Virgin Media O2 XGS-PON full fibre rollouts changing old cable landscape

Some call it Project Mustang, some call it FibreUp but the programme Virgin Media O2 has underway to upgrade old coax DOCSIS 3.1 areas to XGS-PON full fibre has been underway for a while, but now with giffgaff selling its full fibre services using the nexfibre wholesale platform in some Project Mustang areas the landscape is set to transform.

A couple of quick statistics to highlight the change underway, 6.9 million premises are covered by FibreUp/Project Mustang/nexfibre, and if we add the Project Lightning RFOG footprint this increases to 8.6 million premises. Just the nexfibre footprint alone is 2.6 million premises.

We’ve being spotted streets where VMO2 offered a mixture of full fibre and hybrid (the VMO2 name for its coax services) products since March 2025. Two things have changed in the last couple of weeks, old RFOG Project Lightning addresses in some places have giffgaff and its full fibre products available, and giffgaff is available in selected Project Mustang areas. You would assume giffgaff would also be available in every nexfibre XGS-PON location, but it does still look like a subset, though it is a very large part of the nexfibre footprint.

The result is that on the maps people may see some areas that are RFOG blue, flipping to the red/brown for FibreUp. At this time we are not counting FibreUp in our full fibre statistics, and the reason is that existing VMO2 cable customers don’t seem to be able to seamlessly upgrade. If you want to flip to full fibre you need to leave VMO2 first, and then signup with giffgaff i.e. no formal migration path is available and we doubt many people want to have a gap in broadband service. Once this caveat is removed we expect the full fibre and Gigabit coverage figures to rapidly converge in areas. The interesting bit will be how fast and how many small islands of just coax will be left – for example there is still a few hundred premises without access to Gig1 speeds and are limited to the 350 Mbps products.