Virgin Media O2 Grow UK FTTP Premises by 114k in Q2 as Broadband Users Fall
The latest Q2 2025 results from Virgin Media and O2 today have revealed that their gigabit broadband network increased by 114,900 premises in the quarter to cover 18.53 million UK homes. But related customers suffered another fall to total 5,643,500 (down by -51.4k in Q2 vs -44k in Q1) and O2’s mobile base also suffered a fall (albeit with positive results in wholesale).
The new results confirm that the combined Virgin Media and nexfibre fixed broadband network now reaches a total of 18,535,800 Homes Serviceable (up from 18,420,900 in Q1). As before, the vast majority of the new quarterly UK network build is from nexfibre’s full fibre FTTP lines (this network alone now accounts for around 2.3 million premises of the total), although the recent impact of Telefonica’s strategic review has significantly slowed their roll-out (here).
The results reveal that a total of over 7 million Virgin Media and nexfibre premises (footprint) are now covered by FTTP lines (XGS-PON and RFOG), which is up from 6.8m in Q1. But this figure also factors in Virgin Media’s ongoing upgrade of existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) areas to FTTP under Project Mustang (i.e. aiming to convert all of Virgin’s existing HFC and RFOG lines to XGS-PON by 2028).
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Finally, a tiny portion of the quarterly nexfibre build figures (shown below) may also include infill deployments from Virgin Media itself, which usually takes place on sites for existing property developments (i.e. the legacy of long contracts with housing developers for new build homes). But otherwise, the Q2 pace of build continues to slow, which reflects the expected fallout from Telefonica’s ongoing strategic review (here and here).
Nexfibre Rollout Progress
Q2 2025 = 114,900 Premises
Q1 2025 = 165,000 Premises
Q4 2024 = 485,500 Premises
Q3 2024 = 281,100 Premises
Q2 2024 = 295,300 Premises
Q1 2024 = 194,000 Premises
Q4 2023 = c.299,000 Premises
Q3 2023 = 250,800 Premises
Q2 2023 = 175,500 Premises
Q1 2023 = 107,800 Premises
Q4 2022 = 24,000 Premises
Just for context. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners established a new £4.5bn joint venture called nexfibre in 2022 (here), which originally aimed to deploy an open access full fibre (FTTP) network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT served by Virgin Media’s own network of 16m+ premises.
Elsewhere, Virgin Media has long stopped giving any solid figures for their Pay TV (video) base, which often happens when a base is in decline. But their mobile base has grown, albeit primarily due to their wholesale (MVNO) providers (increased by 480k in Q2), since O2’s own contract base reduced by 73,600 in Q2.
VMO2 Q2 2025 UK Customer (Connection) Figures
5,643,500 Fixed Broadband – (down from 5,694,900 in Q1)
46,165,200 Mobile inc. Wholesale – (up from 45,685,000)
On the financial front, VMO2 reported total revenue of £2,526.8m in Q2 2025, which is up from £2,480.1m last quarter.
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Lutz Schüler, CEO of VMO2, said:
“Against a tough trading environment, we have continued to be disciplined delivering growth in profitability which means we are reconfirming our guidance for the year.
We are carefully balancing volume and value through a multi-brand strategy in both fixed and mobile, underpinned by a continued improvement in customer service and one of the country’s best loyalty programmes with Priority from O2. In B2B, our new company with Daisy Group has received all relevant approvals and is now ready to go with an imminent launch, creating a dedicated entity with the scale, focus and expertise to deliver a great service for British businesses and drive long-term enterprise growth for Virgin Media O2.
Our significant network investments are continuing, as we leverage our scaled gigabit broadband network today and rollout fibre for future, and on the mobile side we continue to boost our network across the country, expand 5G Standalone to more areas and have announced a significant spectrum acquisition that will materially enhance our network performance in future, further improving customer experience.”
Sadly, the latest results didn’t include much in the way of any useful updates on Virgin Media’s plans for opening their existing fixed broadband network up to wholesale via their new NetCo (originally intended to launch during the first half of 2025), or the future of their roll-out via nexfibre. All of this remains somewhat dependent upon what happens with Telefonica’s strategic review.
In the meantime, we suspect Virgin Media will be concerned at the level of ongoing decline in their broadband base, which is being eroded by more competitively priced alternative networks. Something that isn’t helped by the high post-contract pricing that the provider continues to adopt. In the past, Virgin could rely on being considered more of a premium brand and the fastest widely available broadband provider, but today’s market is much more diverse.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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“Tough trading enviroment” Yeah, no shit. especially when you charge people double the money for being ou of contract, it’s gonna be tough for you
Most providers do that, it is so they can give you a deal and lock you in for another 24 months. It seems to work for most people.
in my opinion, if a company have to lock you in for 12 months, then they must think their service is so bad, that people will leave.
