Virgin Media Tops 4.69 Million Broadband Users and Extends 300Mbps

Cable Internet and TV provider Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has published their results for Q4 2015 and revealed that they added +69,100 broadband users in the quarter to make for a total of 4,694,900 (up from the +55,500 added in Q3 2015). The new 300Mbps service will also be extended to “Home Workers“.

On top of that Virgin Media reports that the progress of their Project Lighting network expansion, which aims to cover 17 million premises in urban areas by 2020 (60-65% UK coverage), has been good and they’ve so far put an additional 250,000 premises within reach of their network. Virgin also expects to add another 500,000 in 2016 (the completed expansion will add an extra 4 million premises).

As a result of the above Virgin’s Two-Way Homes Passed figure (i.e. homes on those sections of Virgin’s cable network that are technologically capable of providing two-way services, including video and Internet) has reached 12,891,300.

Another interesting piece of news in today’s report is that the recently launched ultrafast 300Mbps broadband service for SME businesses (here) will be extended and made available to “home office workers” in March 2016, which will mark Virgin Media’s first ever targeted proposition for this customer group and is one step away from making it a residential package (sadly that might not happen until much later this year).

Tom Mockridge, Virgin Media CEO, said:

“These results demonstrate a strong financial performance from Virgin Media. We’ve grown revenue and operating cash flow and improved cost control, since becoming part of Liberty Global. More people than ever are choosing to switch to the UK’s fastest broadband speeds from Virgin Media, whether they are at home, at work or on the go.”

At this point we should add that some 45% of Virgin Media’s cable broadband subscribers now take their 100Mbps or faster packages, which is up from 43% in the previous quarter and 31% at the end of 2014. Last year’s “VIVID” speed boosts had a big hand in that and took the top domestic package to a maximum download speed of 200Mbps.

Elsewhere it’s worth noting that Liberty Global has today announced an asset merger deal with Vodafone in the Netherlands. Granted this does not have an impact upon the United Kingdom, but such a deal had been proposed for the UK before and we can’t help but wonder if Vodafone will use the Dutch approach as a test case for something similar in the UK at a later date.

Meanwhile, on the financial front, Virgin Media delivered total quarterly UK revenue of £1,122.6m and their monthly Average Revenue Per Customer Relationship (ARPU) was £49.74, which is down slightly from Q3 2015’s £49.77. The operator is also home to 3,016,400 mobile subscribers (EE network), which is down from 3,027,300 in Q3.