Virgin Media to deploy fibre-to-the-premises to at least 1 mn additional homes

Virgin Media, the UKs largest cable company plans to deploy fibre-to-the-premises, to at least a quarter of the 4 million additional homes and businesses tied to Project Lighting, an initiative introduced last year.

The company said it had already started to deploy FTTP in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, and work was expected to start in West Yorkshire, Devon and East Sussex. According to the company, its use of narrow trenching and other engineering techniques for FTTP deployments in high-demand areas had lower costs and were faster than traditional deployments.

After completion of the planned expansion, the company would see 17 million homes connected to its network by 2019.

According to Virgin, it was adding FTTP to the mix, as according to a recent finding from regulator Ofcom, the UK had the lowest proportion of fibre connections running directly to homes and businesses of any country that was part of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Virgin said its updated plan offered a significant boost to the UKs ambitions to become a fibre nation.

The hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) network, which today represents most of its footprint, offered downstream speeds of up to 200 Mbps for residential customers and up to 300 Mbps for businesses.

According to Virgin, its plans represented the single largest investment in the UKs broadband infrastructure in more than a decade. The company added it would deploy the fibre technology more quickly and at a lower cost in areas where demand was high, using new engineering techniques such a narrow trenching.

Since the launch of Project Lightning in February 2015, Virgin Media had connected 250,000 new premises and created 2,100 jobs in the UK. The cable company expected to connect a further 500,000 premises and create another 500 jobs in the the country during 2016.

Commenting on the FTTP deployment plans, Virgin Media chief executive Tom Mockridge was cited as saying, "Our £3 billion ($4.4 billion) investment to bring ultrafast connectivity to more parts of the UK is not just about better broadband, its about future-proofing the country's network infrastructure with the best and most modern technology. In just over one year we've laid enough new cable, reaching a quarter of a million more homes and businesses."