3G mobile dongle customers of Three, T-Mobile and Orange are going to benefit from a hook-up with Virgin Media.

The contract is valued at 100 million pounds and involves Virgin Media will setting up 14 regional 3G aggregation networks in the UK. The networks will run at 1 Gigabyte ( 1Gb ) and will help Three, T-Mobile and Orange provide improved 3G mobile broadband services for its dongle and MiFi users.

The project basically provides a 3G mobile broadband back-haul service and means that some mobile broadband will be routed via Virgin Media's fixed broadband network to increase mobile data capacity for customers.

Increasing mobile data capacity is vital to the 3G operators as mobile data consumption continues to rise as more and more smartphones are sold.

In technical terms it's a fibre cable to the cell site system based on synchronous 1Gbps Ethernet (known as SyncE), It is currently the UK's only synchronous Ethernet mobile backhaul service and it lays the foundations for a transition to 4G.