Virgin Media Bring Full Fibre to 3,300 Premises in Shirebrook

Broadband ISP and TV provider Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) have today confirmed that they’ve just completed another network extension, which has seen 3,300 premises in the Derbyshire town of Shirebrook gain access to their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

The deployment forms part of the operator’s £3bn Project Lightning build, which originally aimed to add an additional 4 million premises to their UK coverage by 2020 but so far they’ve only completed c.2.2 million. The operator tends to use a mix of FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology; both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.

Virgin Media is currently also deploying a DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade across the UK too, which by the end of 2021 should make download speeds of 1Gbps+ possible (here). On the other hand, lately VM haven’t been very good at sticking to their targets, so we wouldn’t be surprised if some areas still aren’t capable of gigabit speeds by the end of next year.