Virgin Media UK Extend 1Gb Broadband to 1200 Homes in Wigan
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has today confirmed that their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network has just been extended, slightly, to cover a further 1,200 homes in the Greater Manchester town of Wigan.
Across the UK, Virgin’s Project Lightning network build has already extended their network to cover 2.7 million extra UK premises since 2015/16 and another 500,000 premises are planned to be added during 2022, which should take the operator’s total coverage to around 16 million premises by the end of this year.
Virgin’s original network was deployed using Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology – reflecting 14.3 million premises, but since 2019/20 most of their new build has used FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) – both methods make use of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard to harness the same consumer kit. Prices for their fastest 1130Mbps package (average advertised speed) currently start at £62 per month on an 18-month contract term.
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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But they have no stock of hub4s!
Is there any way of finding out where exactly this is or areas that might be next? There’s always been roadworks present throughout the region listed on Street Works and the like, so unable to determine the area from that.
Their network is shockingly bad here on the current coaxial network, which may not even get better switching to actual fibre. Constant daily disconnections with high ‘normal’ latency that only ever gets much worse when you add in jitter figures. This is using a Hub 5 and Docsis 3.1 as well.
While alt. FTTP providers list this area for future rollout, not one has stated any sort of start date. Stuck with VM or the alternative is 1-2 Mb ADSL.
Are freedom fibre not in your area they are just doing Leigh now goes live may I’m in 1gb vm but people keep telling me 900 bt is much better why have bt let other companies go first instead of upgrading the network first will it be worse than bt it’s very confusing probably a bit like my reply
Sadly not. I saw the news article on this site with TalkTalk rolling out FTTP. Quite a lot of roadworks going on there now. Can only hope they’d come this way soon and at least kick start some competition.
Aside from new build areas/estates, there simply isn’t any rollout of FTTP happening. Only vague timescales (i.e by 2025/26) and of course no real way as of yet of knowing if you’d be in the coverage area.