Virgin Media UK Extend FTTP to 10,000 Homes in Brandhall
Broadband ISP and TV provider Virgin Media UK has just completed another large network extension in the West Midlands of England, which this time sees 10,000 homes in Brandhall (a suburb of Oldbury in the south of Sandwell) gaining 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 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.
Virgin Media is currently 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 top EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based packages, which will soon be rising to 600Mbps via their top Ultimate Oomph TV bundle.
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Hugh Woolford, Regional Director for VM East Midlands, said:
“Our ultrafast broadband services are now available to more residents in Brandhall, which now has some of the fastest broadband speeds in the country. This boost for 10,000 additional premises will make it easier for residents to work, stream, shop, learn and much more, all online.”
End.
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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Both neighbouring Halesowen, Quinton and Oldbury were cabled either by cable Midlands / telewest (black country) or Birmingham cable back in the day. Surprised this patch of 10,000 properties was missed out. Am also surprised that the villages of Romsley and Hunnington aren’t also cabled as an extension from Halesowen.
That’s great. All they need to do now is get their network to stay up longer than 5 minutes between modem reboots. Service has been shocking all year. Customer service are unreachable. Web based service status is a lie!!!
Bet that it’s a you issue and not theirs, their support is reachable – you just need to wait until they answer.
“We are a disabled household we pay for a virgin bundle ..can not use our mobile phone due to virgin switching off our SIM card ..for no reason bill all paid-up to date with a little extra put on top for next payment too! ..don’t no what the hell is going on?? Being disabled means you got to have a mobile up and running!!
d..
Being disabled doesn’t mean you need a mobile, disabled people can use landlines too you know. Chances are you’re not on a Purple Sim but instead an older one which were recently shut off, how about you call and figure it out instead of taking it to a website which has 0 affiliation to Virgin or any other ISP in which they report about?