Virgin Media Hints at Launch of Two UK Gigabit Broadband Cities

The boss of European cable operator Liberty Global, Mike Fries, has revealed to investors that they intend to launch “two gigabit cities” in the UK this year via Virgin Media, which as the name suggests could result in related homes gaining access to speeds of 1Gbps (1000Mbps+) using the latest network upgrades.

Normally we’d be mentioning this as part of the main results story, but in this case the “gigabit cities” news wasn’t included in today’s release from Virgin Media (focus was on their 500Mbps tier instead) and unless you spent a long time reading though the operator’s investor call (needle in a haystack of info.) then this development would have gone unnoticed. Luckily ISPreview.co.uk loves finding those needles so you don’t have to.

So what do they mean by “gigabit city“? Broadly speaking, this appears to be the long.. awaited start of their new DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade (i.e. like Liberty Global has already started in Germany and Poland). The 3.1 standard is theoretically capable of delivering peak downstream speeds of 10Gbps and uploads of 2Gbps, although end-user packages will obviously start at a much lower rate.

Mike Fries said:

“The second key takeaway is the hard work we’ve done to lay the foundation for continued growth in 2019 and beyond. That includes the launch of two gigabit cities in the UK, we’re going to raise our top broadband speeds to 500 megabits per second, that’s nearly 8x faster than anybody else in the market.”

Just to be clear and we’ve double checked this, the 500Mbps launch and the low-key gigabit cities announcement are separate. The new 500Mbps plan will be delivered via Virgin Media’s existing DOCSIS 3.0 platform and not 3.1. By the sounds of it Virgin’s DOCSIS 3.1 roll-out will most likely adopt a city-by-city approach to deployment (as per Germany etc.), but at present they aren’t offering any solid details.

We should add that in the same investor meeting Liberty also repeated that they still see large apartment buildings (MDUs) as an “area of opportunity,” which will surely be something they’ll want to target as part of their forthcoming gigabit cities roll-out.

The DOCSIS 3.1 platform will also require Virgin Media to launch a new broadband router (Hub 4.0 / SuperHub v4), which seems likely to be based off Liberty’s new Gigabit Connect Box (Connect Box 2) or possibly a re-branded version of AVM’s similarly featured FRITZ!Box 6591 Cable router (2533Mbps WiFi speed – Intel chipset). Both are being used in other parts of their cable network around Europe.

The GCB, which is pictured below, features 4 x Gigabit LAN ports, as well as the usual 2 x Analogue Telephone ports (handy for VM’s VoIP phone service) and we understand that the theoretical WiFi peak speed via 5GHz and 2.4GHz is 2183Mbps (via 10 antennae). Sadly there are no USB ports but we understand that it may have support for Bluetooth, which you don’t often see in routers (sadly we don’t know who manufactures them but several brands, like ARRIS, have a strong relationship with Liberty).