Mobile Broadband Network (MBNL), the 50/50 joint venture company owned by Three and Everything Everywhere has signed an eight year, GBP100m plus contract with Virgin Media Business, which will build 14 regional aggregation networks across the UK to enhance MBNL’s bandwidth capacity.
Virgin Media Business will deploy its Sync-E offering to enable MBNL support the explosion in data traffic and lay the foundations for a transition towards 4G.
With the high-performance network in place, consumers will have a better mobile experience allowing them to push their 3G enabled functionalities from video calling through to mobile TV to the limits, MBNL said.
The first phase of deployment will see MBNL harness the power of the 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet service, ensuring that mobile data users will have continuous access to the high bandwidth network.
Virgin Media chief executive officer Neil Berkett said people no longer expect to simply make calls from their mobile phone.
"Being connected all the time to social networks, the internet and their favourite apps is very much a basic expectation which operators need to deliver on. Investing now means they’ll be able to deal with the escalating data demands of today and tomorrow," Berkett said.
MBNL managing director Graham Payne said connecting their end users to the online world, from any location and from any device is at the heart of what they do.
"Working together with Virgin Media Business, the first company in the market to offer this synchronous Gigabit Ethernet service, we will be able to scale for future demand," Payne said.
Virgin Media Business managing director Mark Heraghty said as the only company with a nationwide fibre optic network, they can leverage that asset for all mobile network operators in the UK.
"This is just the beginning of our deployment and as we roll out this mobile backhaul proposition, operators will increasingly look to us as the best solution for handling the exponential growth of mobile data," Heraghty said.
