Nexfibre Invest £2.9m to Upgrade 18,000 Homes in Darlington to Full Fibre
Network operator nexfibre, which shares some of its parentage with Virgin Media (harnessing the same build engine), has today announced a £2.9 million investment in the large County Durham (England) town of Darlington to help upgrade 18,000 homes to full fibre (FTTP) broadband. The work is linked to the planned acquisition of altnet Netomnia.
Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia recently reached a £2bn deal to acquire Netomnia (here) and, as part of that, nexfibre announced a plan to finance the FTTP upgrade of 2.1 million homes covered by Virgin Media’s old Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network (i.e. those that are “adjacent” to the Netomnia footprint), with VMO2 paying wholesale fibre access fees on its customers in those homes as the fibre becomes available (with the “majority expected to be ready by the end of 2027“).
Since then, we’ve seen nexfibre announce a growing number of related HFC to FTTP upgrades (here, here and here) and today’s one for Darlington is the latest (Northern Echo). Openreach, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) and Netomnia already have significant coverage of gigabit-capable broadband in the town, although most of Virgin’s network there is still HFC.
Advertisement
The combined nexfibre and Netomnia full-fibre network footprint is expected to reach around 8 million premises by the end of 2027 (nexfibre alone currently covers 2.6m premises). The goal of nexfibre is to make this network “available to all internet service providers“, which will hopefully result in them enticing non-group ISPs to join their platform at wholesale too (progress on this front has been rather glacial).
In an ideal world nexfibre will perhaps be hoping to sign large ISPs like Vodafone, Sky Broadband and Zen Internet to sell packages over their network.
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.
« Delays to Giftcloud Vouchers Cause Frustration for UK Telecoms Customers
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Netomnia have built in Darlington and Stockton already. Given the news on the Nexfibre and Netomnia deal it makes absolutely no sense overbuilding the FTTP network that is already there. The capex spend would be best served where there is no overbuild between these two or at least made no redundancies!
It’s not overbuilding their existing FTTP.
@Yakbub: If nexfibre is to enable its ISPs – currently Virgin Media and giffgaff – to be able to provide all of VM’s services to Netmomnia’s users, then I think it can easily take 24 months to get everything in place before a single truck roll can be done. The work will include backhaul, new nexfibre OLT and aggregation cabinets with nexfibre’s fibre inside Netomnia’s ducts, possble reuse of Netmomnia’s distribution cabinets so that drop fibre can be repatched to nexfibre.
Mark referred to ‘nexfibre will perhaps be hoping to sign large ISPs like Vodafone, Sky Broadband and Zen Internet to sell packages over their network’: for almost all it would be a managed broadband/TV/phone service at wholesale prices provided by a rebadged VM Hub 5x (but taking only broadband if they want) with a few like Vodafone and Sky who have their own big networks opting for a VULA (Layer-2 Handover) – meaning they get a connection at nexfibre’s handover points to enable them to run their own broadband, TV and VoIP — with none of VM’s services being used. In all cases, regardless of the wholesale model used, the ISPs will do their own marketing, customer service and billing.
Roger. Netomnia have no distribution cabinets, very few ducts only used in short stretches as they are very PIA-heavy, and an extensive dark fibre backhaul network made of a combination of their own fibre and long term leases.
nexfibre aren’t going to disconnect all the customers and rearchitect the network to terminate the fibre on nexfibre OLTs any time soon. It’s built around Openreach exchanges with long term contracts and tons of OLTs. Those OLTs are virtually next door to Sky, Vodafone, etc. It makes more sense to connect the Netomnia and nexfibre backhaul.
Netomnia’s OLTs pass more premises than nexfibre’s and deliver service to far more customers. Writing all that plant off for no reason and enacting the labour of resplicing thousands of PONs, causing at best outages during the work and at worst extensive issues between CPE and their Nokia OLTs when the colo is being paid for either way would be insanity. Moving Netomnia would require 35,000+ fibres to be spliced and 35,000+ OLT ports to connect them to.
You’re completely wrong that the options would be either a direct layer 2 handover or a fully managed service, that’d be ridiculous. nexfibre will offer both local handover via dark fibre or metro network and national service aggregated by BNGs delivering their entire footprint across NNIs. At a price for the aggregation and delivery, of course.
In some towns and cities it’d make far more sense for nexfibre to complete the XGSPON overbuild by completing the Netomnia build.
This is not the same situation it may have been with Upp.
I went back and this:
‘Mark referred to ‘nexfibre will perhaps be hoping to sign large ISPs like Vodafone, Sky Broadband and Zen Internet to sell packages over their network’: for almost all it would be a managed broadband/TV/phone service at wholesale prices provided by a rebadged VM Hub 5x’
Makes even less sense given GiffGaff use an ONT provided by nexfibre, not a Hub 5x, despite being part of VMO2.
They’ll have to offer similar services to CityFibre, local and national handover. VULA isn’t relevant here, that’s a regulatory term not a technology.
National handovers can deliver customers as VLANs same as having a port attached to the OLT. Ethernet VPNs are a thing. Without them every ISP would need to either use PPPoE or provide a fully routed network from every handover point between themselves and the access network provider.