Virgin Media has announced its plans to roll out 100Mbps high-speed broadband later in 2010.

Virgin already offers fast 20Mbps and 50Mbps packages, but this will be some really serious speed when it comes to bandwidth intensive tasks such as HD video.

The service will be widely available, targeted at some 12.6 million homes across the UK, although the company expects that only its “tech savvy” customers will want the ultra-fast lines to begin with.

As it’s cable and not ADSL, the broadband should be able to achieve quite close to the maximum theoretical speed, which isn’t the case on many ADSL phone lines.

Virgin quoted research which said that it delivered 84% of its headline speed on average, whereas the second best ISP only managed 58%.

If that figure is correct, it would mean Virgin’s next-gen connections will run at around 80Mbps in the real world, eleven times as fast as a good ADSL Max line manages.

According to reports, the company will be trialling a 200Mbps service later this year, as well.