Virgin Media has unveiled 10 communities to receive ultrafast broadband with speeds of up to 300 Mbps.
The 10 communities, chosen by local residents and businesses, are being upgraded as part of Virgin’s £3 billion (€3.87 billion) Project Lighting network expansion programme. Local residents were encouraged to vote to receive the upgrade as part of the ‘Supercharging Local Communities’ initiative.
The top 10 communities are: Kirknewton (West Lothian); Houston, Crosslee, Craigends and Brookfield (Renfrewshire); Bridge of Weir (Renfrewshire); Ratby (Leicestershire); Wilsden (West Yorkshire); Kilmacolm (Inverclyde); Stoke Poges (Buckinghamshire); Lightwater (Surrey); Hartley Wintney and Phoenix Green (Hampshire) and Oakley (Dorset).
Some 7,000 votes were cast in March and April this year.
Paul Buttery, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media, said: “This is truly people-powered connectivity. The collective support and demand from across the UK has exceeded our expectations and we’re delighted to be supercharging these 10 areas with ultrafast fibre broadband and top notch entertainment. Investing and delivering better connectivity in these communities shows that ultrafast broadband isn’t just for the big cities – we urge more communities to come together and register their interest.”
For residents, Virgin Media’s Vivid 200 broadband offers the fastest widely available broadband – with download speeds of up to 200Mbps.
For businesses, Virgin Media Business now offers ultrafast connectivity, with speeds of up to 300Mbps – almost four times faster than its main competitors’ widely available top speeds.
This FTTP expansion uses an innovative way of bringing ultrafast broadband to people’s homes with minimal disruption. The approach, called narrow-trenching, reduces the width of the trench used to lay optical fibre cables from around 40cm to just 10cm and enables engineers to cover up to 100m in a day, making it more than twice as fast as current methods. A similar technique has been used recently in Leicester where Virgin Media is connecting six villages.
As network expansion continues across the country, voting for the Supercharging Local Communities initiative has now reopened across 18 UK counties with more communities to be announced later this year. The site can be found at: www.virginmedia.com/cablemystreet
The 18 counties are: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire, Dorset, Glamorgan, Hampshire, Leicestershire, North Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Renfrewshire, Rhondda, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Surrey, Warwickshire, West Lothian, West Yorkshire, Worcestershire.
