Virgin Media “record start” to new year
May 10, 2016
Virgin Media is on track to connect half a million UK homes access to its broadband network this year as part of the company’s Project Lightning rollout.
The announcement comes as Virgin said it has experienced “record customer growth” in the UK in the first quarter of 2016, adding 55,000 customers.
Virgin’s £3 billion Project Lightning is connecting 4 million premises to ultrafast broadband. Last month, Virgin said a quarter of those would be connected using FTTP technology.
Announcing its Q1 results, the Liberty Global-owned company said: “From a new build perspective, Project Lightning is a key source of customer growth for us in the UK. We have already released approximately 330,000 premises since the programme launched in 2015. We are on track to add over 500,000 premises in 2016, which would take our total Lightning homes released to over 750,000 by the end of the year.”
Virgin said its growth had come from its existing cable footprint and the new homes added as part of Project Lightning, as well as by its marketing campaigns.
Virgin added 67,000 new Internet customers and said its ultrafast speeds of 100Mbps and higher are now taken by nearly half of the company’s 5.1 million broadband subscribers.
Virgin also revealed it will be enhancing its TV platform in the UK in the near future, by:
- Adding new on-demand programming
- Working on further improvements to user-interface in the second half of 2016
- Preparing to launch a new set-top box platform (presumably with 4K support)