4,000 Homes in Warsop Get Virgin Media UK’s FTTP Broadband
Broadband ISP Virgin Media has completed an extension of their soon-to-be “gigabit-capable” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to include 4,000 homes in the Nottinghamshire town of Warsop, which means that locals can access top average download speeds of 516Mbps (35Mbps upload).
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 only 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.
The operator is currently deploying a DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade across the UK too, which by the end of 2021 should make download speeds of 1Gbps+ possible (here). We only wish that the operator would put out a more comprehensive roll-out plan for Project Lightning, as opposed to so many piecemeal updates.
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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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I think they’re keeping it all piecemeal to prevent other providers from coming in whilst they’re busy in another area & adding more properties. Like releasing a list of 50 locations and other providers work bottom to top whilst VM works from the top. Could be totally wrong however, and that would possibly be illegal but I have no clue.
Or there are only so many people available to do the work in each area and VM aren’t going to pay hotel bills to bring in contractors from well outside the areas.
Not illegal in the slightest. As long as they follow the laws on how they build VM can build wherever local authorities permit.
Piecemeal updates is what you get from Virgin Media, a company renowned for its communication (or rather its lack of it). Even national outages result only in the briefest of statements. There is no need to read anything sinister about these updates.
I wonder how Virgin media decide who gets coverage, just checked population of that town at 12000 people, yet Stroud in Gloucestershire at 32000 don’t get a look in, very strange roll-out in UK.
As this is private investment, they are presumably considering lots of complex factors including number of premises passed per mile of dig, type and condition of the pavements/highways and cost to reinstate, proximity to core network or cost/availability of fibre backhaul in the area, projected take-up rate based on local demographics and ‘cable my street’ enquiries/registrations, current and projected future competition in the area, whether the local highways authority has been picky or accommodating around previous streetworks in their area, cost and availability of local labour, etc.
Judging by Google sat images Stroud dwarfs it for density, so I suspect there is some other predjice to rolling out.