Liberty Global Inc. (Nasdaq: LBTY) has launched a 120 Mbit/s broadband service in the Netherlands using EuroDocsis 3.0 gear, and says it plans to roll out the equipment and launch similar services throughout Europe in the coming 15 months. (See UPC Deploys EuroDocsis 3.0.)

The company's UPC Netherlands business, which passes 2.7 million homes and has more than 660,000 broadband customers, has launched its new "Fiber Power" service in a handful of locations, including Amsterdam, and will roll it out through the rest of the country during the next few months, reaching all of its customers by next year, says a company spokesman.

The service, which the company has developed with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), is being offered with a 120 Mbit/s top speed, though a package with a maximum downlink speed of 60 Mbit/s is also available. Previously the cable operator's fastest broadband service was 24 Mbit/s.

The company has been showing off the service at the IBC tradeshow in Amsterdam, which ended today. To illustrate the speed of the service, UPC showed how high-definition video streaming services had a very short buffering time before delivering high-quality, uninterrupted content, and also demonstrated the speed of large file downloads.

And now it plans to roll out the EuroDocsis 3.0 service across Europe, with plans to launch the high-speed service in Austria and Switzerland before the end of the year, and then throughout its other European operations, in markets such as Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia, before the end of 2009.

— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading