Virgin Media ends record year with 4.3m broadband customers

Virgin Media added 44,100 new broadband customers in the fourth quarter of 2010, taking the total to 4.3 million as demand for superfast broadband services across the UK continued to rise.

The increase helped Virgin Media to its best ever financial year, which the company attributed to growing demand for data consumption. Quarterly revenues exceeded £1bn, a rise of 6.6 per cent on the same period in 2009.

Virgin Media logged a 40 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of households using speeds of 20Mbit/s or higher to around 780,000, claiming that 32 per cent of new customers opted for faster speeds on sign-up.

The firm also revealed that it now has 118,000 customers on its 50Mbit/s service, almost three times as many as a year ago, and that its network carries over half a terabit of data per second during busy periods.

Virgin Media chief executive Neil Berkett said that the recent rollout of 100Mbit/s services makes the firm well placed to meet the UK's growing desire for ever faster internet access.

"With the rollout of our ultrafast 100Mbit/s broadband across our growing cable infrastructure we will further accelerate our lead in next-generation services and meet the growing demand for greater connectivity," he said.

Virgin Media is also providing customers with a modem and router that can handle speeds of up to 400Mbit/s as the firm looks to cement its position as the fastest internet service provider in the UK.

V3.co.uk recently took a look at Virgin's 100Mbit/s in action when the firm demonstrated that it could download a 500MB file in under one minute.