Virgin Media’s 200Mbps Broadband to Cover 6 Big Leicestershire Villages

Cable operator Virgin Media has announced that their £3bn “Project Lightning” network expansion will use a mix of pure “Fibre to the Home” (FTTH/P) and DOCSIS technology to bring “ultrafast” broadband speeds of up to 200Mbps to 16,000 premises across six large villages in Leicestershire (England).

The project is working to extend the reach of Virgin’s hybrid-fibre and cable (EuroDOCSIS) network to another 4 million premises in predominantly urban areas by 2020 (17 million premises). In keeping with that nearly all of the villages being targeted in this latest phase are quite large (populations range from 3,500 in Cosby to 12,000 in Whetstone).

The Six Villages

Going Live Around Christmas
Blaby
Countesthorpe
Enderby

Going Live During Early 2016
Whetstone
Narborough
Cosby

At this point it’s interesting to note that Virgin Media are using an “innovative way of bringing ultrafast broadband to people’s homes with minimal disruption,” which is called narrow-trenching and this reduces the width of the trench used to lay optical fibre cables from around 40cm to just 10cm (i.e. enabling engineers to cover up to 100m in a day). The narrow-trenching approach, which shouldn’t be confused with micro-trenching (i.e. even smaller trenches), has actually been around for a few years.

Virgin states that residents will receive the “very latest broadband technology with fibre delivered direct to the home“, although they also claim that this “optical fibre broadband uses a unique technology called DOCSIS 3” (this is the normal ‘cable’ services).

What they mean above is that the line is fibre optic, but rather than Ethernet they use Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) technology for a more familiar DOCSIS setup via the in-home environment, which is very similar to last year’s Papworth Everard trial (here).

Tom Mockridge, CEO of Virgin Media, said:

“Expanding our network to villages such as Blaby and Enderby shows that Project Lightning is not just about building in big cities, we’re also investing to bring ultrafast broadband to towns and villages close to our existing network across the UK.

The innovative use of narrow-trenching means that we’ll be laying fibre optic cable all the way to customers’ doorsteps, future-proofing their homes for tomorrow’s connectivity and rolling out network more quickly. We hope that we can count on government and local authority support to use this technique in more parts of the UK.”

So far Virgin Media has confirmed a total of 250,000 premises for their Project Lightning roll-out plan and many more will follow over the coming years. Mind you Ofcom recently decided that the term “ultrafast” should only apply to 300Mbps+ connections (here), which isn’t yet set in stone but does make it harder for Virgin to claim the “ultrafast” crown at 200Mbps.