2500 Homes in Alsager, Cheshire Get Virgin Media’s FTTP Broadband
Some 2,500 additional homes in the Cheshire town of Alsager have today become the latest to benefit from ISP Virgin Media’s ongoing UK expansion of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which can deliver average top download speeds of around 630Mbps (reaching 1Gbps+ in the near future).
As usual all of this forms part of their ongoing Project Lightning build, which has so far extended their network to cover 2.5 million extra UK premises. The operator’s original network was deployed using Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology, but the Alsager build uses FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) – both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard 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 come the end of 2021 aims to have made download speeds of 1Gbps+ possible across their network of almost 16 million premises. Outside 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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Limiting FTTP using RFoG seems incredibly wasteful 🙁
Easy enough to open up once the commercial environment is right.
The reason for this is so that the entire network can benefit from the same tech.
Older areas ideally need to be upgraded from coax connections to customers premises to fibre ones.
Im not sure about this end of 2021 target for DOCSIS 3.1.
Seems like there hasn’t been any moves on it for months now.
Yeah maybe they’re going to turn on a few at once.
Whilst it doesn’t seem like they’re doing much, remember that when they introduced 1Gig in Leeds&Glasgow it was 1.1million properties served with the 1Gig and that was only 2 areas. It does seem a long time that it hasn’t been done but I wouldn’t be surprised if their next was somewhere in London.
There are a couple of issues slowing it. Mostly upstream spectrum/capacity shortage.