Virgin Media UK Extend FTTP Broadband to 4000 Blackpool Homes

Some 4,000 extra premises in the large seaside town of Blackpool, which resides on the Lancashire coast, have just been added to ISP Virgin Media’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based ultrafast broadband and TV network. Average speeds of 516Mbps are available to those covered, but faster services are coming.

Once again this roll-out forms part of the operator’s £3bn Project Lightning build, which originally aimed to add an additional 4 million premises to their UK coverage by 2020 but so far they’ve only completed c.2.2 million. As before, this uses a mix of FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology; both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.

The operator is currently deploying a DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade across the UK too, which by the end of 2021 should make download speeds of 1Gbps+ possible (here). Otherwise there’s not a lot more to say.