Virgin Media Extend Ultrafast Broadband to 12000 Newcastle UK Premises

Cable operator Virgin Media has announced that the on-going £3bn Project Lightning network expansion will see a 350Mbps capable ultrafast broadband and TV service being extended to cover a further 12,000 homes and businesses in Newcastle (Tyne and Wear, England).

The Newcastle-upon-Tyne area already has fairly good coverage of Virgin’s network and naturally their expansion will focus upon the parts that have yet to benefit, with much of the work being expected to take place around properties in Benwell and Elswick by the end of 2019.

The news follows a related announcement last week, which confirmed that 9,000 premises in the Tyne and Wear (England) town of Washington were also in line to benefit (here).

Hugh Woolford, Regional Director at Virgin Media, said:

“By expanding our network in Newcastle to thousands more homes and businesses, we are making the area a digital hotspot. Time-strapped families will soon be benefitting from the reliability of a service that’s 15 times faster than the local average.”

Overall Project Lighting hopes to reach an additional 4 million premises across the United Kingdom by the end of 2019, which should extend their overall coverage to around 60-65% of the country (a total of 17 million premises). Some 2 million of those extra premises will be via FTTP, while the rest will extend Virgin Media’s traditional Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) based EuroDOCSIS cable network.

So far around 1 million of the 4 million premises strong network expansion have already been completed and the build currently appears to be ramping up (i.e. they delivered 147,000 new premises in Q3 2017 vs 127,000 in Q2 and 102,000 in Q1), although it will need to go a fair bit quicker if they are to stand any chance of hitting that 2019 completion target.