Virgin Media Rollout of 100Mbps Uploads for UK 1Gig Users Goes National UPDATE
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) appears to have unofficially begun the full national rollout of 100Mbps+ (110Mbps max profile rate) upload speeds on their top “Gig1 Fibre Broadband” package (avg. 1130Mbps download), which was previously limited to an upstream rate of 52Mbps.
Regular readers will recall that we first spotted a smaller batch of 1Gbps customers being upgraded during March 2023 (here), although the operator has yet to formally confirm the latest speed boost. But over the past week we’ve received multiple reports from people right across the UK, all confirming that they’ve suddenly received the much-anticipated upload speed to 100Mbps.
National upgrades like this tend to be deployed in phases, which means that if you haven’t yet received it, then it probably won’t be long before you do. All of this is part of Virgin Media’s aim to put their broadband packages on a 10:1 ratio of download to upload performance. After this, the next major change we’re expecting is the launch of the operator’s 2Gbps (download) tier, as well as their first XGS-PON based products (here).
UPDATE 4:14pm
Customers of Virgin Media’s 500Mbps tier are also starting to see their average upload rate being boosted from 36Mbps to 55Mbps.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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You have to reboot VM’s hub to pick up the new speed profile as no enforced reboot.
It’s live around Folkestone, Dover, River, Kearsney and Temple Ewell areas for 1gbps service on hybrid coax network. 500mbps goes to 52mbps, but FTTP RFoG areas won’t get an uplift according to those users on VM’s own forums.
On RFoG here and just got the upgrade. As per my original post my latency has gone through the roof.
In Sheffield here.
Good news, between the upgrades & expansion to 5m more homes by 2026, seems like VM has woken up to the pressure.
I hope we see some news on the O2 side, their 5G rollout is well behind the rest, and will be behind in performance too when the others switch off 3G to boost 5G capacity.
Thanks for heads up .
Plymouth Area, manually rebooted and now 100mbit ~ upload on 1gig
Out of interest, is the speed upgrade functional at 8pm / peak hours?
Abingdon area – manually rebooted just now and seeing 105Mbps upload. Thanks for the tip!
Surely now OR ISPs could be using the 200mb upload? or OR should be pricing it better
The OR 1000/220 service is terribly priced. It’s cheaper to go with 2 1000/110 lines. It’s only exists due to one of the government agencies (I think DCMS?) requiring it.
Yes, it exists to satisfy the government’s technical definition of gigabit capable: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/08/the-uk-govs-technical-definition-of-gigabit-capable-broadband.html . I’m not aware of a similar product on Virgin Media, but perhaps that’s because they’re not (yet) open to wholesale?
OR’s 220Mbps upload is a business, not consumer, product.
That may be so @Mark but OR advertise up to 220Mbp/s on residental emails
Almost all operators game their advertising a bit, sadly.
110000274 bps In Farnborough now too
Only 900 more to go and a large price cut to compete with cityfibre
or own CityFibre soon anyway (as reported in press), then reduce your packages to match cable tiers ;
Docsis 3.1 is still only 1-2gbps up (and 2 is pretty unlikely) so don’t expect symmetrical unless you are on XGS PON. Id expect to see upload get bumped again as VM do more testing on 3.1 upload.
For symmetrical over docsis you need to go yo docsis 4.0, virgin are instead switching to xgs pon long term.
XGS-PON is already happening in some areas and VM doing the work in some others. A 2gbps download over DocSIS 3.1 is in the works for late this year or next, but that’s likely to be either 110/220 on the upload. May be 110 same as 1gig for a while – it was work to get to that.
But yes no DocSIS 4.0 anywhere in the UK and allegedly complete to XGS-PON on VM by 2028. Likely to be symmetric (even if not initially), but wouldn’t expect over 2gbps as higher speeds are much long term some VM spokes person had said.
No need to compete with Cityfibre, they’ll own them soon.
can’t imagine cityfibre factors much into the decisions of ISPs with millions of customers and little issue retaining them even where CF’s comparatively tiny network overlaps.
100Mbps is probably about as good as it gets without significant network surgery (in which case they may as well do fibre anyway), and also happens to match their actual competition – Openreach and the ISPs who use it.
I have the new speed on the upload of a 100 Meg to a 110 I unplug the router and power it off I unplugged the hub for 5 minutes and then and turn it back on back on and I have the new speed it is in Shrewsbury Shrewsbury
Manual reboot completed in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear area upload has increased to 100 meg thanks for advice.
Works in Newcastle and Gateshead/Washington, though oddly only when the Hub4 is in router mode, setting modem
Mode causes it to revert to 52mbit. I guess it may be resolved when it’s officially announced next week?
Also in Jarrow, modem mode pulling the 100meg profile for me
Would love to thank VM for the free increase in upload speed. Now my latency is actually higher than my upload @ 160ms. Nice one! Now I cant game at all.
Telford not upgraded to 1Gig yet?
Think itch trigger was pulled too early on article, baffling there is people on 500mbit getting speeds higher than gigabit customers.
