Virgin Media Bring FTTP Broadband to 4,000 Homes in Stanley

Some 4,000 additional homes in the large West Yorkshire village of Stanley (Metropolitan Borough of Wakefield), which is home to a population of 15,000, have now been covered by UK ISP Virgin Media’s new “gigabit-capable” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband and TV network.

At present locals can access a top (average peak time) download speed of 516Mbps via the new “full fibre” network, although by the end of 2021 they should be able to benefit from the new DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade that will make speeds of 1Gbps+ possible (here).

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) 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.