Everything Everywhere and Three sign £100m deal with Virgin Media Business

A joint venture between mobile telecoms companies Everything Everywhere and Three has signed a £100m deal with Virgin Media Business for a new high performance network across the UK.

The firms hope the deal will increase bandwidth available to their UK customers, improving 3G services and paving the way towards 4G, which won't be available until after the government auctions off the relevant part of the spectrum some time in 2012.

Under the terms of the contract, Virgin Media Business will build 14 regional networks across the UK to enhance MBNL's bandwidth capacity.

Everything Everywhere and Three hope to benefit from the increased capacity, which should make them better able to transport the huge amounts of data that their combined 35.2 million customers demand.

Graham Payne, managing director, MBNL, said: "Mobile data and the increase in smartphone usage is a big growth opportunity for us. Connecting our end users to the online world, from any location and from any device is at the heart of what we 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."

The technology will be the UK's only synchronous Ethernet mobile backhaul service. This is a new and cheaper way of transporting data between cell sites in a mobile network (in other words, across the country).

The joint venture, Mobile Broadband Network Ltd (MBNL) was formed in 2007 and manages and delivers the combined 3G access networks of the two companies.