Sky pay Virgin £49 million for broadband backhaul upgrade

Sky has signed a £49 million deal with Virgin Media Business to upgrade their backhaul broadband network.

Virgin announced the deal with Sky in their quarterly earnings report for the start of 2013 but they have now valued the deal. Virgin will provide Sky with its 10Gbps High Capacity Services which will be linked to the firms unbundled local network exchanges, connecting into Sky's own backhaul network.

This will ensure that Sky can deliver services to customers across their expanding network.

Duncan Higgins, product and marketing director for Virgin Media Business spoke to V3 and said “We’re providing a 10Gbps pipe from a third of Sky’s exchanges into their core network to make sure they can support their customers as ever-growing amounts of data, on services like iPlayer, are being sent over the network. We’re actively now planning the project with Sky, so it should be in place by the end of the year.

Consumers are using more media than ever before, such as video, whether that’s on mobile, WiFi or fixed network connections. It’s not just plain text any more as even news sites, like the BBC, have video on pages as standard.”

V3 add “The deal is also noteworthy for the fact that BSkyB, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is taking services from a division of Virgin, which is being acquired by Liberty Global – owned by long-time Murdoch rival John Malone.”

Kitguru says: A good move for Sky? Our previous reports highlight that Virgin should maybe start looking after their own customers.

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