Below is a list of the events and dates as they happened. It should give a reasonable estimate of how long it can take for a Virgin Media XGS-PON area to go from live service availability to a completed full fibre installation.

  • 30th August 2023 - Final Fibre Termination on the Street

  • 2nd September 2023 - Available for Ordering

  • 5th September 2023 - Service Ordered and Installation Date of the 19th of September given

  • 10th September 2023 - External Works done

  • 19th September 2023 - Indoor Installation and Activation Completed

Two engineers in hi-vis vests working at an open BT manhole behind red and white barriers on a brick-paved street

  • On the 30th of August 2023, the final visit to the street appeared to be completed, the termination box in the existing BT manhole went live, and the equipment had been installed several months earlier.

  • By the 2nd of September 2023, the service was showing as available to order on Virgin Media’s website and also appeared as live on https://bidb.uk

  • On the 5th of September 2023, I contacted Virgin Media and ordered the 1 Gig fibre broadband only service. I was given an installation date of the 19th of September 2023.

Driveway camera view of a white Virgin Media works van with an engineer kneeling at an open manhole cover in the gravel

A brown Virgin Media termination box newly fitted to the stone exterior wall of the house, next to a grey duct running down to the ground

Close-up of the brown Virgin Media external box, embossed with the Virgin Media logo, with the fibre cable entering from below

  • On Sunday the 10th of September 2023, the pre-pull team completed the external work. This involved bringing the fibre from the manhole through the existing BT ducting, which had been laid during the house build around 17 years earlier, and terminating it into a brown Virgin Media box that they also installed.

    There was no prior notice for this visit because all of the work was outside and did not require access to the property, but the engineers kindly knocked to let us know they were there. They also had to ask our neighbours to move their car because the manhole sits under their drive.

The white Virgin Media indoor fibre box mounted on an internal wall, with the fibre patch lead attached and its red “Connect This End First” tag still on

  • The engineer arrived well within the stated time. He used an existing hole that I had put there previously, but he did check that I was happy with this. He then ran the fibre from the brown box through the wall to the white box he installed.

Rear panel of the Virgin Media Hub 5x showing the yellow Ethernet ports, WPS and TEL sockets, and the fibre patch lead plugged in

The fibre patch lead was then run between the white box and the Virgin Media supplied router, the Hub 5x, which uses a direct fibre connection.

The Virgin Media Hub 5x sitting on a shelf inside a dark network rack cabinet

The router is aesthetically pleasing. As I was not planning to use the wireless functionality, I was happy to have it placed in a cupboard on a shelf in my rack.

SamKnows RealSpeed result: 1141 Mbps download at the router and 1082 Mbps at the desktop, 108 and 110 Mbps upload, latency 4.19 ms and 4.09 ms

Fast.com result showing an internet speed of 1.2 Gbps, 3 ms unloaded latency, 9 ms loaded latency and 110 Mbps upload

Speed test result showing 1127.66 Mbps download, 109.58 Mbps upload and 8 ms ping against a razorblue server in Leeds

I have a 10Gb connection from the desktop through to the router, so I can obtain the maximum speed that the service can deliver.

  • Overall I’m quite happy with the installation. The speed is excellent and reliable. The biggest downside for me is the lack of modem mode on the Hub 5x, so it is not a very clean setup if you want to use your own equipment. Virgin Media also appear to hijack DNS queries even with content filtering disabled.
  • My workaround for these issues is to use double NAT and place my router’s IP in the DMZ. For DNS, I’m using DoH, which encrypts DNS over HTTPS. Until I switched to that, some of my home lab services were breaking.

If you got this far thanks for reading.