20,000 Extra Homes in Sheffield Get Virgin Media’s Full Fibre
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) and nexfibre have today announced the completion of yet another network expansion, which sees an additional 20,000 homes and businesses in the South Yorkshire (England) city of Sheffield being covered by their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) network.
Sheffield is only the latest in a growing list of locations that, over the past couple of weeks, have reported the completion of similarly sized network expansion projects – including Scarborough (North Yorkshire), Coleraine (County Londonderry) and Wakefield (West Yorkshire). All of this reflects work conducted via network operator nexfibre.
Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners created a new joint venture called nexfibre in 2022 (here) – backed by £4.5bn – that aims to deploy an open access full fibre network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s own network – starting with 5 million by 2026. But Virgin Media, which shares some of the same parents, is currently the only ISP on this network (here).
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At the same time, Virgin Media are also deep into the process of upgrading their older Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC / DOCSIS 3.1) network – covering over 16 million premises – to harness the same XGS-PON based full fibre technology as nexfibre. But this isn’t due to complete until 2028.
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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Slightly irritating that they make the press releases so bland!
Sheffield is a big city.. they are building all over the city right now
I have to assume this is a cumulative figure of homes released city-wide
Rather than a specific large build
That’s sadly the approach that Virgin Media has always taken.
I’d suspect the number is all the homes they’ve been adding over the last couple of years as I’ve not seen any earlier PR on them.
If that is the case then it will include a lot of homes they added under the end of project lightning, homes that are FTTP but RFoG not XGS-PON. All their additions in the Upper Don Valley are RFoG for example.
Con you ammend the total to 19,990 please. Despite watching the virgin engineer install the fiber kit on my telegraph pole and activate those on the telegraph poles either side, their sales team insist they have not installed any equipment on the pole serving my house. Never in my life have I found it so hard to give a company money! Not a good sign for their customer service.