Virgin Media promises one million fibre-to-the-premise connections

Virgin Media has said that it will roll out fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) broadband services to at least one million properties as part of the firm's Project Lightning expansion plans.

Virgin claimed that trials in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire using ‘narrow trenching’ to roll out FTTP services had proved this can be done on a wider basis. West Yorkshire, Devon and East Sussex were the first locations to use this new method.

The deployment of FTTP services will provide speeds of 200Mbps to 300Mbps with a theoretical maximum of 1Gbps in the future.

Tom Mockridge, chief executive of Virgin Media, explained that the move will "future-proof" millions of homes and businesses so that they have high-speed services for years to come.

“In just over one year we’ve laid enough new cable to stretch all the way from Land’s End to John O’Groats, reaching a quarter of a million more homes and businesses, and there’s much more to come,” he said.

Virgin said that 250,000 new premises have been connected to its network since Project Lightning launched in February 2015, and that a further 500,000 will come online this year.

The move comes amid several efforts in the telecoms space to enhance the speed of broadband connections.

BT announced recently that it had passed 25 million premises in the UK with higher-speed fibre services, although these are to the cabinet, not the premises.

Meanwhile, CityFibre is starting to make headway in the market with a full fibre network offering in major cities outside London, such as Bristol, Bradford and Exeter, which can offer 1Gbps upload and download speeds.

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• Topics
• Networks
• Telecoms
• Virgin Media
• Fibre
• broadband