Nope. It’s true. In those areas where 1gbps upload was increased so was the 500mbps tier….
Mark I am disappointed you have called this is a national update, its not everywhere, there is at least two of us who posted we dont have it yet, can you please change the title as it does allow a company to get false PR for something they havent done.
All pressure will be off them now to finish this off if the general public think its done.
They’ve done a large part of their network now in a few batches. They won’t forget the rest as they will want to change the web site for new customers to show the upload speeds…..they can’t do that until nearly everyone is done.
Clearly they have begun their national rollout following their recent trial. The article is not incorrect in that respect, and even the original article before your daft reply pointed out it may not be available to everyone yet as it could be done in batches. Be patient.
From the comments it looks like people from south to north and east to west have 110mbps uploads.
I’d say it’s a national upgrade, I’d say it’s a very fast national upgrade.
Not everyone will get it but most do.
Well we all have different interpretations then, 6% isnt nothing, its a most of the customers upgrade, but if someone tells me they have done something country wide or national, then I interpret that as everyone/everywhere. No one in my entire county has reported having it e.g. all 14 reports I found said its not activated. If an entire county doesnt have it thats not national.
The article will leave those without it checking every day thinking its coming soon, when physical works might be needed and could be several months.
So great for those who have it but I am not pretending its everyone like others are.
Except the article is correct, and you’re being ridiculous.
National rollouts take time. They’ve done chunks of their network across the entire nation – so it’s nationwide.
If they’d only updated central London for example, then obviously that isn’t nationwide. VM work on an area by area basis, and because of how their network is built there will always be areas done “later” when other issues are removed.
Rebooted, I’m still at 52 up in the Loughborough area
My nephew is with VM (there is no 1gig and there is no speed upgraded yet for his M500 in Telford)
As I recall from being active in VM’s own forum, VM don’t allow customers to buy higher speeds (600/600/1G) if an area becomes constrained by capacity, and some areas of Telford have been in and out of over-subscription for years (eg Madeley), leading to appalling latency problems at peak times. So if he can’t buy even 500, chances are it’s a capacity issue, and on those VM’s track record of resolving is (to put it politely) very poor, often preferring to promise fixes that never happen, whilst waiting in the hope customers either get used to it, of for churn to reduce the numbers in the congested zones.
There’s some areas where for whatever reason, VM capacity problems keep recurring, for example Telford, Bromley, areas of Manchester, St Albans have all featured regularly, and notably more localised problems are always possible – it seemed from the VM forums that sales constraints only occurred after a problem became apparent, rather than knowing what capacity they could reliably sell and limiting to that. I’d assume that the historic (and sometimes poorly planned) build out by predecessor companies might be a partial contributor, along with lack of alternative high speed options.
There are rumours that ~ 6% of the VM network currently needs capacity upgrades to support this rollout. Bit of an iffy rumour tbh, but frankly it is not an unrealistic one (and one I can understand)
@Andrew G
Virgin Media always problem in Madeley area for years and years since telewest cable. Nothing ever been fixed and never will be.
This is why I always AVOID VM.
VM last updated 9th May for speed https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/our-speeds-explained
Customers on DOCSIS will receive the boost from 1st June. Those on XGS PON will receive it on the 29th June. Not sure where you got today from…
Everyone affected will receive communication about the boost so just hold on for now.
He got “today” from the fact that people have been getting their boosts since Friday
shame its only 100 on xgspon.
@Martyn: VM markets the same services at the same prices regardless of what kind of network is used. However I won’t rule out early XGS-PON customers being offered something different from 2024.
VM have confirmed (from leaks) that XGSPON release will originally be the current tiers offered of 1Gbs/100
Shoutout to the guy on Reddit having a mental breakdown because of this article
It’s fabulous haha
You fibre….1gb symmetrical @ 29 pcm…. bargain.
YouFibreuser:
Not everyone can get that as its in a minority of locations compared to VM or OR.
Will probably go bust or get taken over anyway.
still waiting. 10 months since they put the cable in but still not active. I’m actually even thinking of going crawling back to Virgin media now since Youfibre can’t be bothered to sort it out.
Yawn. I can use a multi-gig connection at work and it’s not even free – they pay me to use it.
Amazing.
Yes, and Netomnia known for patchy coverage in areas they claim to be serving, even if they send letters out saying your house will get it, they can backtrack and not do it on the slightest thing, particularly when their contractors have run over time during a “roll out”!
So yes their core service is good, their offering is excellent, but their planning of roads covered in an area is rubbish. One road gets it, one road a few meters away doesn’t.
Congrats on being one of ten users on youfibre.
Did you know Youfibre only has just over 10,000 customers with a takeup rate of less than 8%? At least VM and OR has a takeup of 30% of premises covered. That means Youfibre has to sell 4 or 5 lines to make the same profit as one VM/OR line. And the fact that they are cheap with little overheads means they are a prime target for going out of business.
