Virgin Media Business Wholesale Sees Faster UK 10G Ethernet Delivery

The wholesale division of broadband ISP Virgin Media Business (VMB / VMBW) has today announced that their multi-million-pound network investment and upgrade programme, Project Spark, has already helped accelerate 10Gbps service delivery by up to 40 days and reduce Ethernet lead times by 32% year-on-year.

Project Spark has been making a lot of progress in recent years. Alongside its core and metro upgrades, VMBW now has 23 National High-Capacity Services (NHCS) core sites live, 177 Converged Interconnect Network (CIN) enabled metro sites, more than 200 locations delivering accelerated 10G services, and connectivity into 160+ data centres nationwide.

National Ethernet and 10G Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) services have been delivered over the new metro architecture since July 2024, with enhanced 10G delivery now said to be available across approximately 75% of wholesale demand locations.

The programme now claims to have “reached a point of scale“, with national deployments live and said to be delivering “measurable performance gains for partners“.

Deployment progress includes:

• Up to 40 days faster delivery for 10G services
• 32% reduction in Ethernet lead times year-on-year
• 23 NHCS core sites live – supporting 83% of network demand
• 177 CIN-enabled metro sites – upgraded with pre-provisioned 10G capacity and a resilient crescent-based network architecture
• 200+ locations delivering accelerated 10G services
• 160+ connected data centres nationwide – spanning major Tier 1 facilities and an expanding footprint of regional and edge sites
• A new Cisco-powered MPLS network is being deployed to support 100G ENNIs across 38 sites, alongside 1G and 10G aggregation across 330 network locations

Combined with the new CIN architecture, these upgrades should allow VMBW’s partners to provision Dark Fibre and Ethernet closer to end sites, reducing build complexity and improving time-to-service.

Diego Tedesco, Executive Director of VMBW, said:

“Project Spark was never about incremental upgrades. It’s always been focused on fundamentally redesigning how we deliver high-capacity wholesale services. We are now seeing that strategy deliver real, measurable results. Faster turn-up times, stronger resilience and a platform built to support the next decade of UK connectivity growth. In a market that increasingly values operational scale and predictability, this milestone demonstrates that our investment is working.”

Work is now underway on the “next phase” of Project Spark, which will see continued expansion of metro capacity and 5 additional high-capacity fibre routes being established across London, alongside ongoing upgrades to meet rising regional data centre demand. Upgrades like this are of course part of the never ending cycle of network upgrades, which are needed to cope with rising data demands, both from consumers and businesses etc.