Virgin Media is to provide faster mobile broadband and more bandwidth for mobile broadband provided by Orange, T-Mobile & Three in a £100m 8 year deal announced yesterday.

The deal between Virgin Media Business and Mobile Broadband Network Limited (MBNL) will provide the UK’s first synchronous Ethernet mobile backhaul service which will mean customers who are with the previously mentioned mobile broadband providers will get access to faster mobile data with greater capacity.

MBNL is made up of Everything Everywhere (which itself was created when T-Mobile & Orange joined back in 2007) and Three Mobile UK and it is a 50/50 split between them.

As part of the £100m deal, Virgin Media will set up 14 regional aggregation networks which will be used to connect the base stations located around the country to Virgin’s fibre services.

Virgin’s network will offer good foundations for the roll-out of 4G and LTE services with it’s synchronous Gigabit Ethernet service and it will be able to future proof itself going forward as it will be able to scale up it’s offering as and when demand requires it to.

Neil Berkett, Virgin Media’s Chief Executive, said:

“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.”

Previously BT was the main mobile backhaul provider and it will come as a huge blow to them that 3 of the UK’s largest mobile broadband brands will now be using Virgin Media’s fibre network as apposed to their own.