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In recent weeks ISPreview has started to see more indications that customers of UK ISP Virgin Media (O2), particularly those covered by their XGS-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband lines (either via coax upgrades or nexfibre), may soon see a package refresh and possibly even the launch of a 5000Mbps (5Gbps) symmetric speed tier.
A fair bit of time has passed since Virgin Media launched their fastest 2Gbps package to consumers in February 2024 (here) and the market has already moved on, with quite a few ISPs on alternative networks now offering even faster multi-gigabit broadband tiers.
For example, some operators like Netomnia (YouFibre) and B4RN have had 7-10Gbps class packages for a while, while CityFibre made a 5.5Gbps tier available in June 2025 (here) and even Openreach are looking to trial speeds of up to 8.5Gbps next year (here); although they’re officially planning to support symmetric product speeds of up to 3.3Gbps (here); albeit possibly up to c.5Gbps too in the future.
Suffice to say that Virgin Media were hardly going to let that play out without a response, particularly as only a few years ago they could still boast about being “the UK’s fastest widely available broadband provider“. This would of course be a much more challenging claim to make today, particularly with so many ISPs now selling multi-gigabit packages via multiple networks.
What’s Coming Up?
According to our sources, Virgin Media are currently preparing to make changes to their bundles, which among other things looks as if it may remove their 125Mbps broadband tier and make 250Mbps the standard (when bundled with TV). On top of that, we’ve separately been seeing more indications of a possible 5Gbps package being in development.
For example, when setting up new connections in XGS-PON areas, the operator’s engineers typically use a special tablet to check the service. Some of the output from this now clearly shows “Broadband: 5000Mbps | Upload: 5000Mbps” for related lines (credits to YuGi for the evidence). But it should be noted that 5Gbps has been a profile data point in their internal API for a while now, although we’ve not seen it presented like this before.
However, we have already seen the provider’s Irish division introduce a 5Gbps tier during July 2025 (following a soft launch in Feb 2025), which is relevant because Virgin Media UK has recently had a tendency to follow Ireland’s lead. For example, VM Ireland launched 2Gbps in June 2023 and the UK followed about 8-9 months later. If the same trend repeats for 5Gbps, then a launch could come in a few months time.
A spokesperson for Virgin Media told ISPreview that they had “nothing to announce on this right now“, but readers should expect some changes soon, even if it’s currently unclear when 5Gbps itself might surface. We should point out that Virgin Media’s existing Hub 5x router already has a 10Gbps Ethernet port, so it wouldn’t necessarily require new CPE kit.