The Q1 results for Virgin Media O2 have been published and while they are expanding their footprint via the nexfibre partnership and embarking on a fixed line broadband option for giffgaff customers the cable network operators has had a net reduction in fixed line customers of 46,000 in Q1.
The nexfibre rollout also appears to be slowing as evidenced by the results and this marries up with our experience of it becoming harder to find new areas compared to back in 2024 when for the same investment in time we could find 10,000 premises for nexfibre versus around 3,000 now.
The Virgin Media O2 retail Gigabit footprint is 18.4 million premises plus a very small number where DOCSIS 3.1 is still not available. This means in a head to head battle with Openreach they are still marginally ahead, but if talking retail footprints they are still behind retailers like Vodafone, TalkTalk and Zen Internet who have footprints over 19 million.
The nexfibre rollout is added 165,000 premises to the footprint in the quarter, the previous quarter saw a lot more built at 465,000. This puts the nexfibre footprint at somewhere between 2 million and 2.3 million premises.
The results declare Virgin Media O2 has a full fibre footprint of 6.8 million premises, which is the combined might of the nexfibre, RFOG footprint and Project Mustang. The nexfibre and RFOG by our reckoning account for 4 million premises and the rest is Project Mustang i.e. rolling out XGS-PON to areas with the old coax/fibre hybrid network. We have started tracking the Project Mustang footprint but it is not a high priority since only households who have never had a coax cable run to their project can actually order it and services are identical to standard DOCSIS 3.1 products. In short Project Mustang does not meet our RFS criteria for inclusion in broadband statistics.
What is interesting is that while the mapped nexfibre footprint on our maps is lower than what Virgin Media O2 claim i.e. we've mapped 1.75 million premises in the last 3 months we have added 160,000 premises. Our total Virgin Media O2 footprint is 18.3 million premises versus an Openreach FTTP footprint of 18.1 million.
Source: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10650-virgin-media-gigabit-footprint-hits-18-4-million-premises
