Cable ISP Virgin Media UK Bring 1Gb Broadband to Manchester

Cable operator Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) has today announced that the second UK city area to benefit from their new 1Gbps broadband speed upgrade is Greater Manchester, which is set to benefit around 500,000 premises in the area and follows Southampton (100,000 premises) as their first city last month.

Just to recap. The new speed is being made possible across both Virgin Media’s existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network and their latest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines thanks to an upgrade via the latest DOCSIS 3.1 technology. As previously announced, the provider expects to cover 1 million UK premises with this by the end of 2019 and then the rest of their network (currently 15 million premises) by 2021.

As well as Manchester city centre and surrounding areas such Wythenshawe, Sale, Didsbury, Fallowfield and Old Trafford, towns including Altrincham, Warrington, Bury, Bolton, Stockport and Knutsford will also benefit from this upgrade.

Customers who take out the Gig1Fibre package will also be sent a new HUB 4.0 (TG3492LG-VMB / Gigabit Connect Box) router and you can see the specification for that at the bottom of this article from September. You cannot get faster than their 500Mbps tier without the HUB 4.0 because the existing Hub 3.0 doesn’t support DOCSIS 3.1.

Prices start from £62 per month for their standalone broadband service or £67 when bundled with phone (18 month term); with a guaranteed price freeze for at least 24 months. The new gigabit service is being promoted alongside an average download speed of 1104Mbps and an average upload of 52Mbps.

Jeff Dodds, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media, said:

“Manchester is a major centre for Virgin Media and the place our Project Lightning network expansion first started, so switching on our hyperfast gigabit services will help to once again transform connectivity across the city and surrounding areas.

This service is more than 26 times faster than Manchester’s average broadband speed, meaning that households can do everything they want to do online, at the same time, without delay and are well set for whatever comes next.

The Government has called for nationwide gigabit connectivity and we’re helping them leap forward to reach this ambition by turning on our next-generation Gig1 broadband across our entire network over the next 24 months – a speed and scale unmatched by anyone else.”

Regular readers will recall that we leaked details of the provider’s initial launch cities in July (here) and if the operator keeps to that plan, as they have done so far, then we expect the large town of Reading could be the next to go live (Reading is a big area and if Virgin’s main hubsite were enabled then we could easily see Basingstoke and Bracknell being added). After that the rollout pace will become much more rapid and less piecemeal.

Otherwise here’s Virgin Media’s official performance table for their predicted average broadband speeds across different packages. One caveat with this is that their slower plans are using the 10:1 ratio for upload speeds (i.e. on the 100Mbps package existing customers should get 10Mbps uploads) but new customers are still being sold the older tiers (e.g. the 100Mbps package is advertised with uploads of 6Mbps).

* The advertised download and upload speeds for their Virgin Fibre packages are calculated by taking the median average, or the mid-point between the fastest and slowest speeds for each package at peak times (8-10pm), each month; in line with the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) guidance.

** The expected speed range is the normal download and upload speed that you could expect at peak times (8-10pm, Monday-Sunday); in line with Ofcom’s guidance.