Virgin Media Complete FTTP Build to 3700 Premises in Hyde, Tameside
The piecemeal announcements continue today as UK ISP Virgin Media confirms that they’ve completed an extension of their 500Mbps+ capable “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband and TV network to 3,700 premises (homes and businesses) in the Tameside town of Hyde, Greater Manchester.
By the sounds of it this part of their build may have benefited from Virgin’s decision earlier this year (here) to join the local Cooperative Network Infrastructure (formerly the Tameside Digital Infrastructure Cooperative), which has enabled them to extend their ultrafast broadband ISP network via commercial re-use of around 50km of existing local authority owned cable ducts and fibre optic cable.
As usual this forms part of their national Project Lightning work, which aims to add an additional 3-4 million premises to their UK coverage (so far they’ve completed over 1.7 million) via a mix of Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG). Both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware (Hub 3.0 router and V6 TV Box etc.).
Paul Hutchinson, VM’s Regional Director for North West England, said:
“Hyde residents and businesses can now start to enjoy the benefits of our incredible services. Giving them the UK’s fastest widely available broadband speeds will enable them to do the things they need to do and love doing more quickly and more easily.”
The operator is now believed to cover nearly 720,000 premises across the wider metropolitan region of Greater Manchester.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
« BT Group Sells £200 Million Revenue UK Fleet Division to AURELIUS
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5530)
- BT (3518)
- Politics (2542)
- Openreach (2298)
- Business (2266)
- Building Digital UK (2247)
- FTTC (2045)
- Mobile Broadband (1977)
- Statistics (1790)
- 4G (1668)
- Virgin Media (1621)
- Ofcom Regulation (1465)
- Fibre Optic (1396)
- Wireless Internet (1391)
- FTTH (1382)
Hi Mark, do you know if Openreach have any plans to install FTTP in Hyde, they have installed a few G.Fast pods, but that doesn’t cover the whole of Hyde especially not the 3700 properties that Virgin have covered.
If virgin just covered the area with their ‘FTTP’ and there’s already patches of GFast openreach won’t be installing FTTP anytime soon. If they do, it’ll be in least 3-5yrs time.
I was hoping it would be a lot sooner than that, don’t really fancy going with Virgin. hope they do start opening up their network to other providers that might tempt me to change over.
I would consider the Virgin Media cable network as and when they open it up to other providers – rumoured to be something that they are considering and if provision on the network is symmetrical. Existing upload speeds are paltry as things stand and their pricing model is expensive (i can only comment on their internet packages, not the TV and phone side of things)…. my hope is that FTTP arrives in my area via open-reach as there is at least a choice (somewhat limited) of providers other than BT to chose from.
They’re not that more expensive than other providers in the long run, like yes 50Mb is like £37 and 100 is £42 but at least you’re not REQUIRED to take line rental & it’s 99.98% reliable as per their website https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/speeds (bottom table).
So whilst they are expensive, it does show (they use a partner SamKnows to measure their speeds) as does the Hub 3 report back as well that their network is far from disastrous, even if the street cabinets are.
Nobody forces you to go or stay with Virginmedia, but their speeds & their network is widely available & more of a premium unlike Sky, TalkTalk etc; so you pay that premium price.
@RICK: Yours is a valid point about the upload speeds. However, the Openreach FTTP has the same issue, we haven’t seen anything faster the 30 or 50 mbps. You’d probably be better off with an altnet fibre provider if there is one in your area. Otherwise a leased line, or perhaps a 4G/5G link might be the only option.
“However, the Openreach FTTP has the same issue, we haven’t seen anything faster the 30 or 50 mbps”
OpenReach have 500Mb(down)/165Mb(up) and 1000Mb(down)/220Mb(up) available to ISP’s.
Expensive, but the choice is there.
Their upload ratios are also higher than Virgins on almost every package.
@John: Thanks for your info. Which ISPs offer these higher upload speeds?
Why do they use a mixture of HFC and FTTP? Surely it would be beneficial in the long term to use solely fibre.