Big Red Internet to boost business broadband

Virgin Media Business has unveiled new broadband packages, designed to over provide capacity to aid companies who want to grow their bandwidth.

The new offering, entitled Big Red Internet, gives companies two options for their business broadband, upping capacity whilst only paying a flat fee.

Customers who tend to use between 10Mbps and 30Mbps connections can upgrade to 100Mbps at a cost of 12,000 a year unmanaged and 13,000 a year managed. Those who use between 60Mbps to 100Mbps can jump to 1Gbps for 22,000 unmanaged and 23,000 managed.

"CIOs are frustrated and constrained," said Mark Heraghty, managing director of Virgin Media Business.

"These dedicated fibre based [connections] will give people all the capacity they need... no ifs, no ands, no buts. You won't need to worry about bursting your bandwidth."

Virgin is already a dominant force in the consumer space, with connections of up to 100Mbps on offer and around 50 per cent of homes having access to its network.

However, its business offerings have never been widely celebrated.

Its strong consumer network, thought, is the key to the new launch and it enables the company to reach 85 per cent of businesses in the UK.

"It is not just about painting ourselves red and calling us something different," added Heraghty. "It is about shaking up the market."

Customers will not be forced to upgrade from their slower speeds if they are happy with the connections they get, but Virgin is keen to prove how quickly a company's need for bandwidth can grow.

Although today was the launch of the first official Virgin Media Business branded product, Heraghty intrigued journalists with the promise of a cloud computing offering in the near future.

"Cloud services is something we are looking at and [Big Red Internet] is the fundamental basis of that," he said.

"We are talking to a limited number of partners [but] we are talking months not years [before] it is announced."