Virgin Media O2 Takes UK Fibre Broadband Network Wholesale
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) and its shareholders (Liberty Global and Telefónica) have this afternoon finally announced plans to “create the biggest direct network challenger to BT Openreach in UK history“, which for the first time will open their existing fixed line broadband network up to wholesale by other internet service providers.
Regular readers will know that Virgin Media (VMO2) has long prepared their network to go wholesale by establishing a dedicated fixed network business in the UK (or ‘NetCo’ in telco speak), but until now it’s never been clear precisely when they’d press the button.
In this case the new entity, which will be a fully consolidated subsidiary of VMO2 that will “have a neutral impact on the company’s leverage and credit structure“, will comprise of the operator’s cable (Hybrid Fibre Coax) and fibre (FTTP RFOG and XGS-PON) network assets covering 16.2 million premises across the UK today.
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The move represents a potentially seismic shift in the market, which in one fell swoop provides Openreach (BT) with a truly major national scale competitor (Virgin Media’s network covers around half of UK premises, albeit mostly in urban areas). The move may also have an impact upon how Ofcom approaches future regulation across relevant parts of the market and will place additional pressures on other large rivals, such as CityFibre.
The structure is also said to give “optionality and flexibility for future in terms of financing and playing a role in potential altnet consolidation“, alongside pursuing wholesale opportunities as a scaled network alternative.
Lutz Schüler, CEO of Virgin Media O2, said:
“This is a logical evolution of our fibre strategy that creates a clear, focused and scaled network entity within the Virgin Media O2 family which underpins our shift to a fully fibre network and reinforces our position as the leading challenger to Openreach in the market. Working closely with our shareholders, this network business will provide a platform for potential altnet consolidation and wholesale opportunities in future, offering widescale network choice for other providers, as well as giving financing optionality. While nothing changes today work is well underway and you’ll hear more from us later in the year.”
However, just to be completely clear, VMO2’s mobile assets will not form part of the NetCo, and nexfibre (already open to wholesale), the independent fibre joint venture between Liberty Global, Telefónica (VMO2’s parents) and Infravia, will continue to operate separately – focusing on fibre network expansion into greenfield areas. Nexfibre aims to expand FTTP to 5 million premises – those outside of VMO2’s current patch – by 2026 and then possibly up to 7m thereafter.
Once all planned fibre build is completed, the separate NetCo and nexfibre networks will reach a combined total of up to 23 million homes covered by full fibre (c.75% of the UK), which is a little shy of the 25 million that Openreach expects to reach by December 2026. But Openreach also holds an aspiration to go beyond that and potentially toward 26-30m premises by 2030.
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Further details and operational timelines will be announced in due course (although it’s not expected to go live until H1 2025 sometime) and subject to any necessary regulatory approvals. In the meantime, the fibre upgrade activity continues unchanged at VMO2.
Conclusions
One important point to make here is that it’s never a simple matter for any ISP to hop on to a new wholesale network and make use of it. Most providers in today’s market have spent a long time developing their systems and infrastructure to work with Openreach’s network, but adapting to a new platform can take a lot of time and money.
The other challenge for ISPs that will choose to make this leap stems from how they go about creating a streamlined set of packages for consumers, without causing confusion with their existing services. Equally, at this stage, it’s difficult to know whether the products from the “new” wholesale network will give ISPs as much flexibility as they get from Openreach (i.e. ISPs won’t want to merely resell Virgin’s tiers at the same price).
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Another big question will be in terms of how Ofcom reacts. At present Openreach is often beholden to Ofcom’s regulatory whims as the dominant national operator, although the emergence of a major new wholesale network changes that a bit. Time will tell, but we suspect Ofcom may need to further soften some of its rules.
On top of all that we also have to consider the unpredictable impact upon alternative network (altnet) providers, such as Cityfibre, which previously only needed to worry about Virgin Media on the retail side of their ISP business. But they’ll now face more competition at the wholesale infrastructure level too.
Cityfibre will need to retain the support of big name ISPs (e.g. Vodafone and TalkTalk) or their FTTP plans could struggle. Clearly the full fibre battle in urban areas is about to get even more heated and complex than it was before. BT’s share price might be another one to watch.
