6,000 Homes in Longsight Get Virgin Media’s FTTP Broadband
UK ISP Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has today announced that a further 6,000 premises have been connected to their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based gigabit-capable broadband and TV network, which follows the completion of a deployment in Manchester’s inner city area of Longsight.
As usual this effort forms part of the operator’s £3bn Project Lightning build, which originally aimed to add an additional 4 million premises to their UK coverage (so far they’ve done c.2.2 million) by using a mix of both 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.
At present the announcement states that locals can access a top (average peak time) download speed of 516Mbps via the new network, which has us a bit confused since Manchester was one of the first UK urban areas to benefit from their DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade (here). As such they should in theory already have access to the latest 1Gbps tier (due to cover their entire network by the end of 2021), but in this case it appears as if they’ve yet to upgrade some of even their latest premises.
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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Genuine question what sort of percentage of U.K. Homes does Virgin Media cover these days ?
A shade over half (50%).
@Mark Jackson
Thanks I would of thought it was closer to 60% then 50% but suppose now they technically have majority of the U.K. covered unlike before expansion.
According to Broadband Internet UK it’s around 53% of UK homes (14.6 million premises).
The roads next to mine all have Virgin service, but mine doesn’t and they have no plans for coverage. I can’t even get Openreach fibre. Infuriating.
RaptorX,
Yes indeed. VM have a severely infectious in-house problem with laziness.
I know so many cases where one person in a street is connected but the neighbours cannot.
I think this is down to extreme laziness of VM engineers and not possessing the intelligence or skills come up with a solution.
Some of the installs that are “impossible” I could do myself. Walking round my area, some historical installs are a disgrace yet at least it was done.
I also have cases where the customer has offered to pay serious cash for install but still Virgin Media have deliberately messed them around relentlessly. This is so sad to witness.
It seems it is way too easy for all those VM engineers to shrug their shoulders and go home without doing any work in a month, yet still collect the salary.
VM should simply sack these “engineers” who refuse to find solutions to connect customers.