Nexfibre Invest £44m to Upgrade 318,000 Premises in Greater Manchester to Full Fibre
Network operator nexfibre, which shares some of its parentage with Virgin Media (harnessing the same build teams), O2 and giffgaff, has today announced a £44 million investment in Greater Manchester to help upgrade 318,000 premises to full fibre (FTTP) broadband. The announcement relates to the planned acquisition of “fellow ‘altnet’” Netomnia.
Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia recently reached a £2bn deal to acquire rival network Netomnia (here). But as part of that nexfibre announced a plan to finance the FTTP upgrade of 2.1 million homes covered by Virgin Media’s old Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network (i.e. those that are “adjacent” to the Netomnia footprint), with VMO2 paying wholesale fibre access fees on its customers in those homes as the fibre becomes available (with the “majority expected to be ready by the end of 2027“).
Since then, we’ve seen nexfibre announce a growing number of related HFC to FTTP upgrades (here) and today’s one for the Greater Manchester area is clearly the largest so far. The approach could perhaps be seen as somewhat of a complement to Virgin’s earlier HFC > FTTP upgrade programme, except nexfibre’s network is due to become much more accessible to other ISPs.
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More than 39 youth centres in Greater Manchester are also expected to benefit from the partnership, often getting free access to 2Gbps broadband.
Rajiv Datta, Chief Executive Officer of nexfibre, said:
“We are committed to delivering high quality connectivity to everyone across the country. Full-fibre broadband is a crucial driver of economic growth, and our investment in Greater Manchester will help deliver better access to education, jobs, and opportunities that can transform lives and uplift entire communities.”
The combined nexfibre and Netomnia full-fibre network footprint is now expected to reach around 8 million premises by the end of 2027 (nexfibre alone currently covers 2.6m premises). The goal of nexfibre is to make this network “available to all internet service providers“, which should hopefully result in them putting a lot more effort into enticing non-group ISPs to sign up to their platform at wholesale (progress on this front has previously been rather glacial).
In an ideal world nexfibre will perhaps be hoping to sign some large ISPs like Vodafone, Sky Broadband and Zen Internet to sell packages over their network. Such deals may also help to allay any potential concerns that the competition watchdog (CMA) may or may not raise about their pending Netomnia consolidation.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I’m an existing BRSK customer in Manchester and the network already covers a lot of the south area inside the m60.
VM have been rolling out their FTTP upgrades around here for months and completed many areas already.
How much of this announcement is actually new? Or is it just re-announcing work largely already complete?
Let’s reread the key part in article. “Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia recently reached a £2bn deal to acquire rival network Netomnia (here). But as part of that nexfibre announced a plan to finance the FTTP upgrade of 2.1 million homes covered by Virgin Media’s old Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network (i.e. those that are “adjacent” to the Netomnia footprint), with VMO2 paying wholesale fibre access fees on its customers in those homes as the fibre becomes available (with the “majority expected to be ready by the end of 2027“).”
VM is doing the fibre overbuild of its entire HFC for XGS-PON (project Mustang), and where VM’s HFC is near Netmonia, nexfibre will take over and do the overbuild. This hugely reduces VM’s build costs (but VM will have to pay wholesale charges to nexfibre) and simultaneously increases nexfibre’s network which makes it attractive to other ISPs in addition to its anchor tenant VM and giffgaff.
And what will nexfibre’s network look like? It covers 2.6m premises, has already acquired 3.4m from Netmonia and will overbuild 2.1m of VM’s HFC making a total of 8.1m – but there’s more to it. As VM and Netomnia’s networks overlap by 2.5m and as Netomnia had 3.4m, then 0.9m didn’t overlap. So, when nexfibre overbuilds the 2.1m HFC near Netomnia, we can reasonably believe than many of the 0.9m will be covered by nexfibre’s 2.1m and can thus be served with less of the difficulty you may think.