Virgin Media says aim is 80% of UK serviced by its full fibre network

The latest Virgin Media O2 financial results covering the quarter ending 31st March 2023 have been published and the key message is that Virgin Media O2 continues to expand the number of homes it services and is pleased with its average download and upload speeds.

Virgin Media O2 say they are on track to service 80% of the UK with full fibre, which will be the result of the nexfibre roll-out and conversion of the last mile of coax in existing DOCSIS 3.1 areas to fibre. The conversion programme is running under the name Project Mustang. The existing DOCSIS 3.1 network covers some 16.3 million homes and the nexfibre roll-out is expected to deliver another 7 million or so premises.

Covering 80% of the UK with full fibre means a footprint of around 25 million premises, or if just talking households a figure around 24 million, which suggests that the ambition with the nexfibre roll-out is larger than 7 million premises passed.

nexfibre has taken over from Project Lightning which has driven the providers’ footprint expansion over the last few years and is designed to be a wholesale FTTP platform. Alas, at this time Virgin Media O2 is the only retailer using the platform, and at this point in time the only large broadband retailer we can see signing up is Sky. BT Consumer is unlikely to join a network that competes with Openreach. Vodafone and TalkTalk are both on board with CityFibre and TalkTalk has the additional option of Freedom Fibre. Sky already accesses another third party network in addition to the standard Openreach network, and that is OFNL.

In the first three months of 2023 Virgin Media O2 became available to another 107,800 premises, and there was 20,900 net additions to give a broadband customer base of 5.8 million customers. 

Of course, we are tracking the Virgin Media O2 footprint. At this time, we don’t flag new areas as nexfibre, we are waiting until there is a second retailer or some other product differentiation so that we can be sure that a postcode is served by nexfibre rather than the older Project Lighting RFOG FTTP. In terms of figures Virgin Media O2 has conveniently published a timeline of its expansion.

Our figures show that we are able to track the Virgin Media O2 expansion, and while there is a lag of 10 to 12 weeks the gap is relatively stable. We will continue our work to keep up with the roll-out and we look forward to calving out some time to try and get closer to the leading edge of the roll-out. A big thank you to those who email with detail of new areas that have just gone live, in the last quarter some of these have been areas where we weren’t already watching for expansion.