Virgin Media and Nexfibre FTTP Add 14,000 Alfreton Premises
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has today announced that more than 14,000 additional homes and businesses in the Derbyshire (England) town and civil parish of Alfreton can now access their new 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which was made possible by nexfibre’s supporting network expansion.
Alfreton 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 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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The town of Alfreton represents a good pick for nexfibre, since they currently seem to be the only gigabit-capable network operator in the location with any significant coverage. Openreach has built a little FTTP and Glide also has a presence, but neither has yet delivered any significant coverage. But we do note that FullFibre’s network exists just south of the A38 divide, while Netomnia also come very close on the Eastern edge of the town.
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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But all the suppliers keep skirting Hilcote which is just outside Alfreton. All the other small parishes around (Newton, Blackwell, Tibshelf and Huthwaite) all seem to be at least covered by Netomnia. Suppose we’ll have to wait till Connect Fibre use the money from Lot3 to connect us.
I’d be interested to know how long between laying and going live? And whether they went live as town, estate or street level? Nexfibre picked my street as the first in the town to lay. Did the job superfast and told us go live would be ~3 months time. 5 months later they are still laying to other areas in the town but no new digging in my area for over 3 months. Just wondering how long I’ll need to wait. In the meantime Giganet have also started laying but are at least a month or two away from go live. Just wondering who’ll be first – my FTTC is becoming increasingly unreliable and slower.
I can’t speak for every Nexfibre rollout but in my circumstance from the first sign of activity on our estate to being able to place an order with VMO2 was 52 days. They didn’t hang about at all.
Thanks Hilts. They started our large estate (~500 houses) 5 months ago (our road) and finished all work in the estate over 2 months ago so not so fast in my case. Its why I assumed they wanted to go live across the town all at once. (I know giganet seem to go live street by street as the work is done but we seem to be one of their last streets in the town.)
stretton went live last October, the infrastructure was installed about 10 months before going live
My street was dug in the middle of October. Still waiting for go live.
Thanks both. Ours was a similar time Cognizant…
does anyone know if Virgin media are rolling out in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. I have seen a lot of virgin broadband work being done opposite my house on the pole that runs my cables over but heard nothing from them directly.