Virgin Media UK and Nexfibre Expand Full Fibre to 13,000 Homes in Stoke
Broadband operator nexfibre, which shares some of their UK parentage with retail ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), has today announced that they’ve made their 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network available to more than 13,000 additional homes in the city of Stoke-on-Trent (Staffordshire, England).
The city already had a significant level of coverage from Virgin Media’s own gigabit broadband network, although the nexfibre build – most of which has taken place around the edges of the city – means they’re now able to reach the vast majority of local premises. Both Openreach and Freedom Fibre (Lila Connect) also have a significant level of FTTP coverage in the city, as well as the usual smattering of smaller builds from Hyperoptic 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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We are not on VM/Nexfibre’s build plans but two months ago they came and plonked a green cabinet slap bang in the middle of the pavement (yes , in the actual middle of it not a figure of speech). Nobody can find out what it’s for either. The people on the phone claim to not know, and nor does twitter VM account etc. I wonder if it’s going to be fibre
Have you got a rough location for this cabinet?
Sounds interesting enough to look into..
That needs moving. Cabinets should never be installed in the middle of the pavement.
How do you know it was them that installed it?
All of the cabinets they’ve installed in my area (not in their published rollout plans I might add) are grey, not green which are generally Openreach
Not Stoke but just had a nexfibre build go live, 95% of the estate can get XGS-PIA (gig2 +symmetric) but there’s a few houses that are limited to XGS (gig1 no option for symmetric).
Is this a DB error or is there a real reason that would be the case?