The companies have agreed an IP infrastructure hosting contract, allowing the UK-based Virgin Media to leverage the Highwinds CDN to provide fast, anytime anywhere access to its newsgroup forums.

Virgin Media provides a variety of entertainment and communications services, including quad play of TV, broadband, phone and mobile, and a sophisticated TV on demand service. Launching this spring, the company’s recently overhauled newsgroup service will cross thousands of topics.

By means of Virgin Media’s dedicated high-speed link connecting to the Highwinds CDN, users will be capable of accessing Virgin newsgroup service’s latest features , including extended 90-day retention of text articles and seven-day minimum retention of binaries, in addition to a full news feed covering thousands of groups.

The result of partnerships with Digital Rapids and Knack Networks, Highwinds’ RollingThunder network extends sophisticated IPTV solutions for professional media companies. The service enables video distribution solutions to be controlled on both live and on-demand channels direct to the subscriber’s home or office.

In a written statement, VM said that it had been suffering sporadic problems for some customers with @blueyonder.co.uk email addresses and had been working with its platform supplier, Microsoft, to ascertain the source of the problem. The company also took this occasion to issue a statement of apology to its customers.

According to reports by The Register, the outages provoked VM to call in Microsoft engineers to assist with an pressing Exchange upgrade on its servers. A VM spokesman says this malfunction has helped to speed up a previously-discussed program to migrate the email servers to a Microsoft Exchange 2003 platform. The upgrade is expected to take in the region of two weeks, as long as the company faces no further issues.

VM says that a disconnected hardware problem on an authentication server was also the foundation of a slowdown across all eight clusters, but this has reportedly now been resolved.