Virgin Media UK and Nexfibre Expand Full Fibre to 8,000 Northallerton Homes

Network operator nexfibre, which shares some of their UK parentage with retail broadband ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), has today announced that they’ve made their 2Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network available to more than 8,000 homes in the market town of Northallerton (North Yorkshire, England) for the first time.

The deployment is interesting because the town was already home to two competitive gigabit-capable full fibre broadband networks via both Openreach and Zzoomm. In fact, it was only a few months ago that Zzoomm was loudly proclaiming to have achieved 20% take-up in Northallerton on a network that had, at the time, only been available for “19 months“ (here). Suffice to say that it remains to be seen how nexfibre and Virgin Media do on this front.

Virgin Media added that their services would be available “before the end of the year” to more homes locally in the town, after work to bring full fibre connections to the area have been “completed in the next few weeks“. The investment has been welcomed by local MP and former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, on a recent site visit where he met representatives from both nexfibre and VMO2.

Rishi Sunak, the MP for Richmond and Northallerton, said:

“I welcome the latest investment in Northallerton that will ensure more people have access to much faster broadband speeds. It was great to meet with representatives from both Virgin Media O2 and nexfibre to discuss the progress they have made so far, as well as the plans they have to make gigabit broadband available to even more residents in our area.”

Nexfibre itself has already covered 2 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network (here) and many more will follow. 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.