18 months is too much, I can cope with 12, then again if they only lock you in for 12 months, they can’t rise their prices 2 times in that contract.
To be fair, they all do this. BT charged me close on £90 for out of contract. I ate it for a few months because there were signs of an Altnet moving in, but that never materialised
@Ad47uk
That logic doesn’t really hold up. If anything, companies offering 12-month contracts are showing more confidence in their service — they believe customers will stay by choice, not because they’re tied down.
It’s the providers pushing 24-month lock-ins that are banking on inertia and minimising churn, especially when they hike prices mid-contract (usually more than once).
Shorter contracts give customers flexibility and limit how many times a provider can sneak in price increases. That’s not a sign of a bad product — it’s a sign of customer respect.
If a company needs to tie you down for two years just to keep you, maybe they don’t believe in what they’re selling
Still a large subscriber base, and if you have no other fast provider then a lot of people are kind of stuck between BT’s FTTC (ropey speeds, noise issues, affected by wind/rain/lightning) and VM.
The reduction is likely to be (based on user complaints from VM forums):
1. Customer Service – VM forums littered with customers complaining about being told one thing, and getting another, or being forced to upgrade package to fix various issues
2. Contract Renewals – Messed up contracts that are correct on pre-contract paperwork and then suddenly not what was agreed on final contract or billing and then a CS nightmare to even try and get sorted out
3. Price Increases – When a customer comes out of minimum term contract and onto rolling 30 day, the price usually doubles, as discounted deal expired, and the yearly, usually above inflation increases.
Other things will be specific area over utilisation OR faults like SNR issues that are long term, or customers fed up waiting for a re-pull of cable to fix a specific job and being cancelled multiple times.
You’ve taken an interesting line considering that when BT reports that they’ve had an increase in retail customers (alongside amazing takeup numbers for Openreach) you are insistent that they’re on death’s door. I’m also surprised to see you’ve not mentioned the asymmetry on HFC.
The only substantial benefit of VM HFC over OR FTTC is that there is no line length/speed relationship, and in some cases a faster headline upload speed. Virgin still has all of the other issues that arise, including issues caused by weather and aging cabling. Their network is however far more susceptible to congestion than Openreach’s network is.
… which is why both companies want to replace it all with FTTP, though VM seem to be stalling somewhat on their non-nexfibre FTTP rollout.
@Ivor,
1 VM are not affected by congestion at all, this has not been the case for 10y
2 VM are not affected by the weather, the only time customers are affected by rain is if they damage the cable to their property, and this is always caused by the customer gardening or laying new drive.
3 the upgrade to full fibre is cheaper to get symmetrical speeds than it is over HFC, symmetrical speeds over HFC is super expensive.
Hello BT Ivor, good to see you posting again.
VM is moving from HFC by 2028 for full symmetric capable (if extra small fee paid) FTTP. VM is is strategic review with partner Telfonica hence the delay to NexFibre and wholesaling on it.
I didn’t say Openreach was on death’s door. I merely said the ALTNETS and yearly price increases were beginning to bite, and that new customers through Openreach roll out expansion could not hide leaving customers forever, as a roll out naturally ends.
I do agree that Openreach historically has been better shielded from congestion than some parts of VM’s HFC network. That is in part though, because each FTTC cabinet is designed for limited connections, once full, its full until someone leaves or additional cards or new cab is addressed. VM on the other hand just kept adding splitters in their cabinets of required for new properties or already had capacity designed for every cabled house to that cabinet and then just a case of poor network segmentation or over utilisation. DocSIS has overheads in the way each modem has to communicate, and BT was always streets ahead with latency being better on a normal performing line that does not have noise/sync issues.
FANNY_VERIFY: Openreach/BT done well, but its because of a number of factors like household name, people being lazy to switch, being the only FTTP operator in some areas, inheriting people from older technologies like ADSL and FTTC/VDSL. It does not mean they automatically offer a superior product – although additional factors like number of support engineers, can make their product superior as a whole if other factors like symmetric speed and price are not as important to an end customer.
WEZZ, VM still have areas with congestion and have never had a situation where they’ve had none only taken it down to a couple of percent of service groups. That’s getting worse before it gets better as there’s low incentive to upgrade the DoCSIS platform as the capacity relief will be moving to XGSPON. They haven’t had any on download for a while since they brought DoCSIS 3.1 online but upload quite different.
