Virgin Media Extends Ultrafast Broadband to 38,000 Premises in Edinburgh

Cable and fibre optic provider Virgin Media has announced that an additional 38,000 homes and businesses in the city of Edinburgh (Scotland) will soon be put within reach of their 300Mbps capable broadband and TV services, which forms part of their £3bn ‘Project Lightning’ network expansion.

Overall Virgin Media aims to reach 17 million premises by 2019 (i.e. an extra 4 million premises – 50% of which will be delivered via pure fibre optic FTTP lines), which should boost their network coverage of the United Kingdom to around 60-65%.

Last year the operator added 465,000 UK premises to their network and this year they aim to boost that by up to 800,000. Today we learn that a big chunk of this figure will come from their roll-out into new parts of Edinburgh, which is expected to be completed before the end of 2018.

Martin McFadyen, Regional Director for Scotland at Virgin Media, said:

“We’re delighted to be expanding our network to thousands more homes and businesses to help to make Edinburgh a world class digital city. Residents will soon be getting the high-speed connectivity and top-notch TV they deserve. We urge residents to come together and register their interest – your street could be next.”

Fergus Ewing, Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Connectivity, said:

“The quality of digital connectivity affects our lives in a way that we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. Having reliable broadband and mobile services is now, rightly, seen as part of essential, everyday infrastructure: that’s why we’re committed to making superfast broadband available to every home and business by 2021.

The market has a key role and responsibility to play, by investing fully in commercial areas and supporting our efforts to connect the hardest to reach parts of Scotland. That’s why I’m delighted by today’s announcement from Virgin Media, one of the key commercial providers in Scotland, bringing ultrafast connectivity to homes and businesses in Edinburgh.”

We should point out that Edinburgh is already extremely well covered by superfast broadband services. In keeping with that we’d expect that a lot of Virgin Media’s expansion in the city will thus end up overlapping with areas where Openreach’s (BT) rival FTTC/P services are already present.

At present more that 1 million premises in Scotland can already access Virgin Media’s network and the operator intends to add a total of 360,000 extra homes and businesses to that tally by the end of 2019.