Virgin Media UK and Nexfibre Extend Full Fibre to 13,000 Homes in Sheffield
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (O2) and network operator partner nexfibre, which share some of the same parentage, have today announced that they’ve once again expanded the reach of their symmetric 2Gbps speed full fibre (FTTP) network to more than 13,000 additional homes in the South Yorkshire (England) city of Sheffield.
The roll-out follows an earlier expansion phase in the city that completed in 2023 and added 20,000 homes to their coverage (here), although the network continues to face plenty of competition from other gigabit-capable broadband rivals. For example, Openreach covers most of the city with FTTP and CityFibre reaches around half of the urban area. On top of that Hyperoptic, Pine Media, FullFibre Ltd, Connect Fibre also have some modest to smaller deployments.
Nexfibre reflects a £4.5bn joint venture between Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners (here). This has so far already covered around 2.4 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network, which is being built by Virgin Media’s engineers. 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).
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The network operator now only expects to reach 2.5 million UK premises by the end of 2025 and uncertainty remains over what comes next. But Virgin Media has recently announced the creation of a new fixed wholesale until, which will enable retail ISPs to harness both of their FTTP networks (here) – currently available to a combined 7 million UK premises.
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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