When will Virgin be in my area?

[LunaLovegood83]

hi all. I have spotted a house I'd like to rent (it's beautiful!) but it's in quite a rural area. The fastest speeds quoted for that address are under 70Mbps. We are a family of 4 and quite like gaming/streaming, so this wouldn't be fast enough. Is there any way to tell when Virgin might be expanding to a particular area?

[nodrogd · Accepted solution]

The first thing to be aware of is that at present Virgin is a Cable operator. Their network comprises radio based DOCSIS Cable Broadband & Broadcast TV services using their own local networks. These currently cover around 50% of the UK, almost exclusively in urban areas. A lot of these networks are years old & were VERY expensive to build. In fact many of the companies that built them soon ended up in financial difficulty & either went bust, or were taken over. Virgin is basically the only survivor. You can see Virgin's current zoom-able coverage map here.

https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/broadband-map#6/51.809/-0.901/virgin/ 

The further you are away from the red filled areas the less chance you have of a service in future, as although Virgin will drop Cable status in the not too distant future, there are many Fibre providers that will never service rural areas due to the expense of doing so for small return.

[NigelGoodwin]

An interesting webpage, but obviously it doesn't give any indication as to when services (VM or otherwise) might become available, is there any way to get some kind of estimate as to when services already under construction might actually go live?. We've already had fibres put on our telegraph poles, and their are VM roadworks all over the local area, but not a word about if and when a service might arrive. I only know it's VM because I happened to catch the two guys fitting the fibre to the pole that will feed my house, so I asked them 😄

[Roger_Gooner]

There is an Openreach web page which might tell you when fibre is due in your area.

[Akua_A]

Hi @LunaLovegood83 

Welcome to our community forums and thank you for your first post.

You can check here to see if our services are available https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/postcode-checker You can also register your area there to flag it to our team for future work.

Thanks,