Virgin Media’s Cable Expansion in Liverpool Stalled by Shoddy Street Works

The Liverpool City Council has kept the expansion of Virgin Media’s ultrafast cable broadband and TV network on hold since February 2017 because of “serious issues” (damage to highways, poor reinstatement, site safety etc.) with the street works being conducted by contractors.

At present the cable operator is spending around £3bn on a major network expansion (Project Lightning), which aims to cover a total of 17 million UK premises by 2019 (i.e. 4 million extra premises, 2 million of which will be done with FTTP) and this should boost their coverage of the United Kingdom to around 60-65%.

The downside of such a positive project is that it requires significant new civil engineering (street works etc.), which has a natural tendency to cause a lot of disruption and that’s particularly true when working in dense urban areas where a lot of people will be affected (especially if the work isn’t conducted properly).

Suffice to say that complaints soon stack up and local authorities then have to take action, which usually involves ordering the contractors to correct their mistakes. We’ve seen countless examples of this from all of the major telecoms infrastructure builders.

Similarly the Liverpool City Council claims to have found all sorts of problems with Virgin Media’s roll-out, which also included evidence of open trenches without barriers and using footway boards at vehicle access points. “To continue working in this manner could have led to a serious accident,” said LCC to The Times (paywall).

A Spokesperson for Virgin Media said:

“Where remedial work needs to take place we are committed to ensuring this is completed to the highest quality. Getting relevant permissions is a vital part of ensuring we can bring ultrafast broadband to more parts of the UK and Ireland. We urge all local authorities to work with us so that investment isn’t held back in their areas.”

Apparently both sides are making progress in reaching an agreement to resolve the dispute; although clearly Virgin Media has yet to satisfy the council that they can meet the required standards, otherwise the deployment wouldn’t still be stuck in limbo.

As always it’s easy to moan about a lack of fibre optic broadband but building such networks is rarely possible without a fair bit of disruption, which can itself attract plenty of complaints from residents. Contractors can at least mitigate this by conducting their work properly and keeping local residents fully apprised of their plan on a day-to-day basis.