Virgin Media UK Bring FTTP Broadband to 24,000 Extra Wakefield Premises
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) has confirmed that they and nexfibre have just completed the expansion of their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) network to serve an addition 24,000 homes and businesses in the West Yorkshire (England) Cathedral City of Wakefield.
Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners created a new joint venture firm called nexfibre in 2022 (here) – backed by an investment of £4.5bn, which aims to deploy a separate open access full fibre network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media – starting with 5 million by 2026. But Virgin Media, which shares some of the same parents, is the only live ISP on this network (here).
So far nexfibre has already covered over 500,000 premises (excluding the 175,000 they recently acquired from Upp), although they’ve yet to reveal a solid rollout plan and thus consumers often remain uncertain about whether they’ll be reached by the network’s future expansion plans. But a lot of their builds, like this one, have reflected extensions of Virgin Media’s existing deployment areas.
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Julie Agnew, MD of Fixed Network Expansion at Virgin Media O2, said:
“24,000 more people in Wakefield can now feel the benefit of Virgin Media’s services – with packages that include everything from next generation gigabit broadband to easy-to-use TV streaming and entertainment services.
These ultrareliable full fibre to the home broadband connections come with speeds – up to 19 times faster than local average – providing total peace of mind that whatever you’re doing online, you’ll never be slowed down by your service.”
Assuming all goes to plan, then together the nexfibre and Virgin Media O2 networks will cover up to 23 million premises or around 80% of the UK by 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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Nexfibre seem to be following the haphazard deployment ways the Altnets have – bidb shows they have done areas either side of me but left a 2 road hole in the middle. I know my specific road has had wayleave issues in the past so could be a reason, but the other road is public and a nice simple circle to run fibre round – all very odd!
Streets are only usually missed for good reason.
Wayleave like you mentioned for your road, but public roads have challenges too, maybe issues with what is already buried there or a prohibition notice due to recent resurfacing.
If the road is financially viable to fibre it would be planned in
It’s quite possible it’s planned for a different method of delivery – PIA on poles rather than ducts
Nexfibre won’t miss any streets if they can help it
Don’t be down about it as they don’t need to trench every street to give service. If an Altnet has done a single road and left 2 out it’s because they are allowed to deliver via the existing infrastructure. CityFibre only did the middle street out of 3 here and didn’t touch the streets either side. But we now have 2.5Gbps and they came over the overhead line. So worth checking again as you never know.
And I am a CF Engineer and I have done enough street digs and installs to know this is 100% accurate.
In our area they’re rolling out to every street, they don’t seem to be missing any significant areas.