Virgin Media UK Complete 50000 Homes in East London Network Expansion

Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has today announced that the work to expand the reach of their cable broadband, TV and phone network to 100,000 extra homes in East London has officially reached the half-way point (50,000 completed), which is now benefitting residents in East Ham, Stratford, Bow, Poplar and Stepney.

The work was officially announced last August 2014 (here) and has of course more recently been followed by bigger news in the shape of Project Lightning, which will see the UK cable giant invest £3 billion to expand the reach of their 152Mbps capable network to an additional 4 million homes and businesses (total of 17 million premises) by 2020 (here).

In order to celebrate this Virgin Media has hired the world’s fastest henna artist, Ash Kumar, to help spruce up one of the vans used by their engineering team (picture).

Neil Bartholomew, Executive Director of Virgin Media, said:

“Working with Ash Kumar has been fantastic, helping us raise awareness of the importance of better access to the digital world. Thousands more homes across East London are now able to benefit for the first time from the UK’s fastest broadband.”

Talay Ibrahim, Virgin Media Apprentice, said:

“The makeover Ash has given my van will be a great talking point with everyone as we connect more people to our ultrafast network in East London. The other engineers will definitely be jealous and will be clamouring for a new look for their vans too.”

Most of the areas that Virgin Media have recently expanded into are already close to their existing cable infrastructure, which means that the work can be conducted quite quickly. In addition it’s a lot easier to cover a significant number of premises, in a short space of time, when you’re predominantly focused on dense urban and not sparse rural areas.

The work to connect 100,000 premises should complete in the next few months and then they’ll spend the next few years adding several million more to the tally. An upgrade to the latest ultrafast DOCSIS 3.1 cable technology is also on the cards, with early trials anticipated to start later this year.