Virgin Media and Nexfibre Add 13,000 York UK Homes to FTTP Cover
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has today announced that more than 13,000 additional homes and businesses in the Cathedral City of York (North Yorkshire, England) can now access their new 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which was made possible by nexfibre’s network expansion.
York is only the latest in a long list of VMO2 areas that have, over the past year, reported the completion of sizeable broadband expansion projects – including Alfreton, Blyth, Heysham and Lancaster, Brentwood, Sheffield, Scarborough, Coleraine, Wakefield and Doncaster etc. All of this reflects work conducted via wholesale 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 (starting with 5 million by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s own network of 16m+ premises. But Virgin Media, which shares the same parentage, is currently the only ISP on this network (here).
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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 been doing lightning work across Hawkinge near Folkestone, Kent right now.
Just wish the other parts of main Folkestone and Dover HFC areas were upgraded under Mustang as BT very busy doing FTTP and Netomnia in patches. Meanwhile on VM HFC, nothing, zilch, nada….
There isn’t much point to rush HFC yet. Openreach is the only real competitor of scale and them not doing symmetrical yet means that HFC can still compete.
They don’t seem to bothered about the RFoG areas either, and some of those can’t do 100Mbps upload.
They obviously think they won’t lose enough customers between now and 2028 for it to matter. I’d agree that it probably doesn’t matter too. We’re only 4 years away now.
Clearly they’re prioritising new builds over upgrading the existing HFC infrastructure. Docsis 3.1 is theoretically capable of 10G down and 2G up so it will probably remain competitive for a while.
Because of segmentation of frequency blocks for DVB-C, and noise issues and lack of split nodes in many areas, and even other issues, DocSIS 3.1 will never have those speeds in UK. They will like offer 2gbps/220mbps and that’s it.
They took their time announcing that – I’ve been live since just before Christmas last year! Mainly infill from what I can see (For example, Haxby had HFC while Strensall & Huntington didn’t). All delivered via PIA from what I’ve seen locally. Only concern is they already had to run a new fibre to me 2 months after install because of damage…. Fortunately this is my backup link!
Sensible to send out the press release after a large area is completed as you are less likely to pee off potential customers than making it while works are in progress.
In Doncaster, the newbuild VM/Nexfibre work has mostly piggybacked off Opernreach’s poles. This seems to be to pointless. The whole point of an alternative distribution network was that underground cabling providedredundancy against a competitor networks’ distribution system.
Virgin media can use PIA now so openreach ducting, Chambers and poles.
Virgin actually got stood down from using openreach poles for a good few months due to health and safety breaches.
They were using D poles when they shouldn’t touch them