Virgin Media Bring FTTP Broadband to 5200 Homes in Armthorpe

ISP Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) has extended the reach of their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 5,200 homes in the large South Yorkshire village of Armthorpe, which has a population of around 15,000 and sits just outside of Doncaster.

The deployment comes shortly after the operator extended into another large-ish village, Allington in Kent (here), which suggests that they’re starting to branch out a bit more into smaller areas.

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 this 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 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 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).