Virgin Media UK Expand FTTP Broadband to 13,000 Homes in Worcester
Network operator nexfibre and supporting broadband ISP partner Virgin Media (O2), which share some of the same parentage, have today announced that they’ve expanded the reach of their symmetric 2Gbps speed capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to more than 13,000 homes in the Cathedral City of Worcester (Worcestershire, England).
The city was previously dominated by full fibre coverage from Openreach and CityFibre’s respective networks, as well as a few smaller deployments from Hyperoptic, OFNL and possibly others. But now nexfibre/VMO2 have also decided to bring their network into the area for the first time and put it live, although it’s unclear if they’ll be going much beyond 13k (the city itself has c.50k premises).
Nexfibre, which reflects a £4.5bn joint venture between Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners (here), has so far already covered 2.3 million premises across the UK with their new full fibre network. But the operator’s original plan to cover “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s network of 16m+ premises was recently dealt a blow by Telefonica’s strategic review (here).
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At present, nexfibre now only expects to reach 2.5 million UK premises by the end of 2025 and uncertainty remains over what comes next.
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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VM need to realise they aren’t the only game in town for Gigabit connections and need to up their game. They really need to move to a stand alone ONT on their FTTP network and drastically improve their customer support both technical and account support. Users are becoming more savvy and more technical as more and more digital natives become primary users of broadband. They can’t just have folks reading from a script and resetting to blaming a users’ internal setup when stuff goes wrong.
This is not really Virgin as such, they are in partnership, so a different company, and also they are not the ISP as to speak. Think of Nexfibre as a smaller Openreach.
VM maintain the Nexfibre network
Any Network Provider that has a supporting Partner like Virgin Broadband needs to be given a wide berth.
Who will have the contract?