Virgin Media Business Wholesale brings dark fibre, managed services capacity to south Wales

Virgin Media Business Wholesale, the fixed wholesale connectivity arm of Virgin Media O2 Business, has revealed a significant boost to its pre-existing fibre capacity in south Wales, more than doubling its capacity across the Prince of Wales Severn Bridge and connecting businesses in the country to the M4 corridor in England and London.

The upgrade will add vital capacity to support demand from wholesale partners on either side of the Severn estuary, ensuring shorter delivery times for customer projects. It is also designed to enable additional diverse and resilient fibre network routes for businesses depending on reliable and secure data transmission between south Wales and the rest of the UK.

South Wales offers businesses easy access to the UK market, and is viewed as the UK’s second major datacentre region by major hyperscalers and global digital organisations. This latest fibre boost supports the secure high-speed data transmission of customer servers running day-to-day applications, critical high-performance computing systems and the hosting of private and hybrid clouds.

An early beneficiary of Virgin Media Business Wholesale’s M4 Severn Bridge cable upgrade is Vantage Data Centers CWL1, said to be Europe’s largest datacentre campus, and its growing base of customers. The 270MW, 135,000m² campus near Cardiff provides facilities for hyperscale and colocation customers.

Vantage’s CWL1 campus has been a strategic point of presence on the Virgin Media network for more than a decade, and the Severn Bridge fibre network upgrade marks a new era in the longstanding connection between the two companies.

Doubling capacity to a total of 96 fibres allows CWL1 customers to benefit from both managed network services and dark fibre routing, and access to the 190,000km Virgin Media Business fibre network, said to be the largest of its kind in the UK.

“Virgin Media O2 Business’s initiative will contribute significantly to our ongoing commitment to providing totally future-proofed, highly scalable datacentre solutions to customers,” said Justin Jenkins, chief operating officer, EMEA and president of UK Vantage Data Centers. “In doing so, we can now provide a range of new solutions to multinational systems integrators, as well as the many small and medium enterprises, fintech, pharmaceutical, government, retail and engineering organisations that underpin Wales’s thriving digital economy.”

Virgin sees the project as of strategic value to large hyperscaler and datacentre providers, such as Vantage, that are looking to take advantage of resilient, secure and diverse networks in the UK. Partners and businesses in both south Wales and southwest England looking to increase their dependence on cloud-based resources will also benefit from the boosted capacity.

“Last year, Virgin Media O2 made a commitment to invest at least £10bn as part of our mission to upgrade the UK,” said Diego Tedesco, wholesale fixed director at Virgin Media O2 Business. “And building out our fibre from Vantage’s CWL1 campus is one of the significant early investments we have made to honour that commitment.

“As we look to become the partner of choice for both managed fibre services and dark fibre, projects like this show our capability to build high-bandwidth, low-latency network infrastructure at the scale needed to support the pace of digital transformation across the UK.”