Virgin Media UK Build Full Fibre to 14,000 Burgess Hill Homes
Broadband ISP and TV operator Virgin Media has completed yet another large network extension, which this time sees 14,000 homes in Burgess Hill (West Sussex, England) gaining access to their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) internet connectivity 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 has so far only completed 2.3 million. The operator tends to use a mix of FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) and also Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology – both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.
We should add that Burgess Hill is also one of the locations that is currently benefiting from a separate £20m West Sussex Gigabit project with Cityfibre, which is working to upgrade and extend a local Dark Fibre network in order to improve connectivity for public sector sites. This forms part of the Government’s wider Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme.
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Meanwhile Virgin Media is also rolling out their latest DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade across the United Kingdom, which by the end of 2021 aims to 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 existing EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based packages, which will soon rise to 600Mbps via their top Ultimate Oomph TV bundle.
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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Does anyone know of Virgin replace the street cabinets as part of the Gig1 rollout?
The ones round here are all 20-30 years old, most of them have the doors hanging open and wiring spilling out. Would be useful to know if they get replaced as a lead indicator that the network improvement work is underway..
You’ll probably be notified when they are in the area doing work as they often send out letters to customers in the area reference in advance advising of works and that your services may be disrupted.
If the cabinets are damaged/doors left open then that needs to be reported to Virgin Media.
I have to say OR’s housekeeping got a lot better when the DSLAM’s and re-shells were done. Althougt I have started to see a few local ones with lock modules missing.
VM on the other hand have been pretty bad at keeping cabs locked shut for quite a while. I am surprised that they get away with it, TBH, as open cab doors are an obstruction to the pavement and that breaches the DDA and a bunch of regs covering pavement works as well as H&S.
You also look at one.network to see if there are any works planned in your area, to know if Virgin Media will be in the area.
To be fair, VM will only know if the doors are open if they are reported. I usually find when you report an open door they fix it pretty promptly. Although this could be very much down to how regional managers prioritise such issues.