Virgin Media O2 Notifies Some 300 UK Staff of Potential Redundancies

Several sources have informed ISPreview that broadband and mobile operator Virgin Media (O2) has today notified staff, specifically those in the Fixed Wholesale and Customer Delivery side of their business, that c.300 of them could be facing redundancy in the near future. The move follows a slowdown in the expansion of their full fibre (FTTP) network via nexfibre.

The move shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given the turbulent year that VMO2 has had, which was partly fuelled by the uncertainty that flowed from debt-strained Telefonica and the earlier move to launch a Strategic Review of their global business (here and here).

The fallout from that review has since resulted in a number of changes, such as nexfibre scaling-back their planned fibre deployment to reach just 2.5m premises by the end of 2025 and Virgin Media adopting a different approach to fixed wholesale access at the consumer level (here). Telefonica did recently outline their future strategy (here), but the exact plan for nexfibre’s build beyond 2025 remains uncertain.

Just to recap. Nexfibre was first established in 2022 after Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners created the company as a new £4.5bn joint venture (here), which aimed to deploy an open access (wholesale) full fibre (FTTP) network to reach “up to” 7m UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT served by Virgin Media’s own network of 16m+ premises.

Redundancies

The latest development began to surface this morning, after several sources informed ISPreview that VMO2 had issued an internal announcement to staff within their Fixed Wholesale and Customer Delivery teams, which put around 300 of them at risk of possible redundancy.

A Virgin Media O2 spokesperson told ISPreview:

“After hitting a major milestone which saw us surpass 2.5 million homes for nexfibre, we continue to push ahead with a focused fibre rollout programme.

Our strategy to create the biggest fibre alternative to Openreach remains in place and on track, and to ensure we deliver on this strategy, we are proposing to make changes within some teams that would result in some exits.

We are having open and honest conversations directly with our people and employee representative groups on these proposals and will continue to support any impacted individuals throughout this process.”

However, VMO2 has informed us that this may not translate into the same number of roles being cut, as the hope is that it will be possible to map many of them into other roles. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of clarity over how all these changes will impact the timescale for achieving nexfibre’s original build target, although there’s been plenty of talk about complementing it with consolidation (example).