In a first, Virgin Media O2 plans to operate its gigabit hybrid fiber coax network side by side with the coming fiber to home network. That has never been done before at scale, if ever, by a cable TV company.
“We don't intend to shut down the HFC network,” Fries says. “ In fact, it wouldn't be surprising to me if the HFC network were operating for quite some time in a sort of a dual mode because we don't want to force migration to fiber.”
That sort of flies in the face of the argument that running a single network costs less than running two at the same time. That suggests operating cost savings will not be a significant part of the upgrade of the whole network to FTTH.
“In our case, we'll migrate people to fiber who want 1, 2, 3, 10-gig,” says Fries. “But if you're happy with your 500-meg or your 250-meg, we may or may not incur the cost of migrating a customer from HFC to FTTH.
“We continue to see cost per premise decline to below GBP 600 (USD 816) per premise as we use more of BT's passive infrastructure, and that only improves the significant return on capital we're already seeing from this investment,” says Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries. “We are accelerating our Lightning build program in 2022 from around 330,000 homes last year to over 500,000 homes this year.”
“Second, we completed the 50,000 home fiber-to-the-premise trial that supports our previously announced intentions to upgrade our entire 15 million homes to fiber by 2028,” says Fries. That build confirms Virgin Media O2 assumptions about build cost.
“VMO2 will commit to be an exclusive anchor tenet of the network” while also opening up the network on a wholesale basis to other internet service providers, he says.
In practice, since the whole VMO2 HFC network runs at gigabit downstream speeds, the only customers that would choose to migrate are those that want higher upstream speeds or “faster than gig” downstream speeds.
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