Nexfibre Invest £10m to Build FTTP Broadband to 61,000 Bradford Premises
Network operator nexfibre, which is in the process of merging with Netomnia (here) and shares some of its parentage with ISP partners Virgin Media (O2) and giffgaff, appears to have announced a new investment of £9.9m to expand their full fibre broadband network across 61,000 premises in Bradford (West Yorkshire, England).
Just to recap. Back in 2022 Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners setup nexfibre as a new £4.5bn joint venture (here), which aimed to deploy an open access wholesale 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.
The catch is that nexfibre’s rollout plan suffered a significant blow last year after Telefonica launched a Strategic Review of their global business (here and here). The decision has since resulted in nexfibre scaling back their planned build, which in practical terms means there isn’t currently a clear build plan for going beyond the current level of coverage (2.6m premises passed). But as the recent deal to acquire Netomnia’s network shows, the greatest focus now seems to be on expanding coverage through consolidation (here).
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However, according to a new report in the Telegraph & Argus newspaper, nexfibre do still appear to have some expansion plans in mind (utilising Virgin Media’s existing build teams) and has announced a project to expand full fibre across “up to” a further 61,000 premises in the city of Bradford; this works out at a surprisingly low per premises cost of £162. Up to 26 youth centres in Bradford will also benefit from a free full fibre upgrade.
Rajiv Datta, CEO of Nexfibre, said:
“We are committed to delivering high quality connectivity to everyone across the country. Full-fibre broadband is a crucial driver of economic growth, and our investment in Bradford will help deliver better access to education, jobs, and opportunities that can transform lives and uplift entire communities.”
One thing to note here is that Bradford is already well covered by Virgin Media and nexfibre’s existing gigabit broadband network, which is before we consider that the city is also home to several other competing gigabit networks including from Openreach, Grain, CityFibre and Netomnia (as well as a small patch from Hyperoptic). But the picture of overbuild is very patchy, and some pockets do remain poorly served.
In having a closer look at the area we can see that Virgin Media’s engineers are currently preparing for a significant network upgrade in areas just outside the main city, such as around parts of Thurnbury, Farsley, Pudsey, Stanningley and Swinnow. But this appears to reflect Virgin’s Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) to FTTP (XGS-PON) upgrade programme, and we can’t see much new fibre build for nexfibre being planned.
Suffice to say it’s currently unclear where the extra 61,000 premises are going to come from and they won’t wish to overbuild Netomnia due to the merger, although we can see some city and outlying areas that VM/nexfibre + Netomnia have yet to fill and these may well be the target.
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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 committed to delivering high quality connectivity to everyone across the country.” said Rajiv Datta. LOL.
Not here, they pulled out before they even started.
Why are you bothered, you never wanted FTTP in the first place!
No point in building over it when you’re thinking about buying it if the price is right.
Zzoom would be a good target for Nexfibre. Vitually no overbuild as far as I can see & all their own PIA.
Not bothered, just saying.
As for buying Zzoomm, they may do at some point or another company may, it is not ZZoomm any more as such.
As long as it keeps working for a decent price.
Brsk has huge coverage around the Bradford suburban areas, once the sale to VM goes through they will only really need to fill in the inner-city area and can use the existing Netomnia network for most of the district.
Perhaps they’d care to come back & finish the rest of Banbury that they were supposed to do 18 months ago but then stopped work.
Only Thornbury is in Bradford. Farsley, Pudsey, Stanningley and Swinnow are all in Leeds.
Nexfibre’s latest plan is to reach 8m homes by the end of 2027, consisting of the current Nexfibre and Netomnia footprints plus 2.1m premises in areas adjacent to Netomnia that ARE currently served by Virgin Media’s own network.
It seems likely these 61,000 premises in the Bradford area are part of the 2.1m adjacent to Netomnia that are being transferred to Nexfibre. In that case, most of them will already have Virgin Media HFC available and the cost per premises passed will be low because it’s mostly the same work as Project Mustang/FibreUp.
There’s probably a bit more to this than just that as they’ve now announced the same thing for Crawley, which doesn’t have any Netomnia coverage:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/04/nexfibre-invest-6-8m-to-build-fttp-broadband-to-42000-crawley-premises.html
In addition, network operators generally don’t announce new investments that are linked to an unfinished acquisition, until the consolidation deal is formally done (regulatory approval etc.). So we’d normally expect something like this to follow after completion of the deal, not before.
Does all this mean there’s been no resistance from competition & mergers or Ofcom
The low per premises cost probably means that they’re treating the Virgin Media and Nexfibre network as one and the same, running nexfibre lines through Virgin ductwork. Might seem a bit early to drop that pretence as the CMA hasn’t yet made a decision on the netomnia purchase but given how the CMA betrayed the public interest in Vodafone’s takeover of Three they’ve probably concluded regulation in the UK is a box ticking exercise rather than anything to worry about.
They’ve always run fibre through the Virgin Media network. Since the beginning of Nexfibre they’ve run fibre through Virgin Media ducts. This is not new.
CityFibre, Netomnia, Community Fibre, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, etc, etc, run fibre through Openreach ducts. Do they need to drop the pretence too and admit they’re part of BT?