They will say their overheads are lower because basically they go by BT ducts and poles. This is why their coverage is very patchy in an area they claim to be going to serve.
Fanfare is made of the numbers and amount of money when they release a press statement. In reality, the numbers are a fraction in the end as they simply just drop roads, EVEN if they have to dig a micro trench of a *few* metres or put one or two new poles hidden out of sight where possible to carry the fibre into another road. They simply drop it, even if they have sent letters to houses in that road prior and their online checkers say that house is going to get it for months. They don’t care if all that road has is slow FTTC with crosstalk because of distance or over utilised VM network with SNR noise issues.
I accept there may be issues with councils over network planning, but you don’t send letters to customers inviting them to your new service or leave online checkers with incorrect information for months as this should have been sorted out first. Had high hopes for this company too, but don;t think I will be proven wrong…
If take-up is as low as 8% I guess they need to be careful about controlling costs.
It’s very possible that what looks like a small amount of work to us, is rather more expensive than we imagine. The lie take-up could mean they never get payback
I’m hoping they come to my property, but given I’m fed from a pole in someone else’s garden I’m not certain I won’t get dropped from rollout
I am the CEO of Netomnia and YouFibre.
Myth Buster 1: “YouFibre only has just over 10,000 customers” YouFibre has just over 35,000 customers.
Myth Buster 2: “Yes, and Netomnia known for patchy coverage in areas they claim to be serving” Netomnia is using the Openreach Duct and Pole access product therefore our coverage will be as patchy as Openreach.
I do enjoy this website and the passion. We are coming, we will be connecting as many as possible 🙂 Please bear with us, it is hard to build a brand new Fibre Network and provide a brand new Internet Service.
Hi Jeremy,
Then perhaps you could follow the existing BT Pole route for telephone/FTTC seeing as your pavement chamber is nearby their green cabinet, as that would lead direct to the road you suddenly don’t want to do, or use 1 or 2 of your own poles to carry the fibre from one road into that road onto existing BT poles. Not expecting huge dig up of roads and 100’s of metres of ducting. All the roads around me get YouFibre, but mine left out after being told by letter “We’re coming, your house is getting it”. Even if BT came along (they would have no trouble as existing cable route in place), they are NOT symmetric and in my road a fair few commuters work from home a lot more now as we know each other from the train station.
On a positive note, your customer facing people are polite and actually take time to reply to any queries rather than a scripted response, much more interactive and trying to be helpful than a lot of companies….
Thank you for the feedback on our customer service. If you want to send me an email with your address/postcode and I will check myself. (jeremy@…)
Jemery, why the pull out of Scarborough?
Just rebooted in Blackpool and received the upload boost.
Rebooted my 1 gig here in Birmingham and now have the 100mbps up.
In modem mode and showing 110 upload on hub 5 settings but still getting 50 upload on all speed tests when wired and wifi. Weird
May or may not be applicable to you, but if you are in modem mode and your own router has QOS controls, check you haven’t manually entered your old upstream rate. If so, change it to the new one.
St Albans here – Just rebooted and got the upload increase.
Latency and everything else seems great – nice free upload speed increase!
Nice its delivered at last but “FREE” is unlikely as the 1gbps should have had this speed when launched, and several inflation busting price rises since then each year….
Confirmed upload @ 105mbps in Barnsley
After a reboot still 55mb in Derby, still no 5th Upstream or Downstream 32 or 3.1 channels showing- although is that still a Hub5 firmware bug?
Yes, firmware defect that still persists.
Didn’t really expect it to be 110 after reboot, the hub hasn’t restarted in an age for maintenance, used to be every tues/weds. Last messages in the log are 12/4, obvs vm think Derby is in tip top condition and doesn’t need any work
110 upload using modem mode in SK9 Wilmslow. Connected Orbi mesh internal speeds test confirms 110.
Nothing in South derbyshire or Burton-upon-Trent. Still on 50mbs upload
is that post reboot?
Swadlincote has seen the uplift^ but we’re on the old Sky network so we’re usually forgotten about, so surprising we’ve been done first.
Yes rebooted plenty of times and still on 52mbs upload in swadlincote..
My build is not part of the old sky network that was in woodville and midway.
I don’t think anyone is Swadlincote has the 110mbs and our connections router via loughborough which has capacity issues..
XGSPON here, and no upgrade yet. really hope I don’t have to wait until the end of the next month -.-
https://i.imgur.com/07OP5Fn.png
Have been using a Hitron Chita on 1Gig with VMB since December, it had 100Mbit upload.
There is a critical flaw with the software, whereby there is packet loss every 6 minutes.
Sadly they haven’t been able to diagnose or fix the issue and have suggested to put us on a lower tier, assuming it’ll be 600Mbit down / 50Mbit up and DOCSIS 3.
Very disappointing and interested to see if there are any other users experiencing the same but unaware of it, after this update to the upload speeds.
Still No upgrade in swadlincote yet..
Derby now has the 110Mb upload – been restarting the hub weekly and today it changed