Cable and full fibre ISP Virgin Media UK has today officially confirmed that their new 1Gbps+ (52Mbps upload) broadband network upgrade – via the roll-out of DOCSIS 3.1 technology – has finally gone live for more than 1 million homes across Birmingham, Coventry and surrounding areas in the West Midlands (England).
The plan was actually soft launched last month (here) and indeed today’s announcement doesn’t add much to that, except to specifically confirm that the local roll-out area also includes big parts of Solihull, Dudley, West Bromwich, Redditch, Kidderminster (as well as many other areas in the West Midlands).
All of this is on top of their previous D3.1 gigabit broadband upgrade across parts of Berkshire, Hampshire and Buckinghamshire (i.e. Greater Manchester, Southampton, Reading and many surrounding areas). Under the current plan Virgin Media hopes to make their new D3.1 technology available to virtually all of their 15 million UK premises by the end of 2021.
Otherwise the new press release, which is actually a few days behind the original go-live date of 12th March, largely mirrors last month’s announcement and we won’t repeat all of that. Customers who take out the related Gig1Fibre package – priced from £62 with average downloads of 1,104Mbps – will also be sent a new HUB 4.0 (TG3492LG-VMB / Gigabit Connect Box) router. You can’t get faster than their 500Mbps tier without the HUB 4.0 (existing Hub 3.0s cannot support D3.1).
Sadly Virgin Media’s DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade currently only fully applies to their downstream side, while the upstream side is still using their older EuroDOCSIS 3.0 network. As a result some of the latency and upload speed improvements that come with the D3.1 standard have yet to be fully introduced (they’ll get around to that at some point).
Have they given any indication at all when they intend to go live in the East Midlands and in particular Leicester?
Well it’ll obviously be between now and the end of 2021, but precisely when.. we do not know until they announce it.
I live in lincoln I have been wondering as well.
The 52Mbps upstream really does make me chuckle…
Orders were opened up on the 12th, so a bit odd the press release was delayed.
Though considering Virgin Media had to fix my part of the network because they failed to set it up correctly for the Gig1, maybe they updated their database a bit too early.