Interview with Kevin Baughan, Director of Technical Strategy for Virgin Media

Kevin is responsible for Technical Strategy across the Virgin Media Group, and is actively involved in understanding the business opportunities created from new technologies and in the overall evolution of Virgin Media's communication and entertainment portfolio.  He will be speaking at the IP Cable conference (part of the IPTV World Forum) taking place in London on 12-13 March, which will cover the impending arrival of 'cable IPTV', expected to introduce a significant new dynamic to this market.   We spoke to him recently to get his thoughts.

ipTV News: Is the IP Cable conference arriving at an appropriate time for the cable industry?

Absolutely, around the globe you are seeing cable companies moving up a gear in 2008 in order to embrace the challenge of clearly differentiating themselves from their competitors in a crowded market place for entertainment and communication services.

What are you looking forward to most about the event?

Learning from the other participants coming to London from around the world, it’s been a while since we have had a conference in the UK with a clear focus on cable and the transformation of ntl: and Telewest into Virgin Media has created a lot of interest.

What are the advantages of migrating to an end-to-end cable IP network, and do you think it will become a logical progression for the entire cable industry?

Cable is an incredibly powerful access technology and we can already provide our customers VOD, HD TV and ultra-fast broadband. So for cable the question goes deeper than simply providing new services, as to whether IP will truly transform the customer experience or cable infrastructure costs – hopefully it can do both, in which case it will certainly become a logical progression.

After recent news reports that Virgin is to boost its broadband speeds to 10Mbps from next month, and 50Mbps planned at a later stage, do you think cable operators will be leading broadband speed increases, and what do you see as the natural ceiling for these speeds?
 
In the UK, Virgin Media has a straightforward evolution path to the rollout of next generation broadband through DOCSIS 3.0 and we are certainly leading the way in the UK by making ultra-fast services available to 9 million homes by the end of this year. In theory, DOCSIS 3 is capable of much higher speeds and we have certainly trialed the technology to speeds of 100Mb/s (we only stopped there because it was the limit of the 100baseT connector on the back of the modem!). For now though we are happy to focus on the launch of our 50Mb/s service later this year - that in itself is a huge step forward.

To learn more about the IP Cable conference please click here