Virgin Media and nexfibre Add 9,000 Witham Homes to UK FTTP Network
Broadband network operator nexfibre, which shares some of their parentage with retail 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) town of Witham.
The town is now fairly well covered by Virgin Media and nexfibre’s combined gigabit broadband networks, although there are also smaller patches of FTTP coverage to be found from Openreach, Gigaclear, Hyperoptic, LightSpeed Broadband and others.
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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How long after digging is Nexfibre available to order?
Nexfibre was installed in my street months ago but still can’t order.
And what is the takup of these excessive speeds.. :-}
Might not look quite so good, the big (unused) numbers look much better to keep the communications directors employed on, not real actual (not such ‘great’ news) use of?
Oh for a unified non geographically discriminating national service and infrastructure, with unified costing, say £10 per 100mbs, or would that be too egalitarian?