13,200 Homes in Chesterfield Added to Virgin Media’s Full Fibre
Some 13,200 homes in the large Derbyshire (England) market town of Chesterfield have just become the latest to benefit from the expansion of Virgin Media’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband and TV network, which by the end of 2021 will be able to deliver gigabit speeds to locals.
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 UK, 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).
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 and Linkedin.
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Yawn! Shame the company is awful!
Then don’t join them. Personally not had an issue with them or their support.
I think Sam has a point though. So many consumers are fed up of companies who show contempt towards their customers in the way of appalling customer service (Virgin Media scores 1.6/5 on TrustPilot: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.virginmedia.com).
@Ben the issue with that is that TrustPilot can easily be bombed, especially how BT only has 1.4 with 5k reviews, Plusnet 1.4 at 7.2k, Virgin having a 1.6 rating at 21.7k reviews is good for the scale. Albeit the Offshore support are hopeless.
It’s a shame they are all awful in their own way, why people take to arguing and defending one ISP over another is beyond me, they don’t care about you, whether you have good or bad service, they’re are a business and do business things, not people things.
@JP; I’m in no way defending Virgin here as I quite clearly stated that already their Offshore support is terrible. As for TrustPilot reviews they mean nothing as there’s no way to verify that someone was/is a customer of any supplier, until there’s a proper way of tracking that then everything on TP from or about any company, whether it’s an ISP or alternative can only be taken with a grain of salt as I personally know a few Die-hard of other companies have purposefully went and gave negative reviews on things they’ve never had. I did however say that the other companies with less reviews aren’t much further behind in comparison to VM’s larger review scale.
So its a new housing estate, just off the coax route and they’ve put fibre to the homes from a cabinet instead?
What do you mean? This is how all Virgin RFOG deployments are carried out. The cabinet contains optical splitting equipment. Fibre doesn’t have a 1:1 connection back to the switching equipment.
13,200 properties aren’t going to be spurred off the existing coax.
This was at least 5 new, large (1.8 m x 1.7 m x 65 cm), powered vhub cabinets with resilient fibre backhaul serving 150+ smaller ones.
The existing duct and potentially fibre would’ve been used to reduce digging to the new cabinets only.
I didn’t mean off existing co-ax, I meant if its new housing estates are they using fibre from existing cabinets to new ones on new estates and then using FTTP? Surely it’d be far cheaper to put in co-ax on new estates?
Isn’t the article clear to you or something? It’s a full town! Why would you think Chesterfield is a new housing estate, it’s been a market town since 1204.
Cheaper to build FTTP than HFC unless it’s all block paving. Narrower trenching and more covered per day.
Why do you think coax would be cheaper? What are you basing that on?
yay more fibre for people who don’t need it and can’t spell it.
How have you come to the conclusion that they don’t need it? Have you surveyed every home in the estate?
Onephat – remember the opinion of the few is the opinion of the masses :L
@JP ah yes.