Virgin Media has confirmed that its gigafast broadband service is now available to 10 million premises across the UK.
According to Virgin Media, its network upgrade has recently enabled gigafast speeds to 1.7 million additional homes while 8 million UK homes in these cities are now able to get M600 and Virgin Media Gig1 Fibre services.
The cable ISP plans to complete the fibre upgrade over the entire network by the end of this year. By comparison, Openreach based fibre networks which can offer gigafast broadband speeds can reach 5 million premises in the UK.
However, it should be noted that the on-going DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade will not offer symmetrical upload speeds which are usually provided by full fibre networks such as FTTH (fibre to the home).
Virgin Media offers the fastest download speeds of 630Mbps (M600 broadband) and 1130Mbps (Gig1), however, the top upload speeds remain just 41Mbps.
The upgrade has already gone live in selected cities such as South Wales, Southampton, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Wigan and York, London, N.Ireland, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds, Reading, Birmingham, Coventry, Bradford, Glasgow, Bournemouth, Bristol, Northampton and Sunderland.
Virgin Media’s cable network has a coverage of 16m UK homes while its FTTP network covers selected areas across the UK.
FTTH broadband which uses fibre for entire rollout is offered by a few providers such as Hyperoptic, Community Fibre and Gigaclear while the big providers BT and Virgin Media have been investing on FTTH upgrade which is expected to complete in the next 5 to 7 years.
Openreach is set to roll out FTTH broadband to cover 25 million UK homes by the end of 2026, while Virgin Media will also carry out its own FTTH upgrade to reach all its cable areas by the end of 2028.