Virgin Media Start Opening FTTP Upgrade Areas to Existing UK Customers

Broadband ISP Virgin Media (O2) has confirmed to ISPreview that they’ve finally started to make their new XGS-PON powered full fibre (FTTP) network upgrade (aka – Project Mustang or Fibre Up), which is being deployed alongside their existing coaxial cable (HFC / DOCSIS 3.1) areas, available to existing customers too.

Just to be clear. The change being referenced above is NOT to be confused with nexfibre’s separate roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines into new UK areas, which has already covered 2.5 million premises (access to this is being sold to consumers via Virgin Media and giffgaff). The nexfibre build is entirely focused upon areas that weren’t previously reached by Virgin Media.

By comparison, this article is talking about Virgin Media’s own efforts to upgrade their legacy HFC (DOCSIS 3.1) and Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG FTTP) powered areas – covering 16 million premises – to add support for XGS-PON technology. The goal of this programme is to complete that upgrade by 2028, although migrating customers will take much longer as it requires an engineer visit (i.e. replacing old kit with new ONT / optical modem).

At present, we still don’t know precisely how many HFC areas have been upgraded to support XGS-PON lines (costing c.£100 per premises), although several million premises are known to have been completed. But until recently the only ones able to access these new FTTP upgrade areas were new customers (here), which meant that if an existing customer wanted to upgrade from HFC to FTTP/XGS-PON then they had to cancel and re-subscribe.

However, some of ISPreview’s readers in HFC areas (i.e. those that Virgin have upgraded to support XGS-PON) have recently informed us that they’re now able to order up to Gig1 over HFC and Gig2 over FTTP, without needing to go through the tedious (early termination chargers and downtime etc.) hassle of cancelling and re-subscribing as a new customer first.

A spokesperson for Virgin Media has now confirmed to ISPreview that they have “begun offering existing customers in some areas the opportunity to upgrade their services to symmetrical and gigabit packages delivered on the XGS-PON network“. The key word in that response is “some“, since this is part of a phased roll-out as they continue to upgrade their network, so not everybody in a Project Mustang (Fibre Up) area may be able to benefit.. yet.

This is a positive development as Virgin Media really needs the XGS-PON upgrade to do more than just sit there, doing absolutely nothing (i.e. not generating revenue). After building, it’s important to make it as easy as possible for both new and existing customers to benefit from the newest network.