Virgin Media investing £3 billion in massive broadband expansion


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Virgin Media



Virgin Media has announced that it's undertaking the biggest UK broadband expansion project in ten years.


Project Lightning, as it's being called, will see £3 billion pumped into the country's broadband infrastructure.


The outcome will be a vast expansion of Virgin's broadband service, with the company's fibre optic network brought within reach of an estimated four million additional homes and businesses over a five year period.


According to Virgin, that represents an increase of around a third for the company, which currently covers half of the UK with its broadband offering.


Those households will be able to access Virgin's 152Mbps service, which is roughly twice the speed of rival offerings from BT, TalkTalk and Sky.


With Ofcom claiming that the UK is the world's most internet-based major economy, Project Lightning will apparently add £8 billion of value to the UK economy, also creating 6,000 new jobs.



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Meanwhile, Virgin's parent company Liberty Global is preparing to trial DOCSIS 3.1 technology across Europe later this year. This could provide broadband speeds of up to 10Gbps when fully deployed.


With BT recently announcing that it will be bringing speeds of up to 1Gbps to the UK as soon as next year, Virgin clearly can't afford to rest on its laurels as the UK's fastest broadband service.