Virgin Media Sets 1-Gig Test

Virgin Media, the largest cable operator in the UK, is tossing its hat into the 1-Gig ring via a small trial that will try out a new trenching technique that, it claims, can reduce deployment costs by 33%.

Virgin Media, a unit of Liberty Global, said it will use the technique -- called “narrow-trenching” -- to bring 1-Gig speeds to about 100 households in the Cambridgeshire village of Papworth. According to the MSO, narrow-trenching reduces the width of the trench used to lay fiber from 40 centimetres to about 10 centimetres, enabling engineers to cover up to 100 meters per day, about twice as fast as current methods.