Virgin Media Business will reportedly connect base stations to its fibre network via a high-capacity Ethernet service, in a bid to answer consumer demand for bandwidth-hungry services such as gaming and HD video-streaming.
"Over the past five years we’ve seen huge growth in demand for mobile data as the number of consumers using smartphones and tablets has increased,” said Adrian Di Meo, CTO at Telefónica UK.
“With our 4G network launching this summer, data growth will only continue to rise and this new fibre agreement with Virgin Media Business will give us the rock solid foundation we need and help us deliver a great network experience for our customers.”
Virgin Media’s mobile backhaul network is designed to deliver extra capacity to Telefónica UK ahead of its 4G launch, and each of the high-speed links have a reported speed of 1Gbps between cell site and their aggregation network.
“Backhauling data is absolutely critical to ensuring that mobile operators are able to provide customers with fast and reliable data services,” said George Wareing, director of mobile and broadcast at Virgin Media Business.
Earlier this year, Telefónica UK signed a deal with Tekelec for policy and charging regulations in its 3G and LTE networks.
