Virgin Media promises £3 billion to bring fibre to another four million homes

A lot of us can enjoy the increased speeds available with fibre-optic broadband, but there are quite a lot of people who are not so lucky. In the near future those people will be able to turn to Virgin Media for help, because it’s promised £3 billion to extend its fibre coverage.

Over the next five years, Virgin Media will extend its existing fibre network from 13 million to 17 million homes across the UK. The company claims that this is the biggest investment in broadband infrastructure in over a decade, and will improve the UK economy by a value of £8 billion.

Sadly for those of you living in rural areas, Virgin Media has said that extending its reach is not the purpose of the new expansion. Rather, it’s about plugging the holes in the existing network in cities and towns across the UK. At the moment that’s being done by extending its fibre networks to 110,000 homes in Glasgow, Sunderland, Teeside, and East London.

Virgin Media claims that the upcoming investment will generate over 6,000 jobs, including 1,000 apprenticeships. It’s also going to give people an awful lot more choice when it comes to choosing their internet provider, and as someone who switched from a obscenely poor connection recently I can confirm that this is very good news.