Virgin Media Extend FTTP to 5400 Homes in Burton upon Trent
A further 5,400 homes in the Staffordshire (England) market town of Burton upon Trent have now gained access to Virgin Media’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network. The work reflects a second expansion after 14,000 premises were put within reach a few years ago (here), albeit mostly via their old coax network.
The latest work forms part of their ongoing Project Lightning build, which has so far extended their network to cover over 2.5 million extra UK premises. The operator’s original network was deployed using Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology, but this expansion harnessed 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 network of almost 16 million premises. Outside those areas you can currently expect average speeds of up to c.630Mbps from their existing EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based packages (via their top Ultimate Oomph 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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It’s so close but yet feels so far
Well, I was super excited to move back to Burton knowing that virgin was available in most suburbans. Pretty much all of the houses I’ve looked at so far which are ticking all the boxes (location is key also..) typically still don’t have virgin media coverage – some of which is quite baffling, given that some of these estates were only built in the last few years… no Gfast either which again just feels so odd.
I know there’s a handful of circumstances involved in this.