Finally, if Sky Broadband ever chooses to migrate some or all of their customers in overlapped areas to the new NetCo then that would have a huge impact upon Openreach’s bottom line (Sky is tied with VMO2 for 2nd biggest ISP with c.5.7 million broadband customers), although doing that at-scale and in bulk would be a very slow and resource intensive process.
On the consumer front though such competition could potentially breed both more choice and thus lower prices, although that in turn has a tendency to make the economic models for deploying full fibre even more difficult. Whatever the outcome, the UK’s fixed line broadband market just experienced an earthquake, and it remains to be seen precisely what will happen during the aftershocks.
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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At last! This would mean I could potentially get A&A services over the 900Mbps Virgin hybrid fibre/coax, rather than Openreach’s cranky old copper (given that actual fibre seems like it will never arrived in my suburb of a city of 130,000 people). Bring it on!
The real win will be A&A services over VM XGS-PON when it arrives.
I’m in an XGS-PON area and would instantly sign back up to A&A if they offered it.
130000, where are you?
My suburb of a city of ~130k is getting CityFibre and UPP was deploying on the street. However, since CityFibre was nearby the website doesn’t seem to imply that they’ll ever give us service, and UPP is unlikely to complete given that they were overbuilding VM HFC. Openreach may eventually get around to installing their offering by 2026.
I don’t think that CityFibre need to worry much. Pricing is good and they offer symmetrical connections as standard without charging more or just not being able to offer it as a possibility technologically.
I always search for it and recommend it if it’s available.
Lol AAISP would cap you to 1TB and charge you the earth for it.
BT will be delighted that their true monopoly position will be broken and how Ofcom will respond to that. Mmm now I’ll be able to get broadband over 1990s cable TV coax from someone other than VM… think I’ll pass now that Community Fibre is available in my street…
I’m sure many in VM monopolised areas will be delighted at some competition and an alternative to Virgin Media.
ISPs could provide broadband where they bundle both Openreach and Virgin connections for redundancy.
Consumer would pay 2x service costs for it thought. Very rare a residential connection would need this scale or cost of redundancy.
It could be made much cheaper though, than the full cost of two services. One connection would be idle 99% of the time. Better to get £10 a month for an unused coax connection than nothing.
Only if the connection provider agrees to make a disccount on lines that *might* be idle most of the time. I don’t think they do that right now.
Why on earth would anyone do that? If you can get a decent mobile signal from anyone with say over 10mbps, then that’s your backup, unless you seriously cannot go without cat movies for the few days it’ll take to fix?
I think Openreach are doing fallback redundancy modems that use 5G if the signal dies
Openreach won’t be messing around with cellular backup solutions, other than as needed for its own monitoring and management.
It’ll be up to the ISPs to do that – and BT itself does provide cellular backup as an option for all of its residential and small business customers. A lot cheaper and easier than the provision of a separate cable from another network operator, for anyone except the very high end.
Having worked as a network engineer on the VM HFC network in the past, I’m not too sure how wholesale on HFC is going to work, I’m assuming it will be tunnelled from the CMTS across the core to the provider.
VMB has disastrous issues when trying to use PPPoE and GRE tunnelling for static IPs in the past, I’m not too convinced they’ll get it right either.
Also, are providers going to want to invest to be a wholesale customer on HFC, when they can wholesale on FTTP from OR or CF where available, or potentially reinvest to migrate HFC to XGS when VM overbuild their HFC with fibre?
Very surprised at this decision
Forgot to add, the tunnelling will add to the already higher latency times, used to always see a 20/30ms difference between the tunnelled and non tunnelled connections. I just don’t see this being an attractive proposition for ISPs
Arris (or whoever they are this week) have it working with NBN in Australia, wholesale HFC is a significant part of that network especially in the (sub)urban areas.
Rogers in Canada also offers wholesale services across its HFC network. No idea who their vendor is.
Ahhh. VM use a combination of Arris and Cisco CMTS. Still not convinced ISPs will be queuing up for this!
