LONDON - Virgin Media Business has won the UK’s first city wireless concessions outside of London, since the Government announced the first phase of its super connected city initiative. This heralds the roll out of a free public Wi-Fi service to 1.2 million people in Bradford and Leeds city centres and paves the way for the deployment of the next generation of ‘small cell’ wireless networks.

This first step on the journey towards super connectivity sees both cities realise their ambitions of providing a free public Wi-Fi service in city centres just in time for the start of the New Year. The high performance Wi-Fi service will be open to all, operated for Virgin Media Business by its partner Global Reach Technology Ltd and powered by Virgin Media’s fibre network. The first locations to benefit from the service in time for the New Year will be Briggate in Leeds and Bridge Street in Bradford, followed by Millennium Square in Leeds and City Park in Bradford early in 2013.

This win follows the highly successful trials that Virgin Media Business undertook in the summer, proving that small cell architectures can significantly boost the capacity of both 3G and 4G networks.

Ensuring that mobile services will be able to keep up with the explosive growth in demand for mobile broadband is the critical second step that Leeds and Bradford are making towards super connectivity. Small Cell architectures achieve this goal by taking the capacity that would have been used to serve a large number of customers over a large area and instead concentrate it over a much smaller area and a much smaller number of customers. Through enabling the future deployment of small cells, Leeds and Bradford can look forward to their residents and visitors enjoying mobile connectivity as it was always meant to be, super-fast and reliable as standard, even in the busiest parts of their cities.

Virgin Media Business Ltd.