Virgin Media Business is giving its business service competitors BT and Cable and Wireless "two finger" salute with its "Big Red Internet" service.
Promising what it says will be unrestricted bandwidth speeds Virgin is rolling out two options for the new service: an "up to" 100 Mbps for smaller businesses and a 1 Gbps download service for mid-sized businesses.
What prompted Virgin to move forward with the new high speed business service suite was feedback it got from an independent study of 1,000 businesses about how limited network speeds were "businesses back." The study revealed that 69 percent of respondents said that business bandwidth were analogous to having "shackles" on their companies.
But as Mark Heraghty, Managing Director of Virgin Media Business, tells it in release announcing the new service, Virgin Business wants to give business customers more bandwidth freedom. "Whereas other providers often constrain the bandwidth made available to businesses, Virgin Media Business can take advantage of the vast capacity on its national fibre optic network," he said. "So by removing bandwidth restrictions on business internet, we're liberating British organizations from one of the single biggest factors holding them back today."
With the obvious hope of luring existing BT and C&W customers, Virgin is offering an unmanaged and managed version of both service speed tiers. To get the unmanaged 100 Mbps service, a UK-based business will have to shell out $18,000 (unmanaged), or $20,000 (managed) per year, while the 1 Gbps service will cost $34,000 (unmanaged) and $39,000 (managed).
For more:
- see the release here
- ISP Review has this article
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