I’m not surprised – they’ve flagged this to investors for a few years now, and OR FTTP and Altnets have created competition that’s challenged VM’s near monopoly of high speed. VM have tried expanding the network, and failed to really grow the customer base or increase revenue per user despite the billions spent on expansion, so the only other growth option is to try and grow a wholesale business. Ultimately that could also enable a complete split between the supplier and networks sides of the business that wouldn’t be viable now.
You may be right that other ISPs are going to be cautious, and I’d think both from technical and commercial perspectives. By putting the wholesale business within VMO2, there’s no appearance of neutrality. VM don’t have a good name supporting their own customers, if there’s customised tech for third party ISPs, then big questionmarks over VM’s ability to support properly, possibly made worse by the NetCo/Nexfibre differences. Factor in the mix of HFC, RFoG and XGS FTTP and it’s all a bit iffy, with different areas offering different capacity and speed options.
Don’t me started on GRE tunnelling. One of the worst things I did was thinking that VMB would be as nice as VM residential but with the nice business level SLA and some static IPs.
All good points Andrew. The other thing is could the HFC be used for budget suppliers once VM start migrating their customers away from HFC. But the cost in keeping HFC and XGS running side by side for a lot longer than originally anticipated will surely outweigh any benefits.
My thoughts are they are about 10/15 years too late to the party from a commercial perspective, but the flip side to that is the HFC network is in a much better state then it was back then due to reseg work etc, so then the performance just wouldn’t have been there
James, VM mainly use Arris CMTS now (DocSIS 3.1). Older CMTS was River Delta (Motorola), Nokia and Cisco. Whilst some old CMTS may exist, majority is Arris kit.
Not forgetting that VM have committed to replacing all their HFC with FTTP by 2028 (less than 5 years).
Anon,
Can only speak for the area I worked in. We had Cisco UBR7246VXR for Docsis1, Motorola BSR64000 and Cisco 10k for D3. D3.1 came along and those were replaced with mainly Arris E6000’s, but there were a few Cisco D3.1 CMTS, think they were called CBR8’s, but the Arris out numbered the Cisco by a fair margin.
Big Dave: “Not forgetting that VM have committed to replacing all their HFC with FTTP by 2028 (less than 5 years).”
Unless things have changed that’s not quite correct – VM told investors that they’d enable network wide XGS-PON, but that the connections to properties would only be upgraded to FTTP when a customer ordered a product that needed XGS-PON. Obvious different in Nexfibre builds and RFoG areas, but if the stick to what they told the investors, then in existing HFC areas the XGS roll out is closer in concept to Openreach FTTC, except that they’ll then do FTTP betwen cabinet and house as required.
Happy to be corrected if this is wrong, but the cost of unnecessary replacement of HFC droplinks would be a billion quid or two, so they shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry.
@Andrew G
Unless things have changed I took the 2028 from Richard Tangs video at LINX in 2021 here:- https://youtu.be/bJ73FMEzIBs
The relevant section is from 4.00 to 6.30. If Richard was right they implication was they intended to replace the whole network.
Big Dave,
What Andrew is getting at is the 2 networks will be ran side by side, and it will be a slow migration from HFC to XGS, you’ll get the people wanting the speeds migrating first paying an install fee, along with new customers. Then over time for various reasons the rest will be migrated.
Wholesale will be Fibre only, no HFC, the article is incorrect on that point.
@James: VM is building its XGS-PON with a planned end date of 2028, much of which consists of cabinets, microducts and fibre. When an area is ready there will be another major project, being a migration from HFC with fibre from the distribution cabinets to the premises and coaxial cabling will finally be removed. RFoG will also be migrated to XGS-PON, a much simpler job that HFC. It’s expected that these legacy networks (and DOCSIS) will be completely replaced by about 2040 and in the meantime it’s the growing XGS-PON which will be wholesaled to other ISPs.
