O2 Switches On 500th UK Giga Site as Part of 5G Mobile Network Upgrade

Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) has this morning announced that they’ve switched on their 500th “Giga Site” (located in North Elgin, Scotland), which reflects mobile sites that adopt the operator’s most advanced 5G technologies (e.g. 5G+, dual-band Massive MIMO etc.) to improve network coverage, mobile broadband speeds and capacity for customers.

Just to recap. O2 deployed their first Giga Site back in October 2025, which was based in Paddington (London) and harnessed Nokia’s latest dual-band Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) tech to boost 5G mobile broadband performance and network capacity (here). The plan at the time was to deploy 1,000 more of these during 2026 and they’ve clearly made progress.

MIMO technology typically works by harnessing multiple antennae (usually 2 to 8) to send and receive data more efficiently to lots of users (both at the mobile mast and on your Smartphone / mobile router / IoT device etc.). But Massive MIMO dials that up a major notch by enabling mobile operators to harness a greater number of antennas, potentially hundreds.

Each Giga Site is said to combine a mix of low, mid and high-band spectrum with this to deliver “ten times more capacity than previous infrastructure“.

Jeanie York, CTO of Virgin Media and O2, said:

“Reaching 500 Giga Sites is a major milestone in the transformation of our mobile network. As customers use more data than ever before, these cutting-edge sites are helping us add capacity where it’s needed most and deliver a faster, more reliable experience across the UK. We’re not slowing down, with more towns and cities set to benefit throughout the year as we continue investing around £2 million per day in our mobile network.”

Take note that even if your existing Smartphone doesn’t have the same number of antennas as a Massive MIMO base station, it can still benefit from the increased capacity and more precise signal targeting that such technologies bring. O2’s 5G+ (Standalone) network is currently also live across around 86% of the UK’s population.

The 5G+ / 5GSA technology offers a pure end-to-end 5G network that can deliver ultra-low latency times, greater energy efficiency, better speeds (particularly uploads), network slicing, improved support for IoT devices, increased reliability and security etc. By comparison, early 5G networks used a Non-Standalone (NSA) approach, which was hobbled by being partly reliant upon older and slower 4G infrastructure.