UPD Virgin Media UK Shelve Possible Northumberland Broadband Rollout

The Northumberland County Council in England has said it is “disappointed” after being informed that Virgin Media had decided to “halt plans” for expanding their ultrafast cable broadband and TV network into the rural county. At present the operator has virtually no presence in the area.

The regional iNorthumberland project currently aims to help make “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) capable FTTC and a few ultrafast FTTP networks available to “over” 95% of the county by the end of 2018, although nearly all of that has been delivered as part of their partnership with Openreach (BT).

Despite this it’s understood that Virgin Media had recently been considering a possible deployment into the county as part of their £3bn Project Lightning network expansion. The project aims to add an additional 4 million premises to their coverage by 2019/20, which is split between their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and FTTP (RFoG) based EuroDOCSIS network.

The operator’s network has already been rolled out across parts of Northumerland’s neighbouring counties (mostly urban areas), such as in North Tyneside, Newcastle and Gateshead. However the Northumberland Gazette reports that a possible expansion into the rural county may now be off the table.

Peter Jackson, Northumberland County Council Leader, said:

“We are very disappointed that Virgin Media have made the decision to halt plans to extend their broadband coverage to include Northumberland. We are keen to attract investment and new businesses into Northumberland and providing broadband is crucial to this and is something we were working with Virgin Media to provide.

As a council, we have supported Virgin Media at every opportunity and have specifically flagged up approved planning applications for new housing and commercial developments while also promoting the ‘Cable My Street’ website in flyers, newsletters and via our iNorthumberland superfast broadband website.

I have written to the company expressing our concerns and have now received a response from Virgin Media that states there are some locations within Northumberland which could have previously been in scope, however, due to rising business costs they are now deemed uneconomical for them to progress.”

At this point it’s unclear precisely what “rising business costs” are to blame and there will no doubt be concern that this could soon reflect a future withdrawal from plans for other counties. On the other hand much of Virgin Media’s network expansion has tended to occur at the edges of their existing network and it’s possible that the deployment into an entirely new area, particularly one as rural as Northumberland, might have been a bridge too far.

On top of that the operator is already known to have been struggling with the pace of their network expansion project, which isn’t quite as far along as the operator would have liked (here). We have of course asked VM for a comment and will update again when one arrives.

UPDATE 4:32pm

The official response from VM is as follows.

A Virgin Media Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We’re expanding our network in the North East as part of our nationwide effort to bring ultrafast broadband to new areas.

Our expansion is entirely privately funded, so we need certain criteria to be met before building. We are committed to extending our network into areas where supportive local authorities can create the best conditions for rollout of our services.

We’ll be meeting with Northumberland County Council soon to discuss potential ways in which we can work together to make ultrafast broadband in Northumberland a reality as quickly as possible.”