Roger again:
‘When an area is ready there will be another major project, being a migration from HFC with fibre from the distribution cabinets to the premises and coaxial cabling will finally be removed. ‘
This is your opinion and isn’t based on anything. Last I heard VMO2 planned a ‘stop sell’ similar to Openreach allowing the HFC customer base to wind down via attrition, incentives and no longer selling the products: they have no plans to carry out major migrations from HFC to fibre in areas in one hit.
I didn’t say it wouldn’t happen, I said there are no plans which there aren’t. To actually do this they’d have to hire armies of installers and get permission from each and every household: this seem likely? Exactly. They’ll stop selling HFC and tell people they can’t renew their old HFC contracts so they either sit on expensive 30 day rolling or move to XGSPON. Eventually the last holdouts will be told they must move to FTTP or be disconnects but that’s a long way away.
James, I’ve no idea if the HFC will be wholesaled however the newer Arris kit is edge routers with CMTS cards in them and is able to handle this stuff with a lot more grace.
Whether HFC or XGSPON there will absolutely be tunneling but, as with the BT Wholesale network, as long as it’s to sensible places it’ll add minimal latency and doesn’t need to involve the CPE at all so no GRE or PPP.
I know that wholesale of HFC was looked at with both handover at headends, data sent over the MetNet, and being collected together and delivered over VLANs to handover PoPs as happens with CityFibre’s national service.
Both are perfectly doable for VMO2 now and the core, CMTS and the FTTP gear are capable.
Couldn’t they do it like MVNO’s do for mobile phone contracts where MNVO’s are just basically resellers? So VM would still provide the connections but you’d pay your MVNO? Then there would be no changes to infrastructure required.
though how much of their network has already been overbuilt by an altnet with superior technology to HFC? Virgin will still need to invest to compete with Openreach FTTP or altnet FTTP.
isn’t the bigger threat to the altnets here, especially the smaller ones?
(to add) I can imagine Openreach are already preparing their arguments as to why their unique regulatory conditions should be removed, especially in areas with competition
“isn’t the bigger threat to the altnets here, especially the smaller ones?”
No. At the moment the smaller altnets are all loss making and cash negative – they need either a sugar daddy buy out, or big write-offs of debt. From the commercial perspective of a big ISP, content and mobile business such as VM, the altnets are mosquitos round an elephant, and even consolidation of the altnets won’t present real competition to VM across its footprint unless the consolidation were by somebody like Comcast who also own Sky and could then do services bundling.
Look at how VM are 100% focused on selling mixed packages – so the lowest (promoted) speed is 125 Mbps, £29 for broadband only, yet only £31 for 125 Mbps, landline, weekend calls included, and Mixit TV of 100 channels. The Altnets have nothing to bundle, so they appeal to those who don’t have any other option, a few technical types after fast upload, or TalkTalk-type customers who just want a barebones connection at the lowest cost.
It would seem to me that the logical conclusion would be that VM (or its sibling Nexfibre) would now be looking to buy up altnets where they don’t have a presence or only HFC exists. Rajiv Datta of Nexfibre in his interview with Richard Tang seemed to suggest that he thought a third national network was not viable so maybe they are going to be the great consolidator. CityFibre seem to have built where Virgin have only got HFC so a buyout may save VM having to do their own installs. Likewise Fern and Community Fibre may also be attractive. Rajiv Datta seemed to be keeping his cards close to his chest during the interview and now we know why.
The main thing is price. No one cares about something which costs 50%. It makes no sense for someone on a good altnet like Community Fibre to ditch it to go to BT or VM
Millenials and Zoomers do not care about TV, and unless you are an old boomer no one cares about a landline
@John, I assume that all that matters is what the snowflakes think?
All that matters is what the people with the spending power think. ‘Snowflakes’ or other pejoratives irrelevant.
@Big Dave: VMO2, having bought Upp and then transferred it to nexfibre, is looking at 6-7 operators with a view to buying one of them. I’d expect that new purchase to end up in nexfibre’s books as well as it’s Infravia which has the money in that joint venture.
Interesting. I still believe that when the HFC is all converted to fibre, VM’s fixed-line assets will be hived off into Nexfibre, including any wholesale agreements at that time. Two large options for ISPs to choose from. Altnets will still be around, but there’s liable to be more consolidation there yet. I think we may end up with two ‘national’-scale players, and some which are semi-national; large but not to the level of Openreach / Nexfibre etc.
