Virgin Media Add 3000 Premises in Wickford to FTTP Broadband
Cable and full fibre ISP Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) has confirmed that they’ve just completed the build of their 516Mbps (average download speed) capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover an additional 3,000 homes and businesses in the Essex town of Wickford.
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.
Locals in the town should also be able to benefit from download speeds of up to 1Gbps once the DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade arrives, which is due to complete by 2021 (here).
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Hannah Wardale, VM’s Regional Director for South East, said:
“We are pleased to have finished our expansion in Wickford. We know how important great broadband is to modern-day living – from online banking to doing the weekly shop, so much of our lives are now online. With our ultrafast broadband, Wickford residents can do the things they love and need to do more quickly and easily.”
End.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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These announcements are positive, good to see a lot more places being connected via fibre to the home. However, they need to start announcing the next gigabit locations! They managed to go live in Southampton and Manchester within weeks of one another and since then we’ve heard nothing.
So important that the takeup has been so small in Wickford….. People already have decent broadband so it just weren’t needed
You kinda expect that initially while contracts expire.
Plenty of places have had ‘decent’ broadband and VM are doing alright there given a little time to market and have people go out of contract with existing suppliers.