Virgin Media Bring FTTP Broadband to 2,600 Homes in Allington
UK ISP Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has just completed another extension of their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based ultrafast broadband and TV network to cover 2,600 homes in the large modern village of Allington (Kent), which is home to a local population of around 7,000 people.
The deployment forms part of the operator’s on-going Project Lightning build, which has so far extended their network to cover a further 2.5 million UK premises. The operator’s original network was deployed using Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology, but this build uses FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) – both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.
At the same time Virgin Media are 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 of c.16 million premises (here). Outside of those areas you can currently expect average speeds to of up to c.630Mbps from their existing EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based packages (via their top TV bundle).
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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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Sadly I live on the other side of a road and missed out on this.
The only thing you’re missing out on is bad customer service and flaky internet
I just don’t understand why they don’t finish areas where you can just throw a stone from where you are and there is coverage!
Looks like I’m still waiting to be in the internet fast lane.
VM seem to have given up in Weston-super-Mare despite many properties having markings on the pavement.
I’m curious to know and probably someone such as CarIT will be able to answer this. With Virgin’s FTTP is it essentially the same as their coaxial cable network in the sense that you’re sharing your connection with the rest of the people on the street who’re connected to your cab? For example, if everyone on the street were to be downloading big files to the point where they’d be saturating their connection, would you see a drop in download speed?
I used to be with them years ago on a purely coax network, long before they’d deployed any FTTP and once it hit 5PM the connection would be at a virtual crawl.
Personally, whilst I don’t love the jitter or higher latency that you wouldn’t get with an OR connection, Virgin have been solid. In the 4-ish years I’ve been with them I’ve had far fewer outages or connection issues and I’ve always received the maximum speed whichever irrespective of the package I’ve been on.
Residential broadband is invariably shared regardless of technology. So, even if you’ve got a dedicated cable to a cabinet, hub or exchange you’ll then find a bunch of other cables from your neighbours which share an uplink. having said that VM’s FTTP is much less likely to get congested than HFC as it’s easier to split.
Still no 1gbps in my area there taking the piss now as thay have not bothered to sort the areas that all ready existed and thay keep harf assing the job