VM said the other day that they have no plans to make their stream platform available through other networks Here:- https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/02/virgin-media-uk-has-no-plans-to-expand-streams-availability.html.
In the light of this announcement you would have to wonder whether this would still make sense. I would suggest probably not.
I clicked on your link and it says nothing about the networks customers are using only the ISP. How they connect to that ISP isn’t mentioned.
“At this time there are no plans to make Stream available to non-VM customers.”
Fantastic news! Hopefully we’ll have OR and/or CF available to us by 2025 but if not it will be great to be able to get away from having to deal with VM directly.
You have to wonder if this has *finally* been driven by OR’s FTTP roll-out and alt nets offering decent speeds at very competitive prices, and they’ve finally realised they’re not going to increase subscriber numbers massively without wholesaling – which is basically what they said in their presentation that it’s an underutilised network. I’m not sad to have seen the back of VM as the only provider of reasonably decent broadband where I live.
Great news for Openreach , bad news for Alt nets . And great news for Virgin o2
Why is it great news for openreach? If Virgin offers other provider services, then that can be bad for openreach if they are in the same area . If they are not in the same area then it will make no difference.
A lot of people who go for Alt nets do so because they don’t want to go with openreach or even Virgin, Also some Alt nets are providing services from different providers.
Makes no difference to a lot of people as they have no access to Virgin, don’t have it here, I doubt we ever will.
See how it goes.
The people on here are anti altnets, no doubt worried about their shares in BT.
Virgin need to do this to stop them running to standstill. Leaves InfraVia as a bridesmaid in NexFibre and Fern and TalkTalk wholesale plans dead in the water.
Might be the saviour for all those large city areas Openreach deemed not viable for their rollout.
On their current infrastructure I’d only consider it for a backup link if a provider offered a cheap and dirty 40/10 CGNAT type product. My hope is that as a result of this OFCOM force them into PIA, from experience their ducts are a lot less full and most of their existing build is UG. Anecdote; a good few years ago in the dialup days I had a mate around the corner who had ISDN and rich parents (unlike me) but we were keen CounterStrike players. A wireless P2P link wasn’t practical so we bought a 750m coil of pre-terminated SM fibre and over a few nights used NTL’s ducts to establish our own 100mbps link between houses. We were kind and pulled replacement draw ropes as we went, we both moved years ago but I did a drive by last year and the 20mm black conduit up the side of both houses (to our bedrooms) is still there, suggesting the fibre still exists!
I love this!
I can assure VM ducts are often rammed
VM Ducts are very heavily congested, more so than ORs, alot of areas built with 2 inch duct as well.
A duopoly is better than a monopoly and with upp bringing fibre to north Norfolk I’m pretty happy at this news.
My preferred isp zen can help me keep my fixed ip address via either openreach or this new consortium.
I wonder how zen will offer and price their packages based on different infrastructure partners?
My daughter and son both moved away from VM due to the appalling customer service (Netomnia/Youfibre and OR/BT). I wonder if the migration traffic is hurting.
NexFibre is already a wholesale platform, but VM is the only enrolled customer. I think they are grandstanding, trying to ruffle the marketplace and you wont see ISP’s signing up soon.
How about the executive speak that also appeared earlier today:
Lutz Schüler, CEO of Virgin Media O2, said:
“We ended the year with stable revenues in line with our revised guidance at Q3, and achieved the low end of our mid-single-digit Transaction Adjusted EBITDA growth guidance through accelerated synergy execution which offset the impacts of consumer spend optimisation.”
“We ended the year with stable revenues in line with our revised guidance at Q3, and achieved the low end of our mid-single-digit Transaction Adjusted EBITDA growth guidance through accelerated synergy execution which offset the impacts of consumer spend optimisation.”
Can somebody translate that into plain English please?
Our revenues were flat but we made a little more profit before tax. We achieved this by reducing our costs despite our customers choosing to leave us for cheaper providers.
