Virgin Media is doubling customer broadband speeds... for free.

Great Britain is leapfrogging ahead in the global broadband speed race with two announcements this morning that represent major advances in British broadband.

First, Virgin Media is announcing it will double the broadband speeds for four million of its customers starting next month, for free.

The company says it will be the first residential provider in the United Kingdom offering 120Mbps broadband — a 20Mbps speed increase for their existing 100Mbps clients.  Customers on Virgin’s 10, 30, and 50Mbps tiers will soon receive free upgrades to 20, 60, and 100Mbps, respectively.  Those on the company’s popular 20Mbps plan will have their speeds tripled to 60Mbps.

That’s a major advancement for British broadband, where dominant BT-provided DSL runs at speeds averaging just over 6Mbps.

The new speeds were made possible by “modest investments” in Virgin’s fiber network, according to Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett.

Berkett said the new speeds would help meet growing demand for faster access to support the proliferation of new digital devices.  Because Virgin invested primarily in fiber and cable broadband, speed upgrades on their existing infrastructure come “at a fraction of the cost of other network operators.”

That understanding was not lost on Sky Broadband, a growing competitor in the United Kingdom.  Sky this morning announced it has launched a newly-upgraded 100Gbps optical network to support its 3 million broadband customers.  The company is spending several hundred million British pounds on updating its network to position itself to become Britain’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Sky’s new network is based on the latest Alcatel-Lucent fiber technology, capable of supporting 100Gbps speeds on each of the individual 88 wavelengths on a single optical fiber.  Sky deployed the new dense wavelength division multiplexing technology on its existing optical fiber backbone network, demonstrating the infinite upgrade possibilities fiber optic technology offers.

Sky pitches its network capacity to consumers as a key benefit of its service, noting it is free of “traffic management” policies that reduce speeds for customers of other Internet providers.

The upgrade arrives just in time to handle the expected explosion of online traffic with this week’s introduction of Netflix streaming across Great Britain.

While you plod along with 3Mbps DSL service, an increasing number of British broadband users can now buy speeds up to 100Mbps.  Those speeds come increasingly from the deployment of fiber optics by cable competitor Virgin Media, which now reaches over 20 million residents with fiber-fast service.

The latest regions to be enabled for 100Mbps service include Harborne in Birmingham, Lincoln, Seven Kings in Greater London and Solihull.  Virgin said it will complete the roll out of 100Mbps service across the entire Virgin network by the middle of next year.

Virgin has attacked some of its competitors for promising fast speeds but never delivering them.  Oversold ADSL service has been an issue for many British households who are promised speeds of 10Mbps or better, only to discover speeds slowing to a crawl during peak usage periods.  Virgin says its fiber network has a level of capacity unprecedented in the United Kingdom and it can actually deliver sustained speeds to its customers day or night.

Efforts by British Telecom to improve its network are progressing with a fiber-to-the-neighborhood expansion project to handle increasing demand.  BT’s fiber network ends at street-side cabinets, where traditional copper telephone wiring delivers broadband to individual homes.  But BT’s broadband speeds are faster than what North Americans can purchase from similar networks like AT&T U-verse and Bell’s Fibe.  Current top speeds of 40/10Mbps have been declared inadequate, so the British phone company is planning to double them by early next year.

Faster speeds are always welcomed by customers.  Virgin notes over half of their customers purchase speeds of 30Mbps or faster.  BT’s move to supply 80/20Mbps broadband to customers will help keep the phone company competitive.

“It will provide a further boost for local businesses and homeworkers as well as families and other people for whom the internet has become an essential part of their daily lives – whether it’s for leisure, education or business,” said Brendan Dick, director of BT Scotland.

While cable broadband has never had the same impact on the United Kingdom that it has in North America, top honors for speedy service have been won by Virgin Media, who successfully tested the world’s fastest cable broadband network, delivering 1.5Gbps speeds in London’s East End.

By combining multiple broadband channels together using DOCSIS 3 technology, cable companies can deliver extremely fast downstream speeds to customers, depending on how much of their cable network bandwidth they wish to dedicate towards broadband.

Virgin’s successful trial managed 1.5Gbps for downloading, but a comparatively slower upload speed of 150Mbps.  The test, conducted in a redevelopment tech park designed to recreate Silicon Valley’s success in the United Kingdom, will likely lead to an eventual increase in broadband speeds for Virgin customers.  The average broadband speed today in the UK is approximately 6Mbps, hampered primarily by substantial reliance on British Telecom’s DSL network.  Satellite television became the primary provider of multichannel video in Great Britain, so development of cable television systems has never been as expansive as found in the United States and Canada.  But where cable providers like Virgin do provide service, broadband speeds have been on the increase.

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey congratulated Virgin for the successful trial, pointing out Prime Minister David Cameron has prioritized technological infrastructure improvements in London’s East End, in hopes it will one day rival Silicon Valley.

“As people are simultaneously connecting more gadgets to the Internet and doing more online than ever before, Virgin Media is delivering some of the fastest broadband in the world and, thanks to our ongoing investment, we’re able to anticipate and lead the way in meeting growing demand for bandwidth,” said Jon James of Virgin Media.

Virgin currently delivers unlimited broadband service at speeds up to 100Mbps, but customers point out the service is subject to “Fair Access Policies” which reduce speeds for heavy users during peak usage periods, particularly for peer to peer file transfers.

It is unlikely 1Gbps service will be marketed for residential customers anytime soon, but as American cable companies have expanded marketing efforts towards the business broadband market, so could British cable providers like Virgin Media.