Virgin Media UK Build Full Fibre to 1200 Premises in Cramlington

UK ISP Virgin Media has today completed an extension of their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband and TV network to cover 1,200 premises in the Northumberland town of Cramlington, which is home to around 30,000 people and resides just 9 miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne.

As part of the aforementioned deployment Virgin Media recently connected a few hundred homes in Klondyke to its ultrafast broadband network and has now brought its services to new housing developments, working with major developers at sites across Cramlington, including Barley Meadows, Arcot Manor, St Nicholas Manor and The Fairways.

As usual all of this work forms part of Virgin Media’s £3bn Project Lightning build, which originally aimed to add an additional 4 million premises to their UK coverage (so far they’ve completed around 2 million) using a mix of FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology. Both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.

On top of that the operator last year started to deploy their new DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade (here), which by the end of 2021 hopes to have boosted their top broadband download speeds from 500Mbps+ to 1Gbps+ (currently live around Southampton, Greater Manchester and Reading).

Cllr Nick Oliver, Northumberland County Council, said:

“The council is very keen to support full fibre broadband roll out across Northumberland and is working with the Government and private sector partners towards wide coverage.

We have been working with Virgin Media for a number of years with a view to them bringing their FTTP technology to parts of the county, and I am extremely pleased to see the first properties being connected.”

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