Synergy is the concept that the value and performance of two companies combined will be greater than the sum of the separate individual parts. If two companies can merge to create greater efficiency or scale, the result is what is sometimes referred to as a synergy merge.
@RightSaidFred, when they say reducing their costs, they mean getting rid of people.
Exactly.
The synergy is being able to cut staff numbers where there is duplication/overlap of workload.
This complexity is becoming a nightmare for the ordinary broadband customer.
Here’s hoping that once Virgin upgrade all the DOCSIS parts of the network to fibre, they actually allow providers that use their network to offer symmetrical, or at least faster upload speeds.
Might finally give OR the kick up the backside they need to increase upload speeds on their own network. OR have always been reluctant to increase upload speeds to help protect their leased line operations!
I was under the impression this would only be whole sale on the xgs pon network. It seems a complicated decision if it’s true to wholesale out on cmts based infrastructure (everything else) using often already heavily contended qam carriers to get from cmts to modem. Unless there’s some kind of wdm type tech for hfc.
I work for vm and it’s depressing to see the amount of vm bashing in public and on here all the time. I understand the reasons but so many of us deliver a first class service to get things working, keep things working. It’s the way we handle customer issues and complaints billing etc that’s normally the thing you read time and again. Hopefully this will be a catalyst for change.
I believe Teleste now do CWDM TX and RX modules for their fibre nodes, allowing splits there and to drive fibre nodes deeper into the network to replace RF amps, which is why reseg work happens a lot quicker than it used to. Only thing is, how much will VM want to invest in this going forward if the ultimate aim is to retire HFC. Having less amplifiers in cascade helps with SNR’s, but the splitting needs new CMTS ports, burning through those is where it gets costly.
The VM name will always be in the mud. The front line staff are great but the call centres and higher management aren’t
@James: Until fairly recently VM was planning to keep its networks, so I’ve no doubt that there would have been a migration to DOCSIS 4.0, some more reseg (as some of the network is I believe N+10) and there had been a small R-PHY deployment in 2020 on the HFC network. Now it’s all guns blazing on XGS-PON, so I cannot see any upgrades on HFC which VM is very keen to replace.
Roger… *sigh*
‘Until fairly recently VM was planning to keep its networks’
Spinning it off has been on the cards for years.
‘so I’ve no doubt that there would have been a migration to DOCSIS 4.0’
There has never been a plan to migrate to DoCSIS 4.0. It was costed and XGSPON overbuild chosen instead as it could come in at about 1/3rd more.
‘some more reseg (as some of the network is I believe N+10)’
Resegmentation continues on the HFC.
‘and there had been a small R-PHY deployment in 2020 on the HFC network’
RPHY continues to be installed where appropriate.
‘Now it’s all guns blazing on XGS-PON, so I cannot see any upgrades on HFC which VM is very keen to replace.’
Business as usual capacity upgrades on the HFC continue. It’s had its last spectrum upgrade to facilitate the higher upload speeds but resegmentation, channel rearrangement, etc, continue within the existing spectrum. VMO2 aren’t going to ignore congested HFC for the next 4 years because they’re overbuilding it.
@VM employee:
Reasons I personally have issues with your employer:
1. Virgin Media will not roll out coax broadband to 6 properties on my street (including my house). I have been asking them repeatedly since 2012. Only option I have is VDSL at the moment.
2. O2’s mobile network is beyond useless where I live – so much so that you can’t even send a simple WhatsApp message – where is the investment? Coverage improvement? 5G?
3. No Nexfibre rollout plans (hardly surprising since everyone seems to avoid us like the plague for some weird reason).
I live in Winchester, Hampshire.
Well this could have something to do with it
Virgin Media O2 posted a £3.3 billion loss in 2023 after the firm added a huge goodwill impairment to its accounts amid rising debt costs and tighter cash flows.
So BT could use virgin network?? Will they have to offer PIA as well like openreach going forward?
Yes I do expect BT to use VM’s network, and any refusal would no doubt result in a complaint to OFCOM as Openreach is obligated to allow VM to use its pole and ducts.
Openreach are regulated as they are considered to have Significant Market Power, VMO2 are not as they aren’t.
