Virgin Media and Nexfibre Add 11,000 Homes to FTTP Cover in Chester
Network operator nexfibre, which shares some of their parentage with UK broadband ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), has announced that they’ve built to cover 11,000 additional homes in the Cheshire (England) city of Chester with their new 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network.
The top half of Chester is now well covered by Virgin Media and nexfibre’s gigabit-capable broadband network, although they’ve yet to do the bottom half. The city is also home to significant full fibre coverage from Openreach, as well as some modest to smaller deployments by CityFibre, Hyperoptic and OFNL etc.
Nexfibre itself has already covered over 1.3 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network, and they’re currently in the process of investing another £1bn during 2024, which should enable them to cover an additional 1 million UK premises (reaching a total footprint of c.2m).
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Just for some context. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners originally setup the new £4.5bn nexfibre joint venture in 2022 (here), which aims to deploy an open access fibre network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s network of 16m+ premises. The funding reflects £3.3bn of fully underwritten financing and up to £1.4bn in equity commitments.
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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What’s the update on upgrading their existing hfc to xgs pon in areas?
Nexfibre are only building in areas not already served by Virgin Media’s existing network. I’m pretty sure there was another article on here not too long ago about the plans for Virgin to launch their own wholesale service. Netco, or something?
Would not touch them with a bargepole if they ever came here, not that I can see them coming here to be honest.
Nexfibre’s rollout has been impressive so far. The rate at which they’ve covered my town in just two or three months is amazing to see. There have been complaints about the footpath closures, but my experience with their contractors here has been fantastic: very courteous and professional.
I’ve been live for two weeks and it’s been very reliable apart from one Virgin outage on Monday which took out Virgin across the northwest.
I’m just hoping they open up to other ISPs to increase competition in my area as they’re the only FTTP network in my street.
They are a large company with a lot of money, so they can afford to roll out fibre fast. If other companies had that sort of money behind them, then they could do it.
Always complaints about footpath closures, depends on how well it is done and if there is space at all for people to pass. Around here I have seen them block a footpath off, but have barriers, so people can go onto the road and separate them from the traffic.
As for opening up the network, I can see where that would be nice, maybe if Zzoomm did it they would get more people on the network, but at the moment i am happy with the service.
Hi rik
No I believe virgin are in the process of upgrading existing customers on hfc and rfog, next fiber are installing xgs-pon in new builds while project mustang is another project of virgins to upgrade existing customers to full fiber aka xgs-pon