A further 159,000 premises were added to Virgin Media’s footprint in Q4 as the Project Lightening build reached 1.1 million.
Over 536,000 Project Lightning marketable premises were added during 2017 as a whole, taking total build since launch to over 1.1 million.
The Liberty Global-owned operator added 336,000 RGUs in 2017, an year-on-year increase of 34 per cent, of which 74 per cent can be directly attributed to Project Lightening.
“Virgin Media, our largest operation, steadily improved throughout 2017 and posted 5% rebased OCF growth in Q4, its best performance of the year,” said Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries. “We successfully executed the price increase last November and continued rolling out cutting-edge products like our WiFi Connect and V6 set-top boxes, which we will continue to aggressively deploy in 2018. Early last year, we overhauled Project Lightning and subsequently reported progressively improved new build totals, including the delivery of nearly 160,000 premises in Q4 2017, a quarterly record.”
It’s planned to increase its top consumer broadband speed to 350 Mbps from the spring. 70% of broadband base now on speeds of 100+ Mbps, up from 52% a year ago.
Churn improved by 30 basis points over the quarter to 15.2 per cent.
Q4 monthly cable ARPU at £50.29 was relatively flat on a rebased basis.