VMO2’s network being separated off and wholesale products becoming available doesn’t change this.
Openreach being obligated to allow others to use their network doesn’t mean anything as far as Openreach being able to put cable into others’ ducts goes.
If BT/Openreach could complain on those grounds they’d be able to complain about CityFibre and many others that have duct networks but also use Openreach’s. It’s not reciprocal and regulation isn’t symmetrical.
Neither is their offering lol
It depends how you define significant market power. VM originally was primarily a provider of cable TV, I would say that VM may well meet the definition of having significant market power particularly when you factor in Nextfibre
The criteria for Significant Market Power are quite specific: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/information-for-industry/telecoms-competition-regulation/smp-guidelines
I’m not clear how Nexfibre could be thrown in with Netco: legally distinct entities. Spinning off the network into a separate Netco also reduces the case for SMP.
The guidance makes it quite clear other subsidiary companies companies can be taken into account if that were not the case Bt could get round it by splitiing /openreach into several companies
VM o2 big joke provider. Worst mobile network in the UK.
Our area, Reigate, has for 9+ months had all the new FTTP cabinets installed alongside the existing HFC network, but when entering our postcode on VM website there is no indication the FTTP service is available. Is it likely to be live yet?
No, no upgraded areas can order XGSPON yet. They’ll announce when they are I imagine.
Might be good news if it’s cheaper than VM’s current prices. Right now I can get:
Cheap but slow
Expensive and fast (download only)
Community Fibre would be idea (fast and cheap) but if there was a way to get VM’s network but for a price approaching £20 (basic copper based connection) it’d be great. I’m expecting it to be something overpriced though.
No chance it’ll be cheaper. VM Retail is a heavily subsidised price.. I’m getting 1gbps for £30 a month. Their wholesale price will be undiscounted to all providers, most of whom aren’t large enough to sell something at less than cost like that.
Yeah I do think Virgin needs the balance the cost at which has to be subsidised… Hardly right that one customer gets a £30 discount and another gets either a tiny discount or nothing at all.
We can harp on about retentions department but reality is thats another additional cost to the company and the customers too, fair pricing for everybody, customers get in contract pricing or out of contract pricing and maybe a small loyalty discount, that’s it.
In the event if the above I also think that a service for lite users should exist such as the 50/5 service but at a reduced rate to the higher services, the users using 50GB a month shouldn’t be subsidising the users using 500GB or even 5000GB a month.
As for wholesaling products, they will likely change the way Virgin Media packages work to be fair, the HFC network is on its way out now, and reality for current users is that it’s likely going to get used to ita limits before it’s demise … Brace for over utilisation issues again.
Reality if this will be building a customer base for an alternive FTTP network.
Does this mean that Virgin is literally unbundling its services to alternate providers like BT does? Whilst I welcome the competition, it’s only going to be competition if its cheaper than Virgin.
And this being Libery Global, it isn’t and simply can’t possibly be cheaper. I mean if it is everyone who’s with Virgin will just leave them (like hopping on an MVNO) and if it isn’t cheaper, who’s going to care less?????
So is Virgin promoting competition with its own product here or what???
It is setting up a seperate wholesale company the equivalent of Openreach. It will not be selling to consumers wholesale
I live in an area where there is no VM service and Open reach is not keen to roll out FTTP.So not sure if this will have any positive impact on that.
Netco/Nexfibre and its associated costs would need continual investment and I cannot see how a couple of billions ££ would cover the long term upgrades especially when the investors would be wanting a return: anyone considered the effects of synergies as mentioned by CEO Lutz, I imagine many more job losses at VM02 and its partner stakeholders. Feel sorry for the staff as I can see the workers (techs and service people) being outsourced like they were prior to lockdown and probably reduced network techs. Any thoughts
This is the news I have been waiting for. Proper competition with ISP’s.
I have Virgin Media FTTP which I am subscribed to and an OR cooper line from the pole. Recently been upgraded in my area to FTT Pole.
Does this mean that any new supplier will allow us VM users to ditch the Hub 2/3/4/5 and use a batter router.