Virgin Media UK Expand FTTP Broadband to 13,000 Homes in Stroud
Network operator nexfibre and supporting retail broadband ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), which share some of the same parentage, have today announced that they’ve expanded the reach of their symmetric 2Gbps speed capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to more than 13,000 homes in the Gloucestershire market town of Stroud for the first time.
The area is currently already well covered by Openreach’s and Netomnia’s gigabit-capable FTTP broadband networks. But until recently there was little to no presence from Virgin Media, either directly or via nexfibre, which has of course now changed. Not bad for a town with a population of just 13,500, although the nexfibre build extends a bit beyond just the town itself.
Nexfibre, which reflects a £4.5bn joint venture between Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners (here), has so far already covered 2.3 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network. But the operator’s original plan to cover “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s network of 16m+ premises was recently dealt a blow by Telefonica’s strategic review (here). The operator now only expects to reach 2.5 million premises by the end of 2025 and uncertainty remains over what comes next.
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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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Any chance they’re going to come back & finish the rest of Banbury? They were surveying our area a year ago but it seems to fallen victim to Telefonica’s review.
Virgin seem to be less and less relevant over time. Their prices are not competitive and their customer service in my firsthand experience is massively lacking. Expanding their network 20 years ago might have been newsworthy when it was them or ADSL. These days if there’s fibre in an area besides them, I can’t see why anyone would go to them.
Take a moment of empathy for the people of Stroud where VM have muscled their way in lol 🙂
From the mouth of Fanny; even though the NexFibre VM network is XGS-PON, I’d take a BT FTTP GPON circuit if I lived there as no modem mode in VM’s HUB5x router is criminal and who would want to be forced to use their shoddy pathetic so called router where on latest firmware you can’t even name devices now and various other things simply do not work.
Yes, you read that right, Fanny would take BT FTTP over this.
Agree with Steve, their CS is appalling with the so called “tech support” from india. They just read out script and then refuse to listen. Prices, are all over the place and far too expensive. Then there is the scamming!! It does not stop.
This is even funnier that Stroud has FTTP from both Virgin and Openreach meanwhile in Gloucester, we’re on ADSL from Openreach and HFC from Virgin.
Doubt VM will upgrade to FTTP any time soon but it’s not too bad.
Another 13,000 prospective customers who would be well advised to think twice before moving to Virgin Media, the reasons being already set out by other posters. As always there will be some who will be glad of getting a better Nexfibre speed.
Virgin medua broadband service and it’s customer services-awful, wouldnt go anywhere near them.