They are not immune to weather issues. Cabinets can and do overheat, the amplifiers in them were built to be out in the open not in cabinets, and temperature can change power levels substantially so some customers on the margins need remediation.
Mr Adams:
VM’s network has a number of issues with noise. Noise upstream impacts everyone on the node to some extent. VM are pushing some of their network very hard and it can’t handle it. VDSL a noisy line is far less likely to cause issues with neighbouring ones as it’s not getting combined with them and its noise amplified. Plenty of issues in the VM forums with SNR issues. The business failed to take care of the network and it’s hurt them when they needed to squeeze more out of it.
VM are losing customers due to the usual issues but more now due to altnet and Openreach FTTP build. If they have it their customers don’t have to tolerate substandard service from VM if they want more than copper can provide anymore. Jeremy Chelot said VM customers are most likely to jump ship.
This: ‘already had capacity designed for every cabled house to that cabinet and then just a case of poor network segmentation’
I’ve no idea. The network segmentation is the biggest factor in ‘capacity designed for every cabled house to that cabinet’ now.
Congestion on VM is due to usage, capacity to the service group, how many customers are on that group. That’s the routine thing though they also have a cycle where the network team get rid of nearly all the congestion then the product team increase upload or download speeds triggering congestion.
How easy it is to fix depends on how easy it is to increase capacity which means using more RF bandwidth, or how easy it is to split the service group. If there’s no RF spectrum spare, and on a lot of the network on the return path there isn’t, they cannot do this. They also keep to the same RF plan across the board, even if some networks have more return path.
If the service group is more than one optical node combined at the headend putting each node on its own port up and down sorts it, but obviously needs the ports to be available. If it isn’t they have to split the node which if they are lucky means a new port and using a spare fibre pair. If they aren’t it means a new powered cabinet and fibre from headend to that cabinet as well as new ports.
VM aren’t likely to be building new nodes when they’re building FTTP. Makes more sense to stall then offload heavy users to FTTP, which is what they plan to do.
For Openreach to upgrade bandwidth on an FTTC cabinet is using one of the spare fibres that are already in the cabinet, and to splice it back to the headend exchange via the existing aggregation node fibre. A lot easier for them to manage the bandwidth too. VM can have 200+ customers with some on 120 Mb upload sharing 200 Mb of capacity which is why that’s where their issues are. FTTC even G.fast only uses 1/3rd of the backhaul.
Totally apples and oranges situation as totally different network architectures. HFC is a shared access network same as PON, FTTC isn’t. You’re comparing upgrading backhaul with upgrading access.
Ivor: the VM overbuild of HFC with FTTP is still going at the same pace. If they ever fix their systems so that they can sell it they will be able to release to millions of homes.
VM cable is Openreach FTTP in reverse. GPON the ratio down to up is 2:1 they won’t sell better than 8:1 besides at lower level, VM the capacity can be more like 16:1 and they sell 10:1 with a couple of high tier users able to trigger congestion.
If we had Virgin here and no alt net, and the choice was between Virgin or Openreach, it would be a difficult choice, but I think I would rather go with Virgin.
I chat to people who are on Virgin and to be honest, most have no problems and those that do, are normally niggly things, one of them I chat to is on the older HFC network and have been for a few years, their only complaint is the price, which could be better.
I am not a fan of Openreach/BT or Virgin, but Virgin would win.
Time for Mike to give Greg a call and make him an offer he can’t refuse.
No thanks, let’s keep Vermin to their own stuff. The public doesn’t want what they feel is a two tier cartel. Competition is great…..
@FANNY ADAMS, i agree that competition is great, even the place I work for have competition and it is good, it keeps them on their toes.
Revenue growth of 1pc per quarter, if sustained, is not to be sniffed at in in a mature market.
It was reported on the same day that Telefonica is negotiating the sale of a Mexican operation, likely resulting in another contribution towards the group’s debt pay-down/M&A funds.
VM02’s Project Mustang also seems to have stalled if you look at the numbers. Most of the upgrade activity seems to be on the wireless side of the business.
My hunch has always been that VirginO2 are more vulnerable to altnet competition. As they are in the same areas and customers looking for faster speeds historically will be on their network.
What Nexfibre has shown is that they have spent a lot of time digging to keep customer numbers static.
Now they have stopped digging, customer numbers are dropping.
Telefonica Exec Chairman said on their results call that the VirginO2 Netco plan is now scrapped. You have to question their commitment to Nexfibre.
The Telefonica review will be very interesting when it is revealed later in the year.