Virgin Media UK Extend Full Fibre to 2,500 Leasowe Homes

Broadband ISP and TV provider Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) has completed another network extension, which this time sees an additional 2,500 homes in Leasowe – an area on the north coast of the Wirral Peninsula (Merseyside) – gain access to their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service.

The deployment forms part of the operator’s £3bn Project Lightning build, which originally aimed to add an additional 4 million premises to their UK coverage by 2020 but so far they’ve only completed 2.3 million. The operator tends to use 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.

Virgin Media is currently also deploying a DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade across the UK, which by the end of 2021 should have made download speeds of 1Gbps+ possible across their entire network (here). Outside of those areas you can expect average speeds of up to 516Mbps from their top EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based packages, although this is rising to 600Mbps on their top Ultimate Oomph TV bundle.