Virgin Media and Nexfibre Add 9,000 Chelmsford Homes to UK FTTP Network
Broadband network operator nexfibre, which shares some of their parentage with UK ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), has announced that they’ve extended their 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) network to cover 9,000 additional homes in the Essex (England) city of Chelmsford.
The city itself is now well covered by both Virgin Media and nexfibre’s combined gigabit broadband networks, although it’s worth noting that it’s also home to several other full fibre networks with strong coverage, such as Openreach and CityFibre (via their Lit Fibre acquisition). In addition, a few areas are also reached by smaller networks from Hyperoptic and OFNL etc.
Nexfibre itself has already covered around 1.6 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network, and they’re currently in the process of investing another £1bn this year, which should enable them to cover an additional 1 million UK premises by the end of 2024 (reaching a total footprint of c.2m).
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Just for some context. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners originally set up 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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So they are operating VM HFC and NexFibre FTTP to same houses (and some new ones that didn’t have HFC before) seeing that most of Chelmsford was already VM HFC?
This ties in with that awful map from Nefibre where I could clearly see existing HFC areas being targeted by Nexfibre. I thought that Project Mustang was delivering FTTP upgrades via VM for those existing HFC areas though. It looks like they’ve scrapped that, and Project Mustang is now covered by NexFibre instead and their published roll out programme.
No
There is no overlap between nexfibre and HFC
Mustang is completely separate
The nexfibre maps are intentionally vague, they aren’t meant to imply any overlap
But the news article says different. It says the area already had HFC coverage. The maps for Nexfibre also show whole town as going Nexfibre next year and its named in the table as well, despite also being all HFC with little exception.
The town mostly was HFC and some RFOG, nexfibre covered the remaining homes in and around the town that were not already covered. Will be the same in any town that already has VM if it’s in the nexfibre list, all they will do is infill and edge out to cover premises that can’t get VM today.
Mustang will overlay any existing HFC in those towns in time, so you will have 2 fibre networks there, one VM and one nexfibre, they will not overlap even by a single premise.
With regard my previous comment: “as in my own town going Nexfibre next year”. Couldn’t edit after submitting.