Virgin Media is connecting 38,000 homes to its broadband in Edinburgh and West Lothian, more than ten percent of the 360,000 total it plans to cover in Scotland as part of the ongoing ‘Project Lightning’ expansion programme.
Work in the Scottish capital has already started and will be finished by the end of next year.
Virgin Media expects to have completed its work across the whole of Scotland by 2019, with two thirds of all properties earmarked for coverage set to have access to fibre to the premise (FTTP).
“The quality of digital connectivity affects our lives in a way that we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago,” declared Fergus Ewing, cabinet sectary for the rural economy and connectivity for the Scottish Government “Having reliable broadband and mobile services is now, rightly, seen as part of essential, everyday infrastructure: that’s why we’re committed to making superfast broadband available to every home and business by 2021.
“The market has a key role and responsibility to play, by investing fully in commercial areas and supporting our efforts to connect the hardest to reach parts of Scotland. That’s why I’m delighted by today’s announcement from Virgin Media, one of the key commercial providers in Scotland, bringing ultrafast connectivity to homes and businesses in Edinburgh.”
More than two million homes and businesses have been connected to superfast broadband in Scotland, with government-assisted projects like Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) helping to boost this figure in areas not considered commercially viable.
However the majority of these are connected using fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), which uses copper for the final few hundred metres of the connection. BT Openreach does have plans to rollout FTTP to some parts of the country and speed up copper cables using G.Fast technology across the ‘majority’ of the UK within a decade.
CityFibre, an alternative broadband firm, is building an FTTP network in Edinburgh which will be available on a wholesale basis for consumer and business providers.
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