Virgin Media will roll out FTTP to 1 million homes in the UK

Virgin Media has announced that it will be rolling out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) for about 1 million homes and businesses in the UK over the next few years. Yes, the UK is finally getting real fibre broadband, not that fake VDSL or coaxial stuff.

This would appear to be the largest FTTP rollout commitment so far in the UK: other big boys like BT and Sky are only trialling FTTP, or deploying FTTP in very small regions of the UK. The UK has a handful of small FTTP companies, like Hyperoptic and Gigaclear, but again their deployments are laser-focused on small pockets of the UK, mostly because it's very costly and difficult to roll out last-mile fibre.

Virgin Media is going through a period of expansion that it calls "Project Lightning," which will see four million homes and businesses added to the company's network before 2020. Virgin's current last-mile network is almost entirely based on hybrid-fibre-coaxial (HFC) DOCSIS tech, and originally the plan was to use that same HFC tech for most of those four million new homes.

It isn't clear why Virgin is now committing to rolling out full FTTP for a million homes and offices, rather than sticking with coax. There hasn't been a sudden burst of additional investment: Virgin still intends to spend £3 billion on Project Lightning. Presumably competition with other providers plays a part: Openreach plans to roll out G.fast in the next few years. Or it could just be down to future-proofing: coaxial cables can certainly carry more data than plain old telephone wires, but there's still an upper ceiling that will be hit sooner rather than later. FTTP, on the other hand, can allow for symmetrical connection speeds of 10Gbps today, with no real upper limit in sight.

Or maybe Virgin is just taking pity on the UK. According to Ofcom's latest report, the UK is placed 30th out of the 34 OECD nations when it comes to FTTP coverage. By the end of 2015, about 2 percent of UK premises had access to FTTP; by comparison, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden all have FTTP coverage of around 60 percent.

Virgin says that its FTTP rollout has already begun in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, and work will soon begin in West Yorkshire, Devon, and East Sussex. The company is laying fibre with a new "narrow trenching" technique that reduces the width of a trench from 40cm to 10cm, which should speed up deployment and reduce costs/disruption.