Month 2, Year 2024.
Following a January packed with moments including National Apprenticeship Week, continuing our full-fibre rollout and our first full-year Movers Index – February picked up the pace with the revolution of both our fixed and mobile networks, amongst other announcements.
Check out what you might have missed from Virgin Media O2 in February, below.
Our Q4 and full-year results for 2023: We released our Q4 and full-year results for 2023 and announced that 2023 was our fastest year of fibre rollout to date – as our fibre footprint reached over 4 million premises.
Creating a national fixed NetCo in the UK: Together with our shareholders, we announced that we have initiated plans to create a national fixed network company (NetCo) in the UK – underpinning our fibre rollout and creating a clear, scaled platform to pursue wholesale and consolidation opportunities.
Our 5G standalone switch-on: Our new 5G standalone network offers higher bandwitch and lower latency connections, enabling our customers to experience wider and more reliable #5G coverage – in line with the Government’s strategy to have 5G standalone coverage in all populated areas by 2030.
Hiya partnership: We’re rolling out new AI-powered spam fighting tools to all our mobile customers in partnership with fraud protection call leader Hiya. This will include tools which use AI to analyse call number behaviour to either block a fraudulent call from reaching customers’ phones or alert a call to the customer as suspected spam.
Gig2 Full Fibre: We’ve launched our first residential 2Gbps broadband service which provides speeds a huge 28X faster than the UK average. As well as hyperfast speeds, we’re also the first major broadband provider to offer symmetrical upload and download speeds across our full-fibre network, as part of our venture with nexfibre.
Renewed joint venture with Tesco Mobile: We put pen to paper on a 10-year renewal of our joint venture with Tesco Mobile – building on a successful 20-year relationship with Tesco to date.
The Isle of Skye became our 100th Shared Rural Network site, significantly improving connectivity across the island. This major milestone means residents, businesses and visitors to rural communities have faster and more reliable coverage than ever before. As part of the Shared Rural Network agreement, customers on other networks will also benefit from our rollout.
We've proudly gone further than any other mobile operator to deliver new infrastructure for the Shared Rural Network programme.
Watch some clips below on the build in the Isle of Skye:
We marked National Love Your Pet Day this month with Team Virgin Media O2’s pets taking centre stage. Even if you saw this post the first-time round, you know you want to watch it again! Click here for #PawsomePets showreel.
Senior Infrastructure engineer
7moDoes it the complete and utter lack of customer service? The all-encompassing incompetence? Or how Virgin Media is literally the worst company in the UK? Virgin media sent me a limited time, email offer to renew my package for another 18 months for the same monthly cost. Now VM are now trying to defraud me by charging me double the agreed amount. I've tried contacting their utterly incompetent customer support service with the usual result. Nothing. Anyways it was a good offer and it expired soon, so I called up VM to take advantage of this "offer". Someone in renewals eventually (after 5 hours on WhatsApp) said they would match the offer and signed me up. When I questioned the fact that my new contract was at a higher rate than agreed, they said that the discount would show up on my account later... No prizes for guessing the outcome. I'm now getting charged twice as much for the same package, which I refuse to pay, so now my bills is overdue and incurring late fees. It's not like I haven't contacted VM customer service to try and get the issue resolved. The last CS agent could see what had transpired and promised to "escalate" the processing of my discount... No prizes for guessing the outcome.