Virgin Media Add 2,500 Homes in Moira and Magheralin to FTTP
Cable and full fibre ISP Virgin Media UK has announced that their network has just completed another extension to cover 2,500 homes in the large villages of Moira and Magheralin (County Down, Northern Ireland), which harnesses their 516Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network (top speeds to hit 1Gbps by 2021).
As usual this effort 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 c.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.
The new deployment appears to form part of the provider’s 2017 commitment to cover an additional 50,000 premises in Northern Ireland (here), which is said by some to reflect a £65m investment (they’ve actually added around 100,000 premises since 2015). Most of that has now completed in locations like Bangor, Ballyclare and Carrickfergus etc.
Seamus McCorry, VM Regional Director for N.Ireland, said:
“We’re delighted to have finished our network expansion in the villages of Moira and Magheralin in County Down. Residents and local businesses will now have access to our ultrafast broadband services, making it easier and quicker to do all the things they love and need to do.”
Overall VM’s network currently covers around 330,000 premises in N.Ireland and reaches 98% of Belfast.
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.
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This is great to see, Moira had to be subsidised for FTTC, so this is good to see.
The commercial business case is very different if you’re winning/retaining customers versus offering faster speeds to a captive audience for a small marginal increase in revenue.
If VM had arrived first, there would have been a stronger business case for openreach to spend their investors’ money on FTTC or FTTP to retain customers. Just as losing too many customers to VM will strengthen the business case for openreach to upgrade the area to FTTP in future.
@CJ you hit the nail on the head
Over Virgin Media too much everything somewhere work around under floor making again so why??