The Q4 2024 Virgin Media O2 results are out and from a Gigabit footprint of 18,255,600 UK premises they have 5,738,900 million fixed line customers and 12 months ago the footprint was 16,999,700 premises and 5,717,600 customers. The extra customers are of course welcome but looking at the take-up it has dropped from 33.6% to 31.4%.
The results don't break out the customer numbers into the coax, rfog or XGS-PON footprints so its hard to be exact, but we know we do see take-up in the nexfibre XGS-PON footprint so the suggestion is the older coax areas are losing customers to alt-nets and the Openreach full fibre roll-out but in nexfibe areas where they may be the only full fibre or are bringing customer choice they are getting a reasonable share.
A big headline figure from the results is a combined FTTP full fibre footprint of 6.4 million premises, and if we combine what we've mapped for the older Project Lighting RFOG footprint and new nexfibre footprint we get an answer of 3.3 million premises. We are around 0.3 million premises behind on the nexfibre footprint but probably half of that is down to us only counting ready for service rather than premises passed in our figures i.e. we endeavour to be constitent across all providers. The missing three million is likely to be from Project Mustang which is an upgrade of the old coax footprint to XGS-PON and as yet we've seen no actual evidence to allow us to confirm which streets have been upgraded and no sign of the public having coax removed from their home and fibre being installed. In this sense Project Mustang is premises passed but not Ready for Service. It is likely that the work of Project Mustang will become apparent when NetCo results in the opening of their network to wholesale access.
We said 2024 was a year of investing to support our long-term growth and these results reflect that. We close the first chapter of Virgin Media O2 having delivered our full year guidance and hitting our JV synergy targets 18 months ahead of schedule, meaning we are well set for the future.
We ended the year with another quarter of fixed customer and ARPU growth, positive mobile contract additions and improved customer satisfaction through a relentless focus on customer experience.
Our investments of more than £2 billion across the year helped us to significantly boost our 5G coverage, improve mobile network quality and enhance rural connectivity. We also expanded our fibre footprint faster than ever as we build on our existing gigabit leadership and push ahead with creating the biggest fibre challenger in the UK along with nexfibre.
In 2024 we laid the foundations for future success, and in 2025 we will get back to growth in core revenues and profitability while continuing investment in our networks and services. Throughout the year we’ll also deliver on key strategic moves, including the creation of a fixed NetCo and the expected acquisition of spectrum from Vodafone-Three which will further improve mobile performance. This is the start of a new chapter for Virgin Media O2.
Lutz Schüler - Chief Executive Officer
Virgin Media O2 has some of the largest out of contract price rises in the broadband industry e.g. M125 in a nexfibre area is showing as £25.99/m on an 18 month contract with a price rise to £29.49/m in April 2026 but the out of contract price is £54/m. The out of contract price was more prominent we believe but has now moved into the legal stuff small print. That the ARPU has only risen 2% in the last year to £47.74 is testament to the number of customers who do chase at the end of the contract term and sign up on a new deal.
The 18,255,600 UK Gigabit premises footprint excludes the Upp network where the home has not been integrated to the Virgin Media O2/nexfibre network and as things stand today we've seen our Upp footprint decrease from a peak of 111,000 premises to 61,000 premises, and while we are still finding old Upp premises where nexfibre is now available (1,000 in the last week) it is becoming ever more likely that we may end up clearing some 40,000-50,000 Upp FTTP premises from our database. At its peak the Upp footprint was said to be 170,000 premises, but we were not able to get above a figure of 111,000 before the VMO2 acquisition.