The Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), the UK government’s leading advisory group on broadband has released a new report stating that installing super-fast fibre optic broadband across the UK with speeds up to 1Gbps could cost up to £28.8bn.

The £28.8bn bill is for full fibre into each home for the whole of the UK – while an alternative option, fibre just to the BT cabinet on the corner of your street could cost £5bn and deliver speeds up to 100Mbps.

Whichever route is taken the BSG warns of a new digital divide ahead between town and country. Providers like BT and Virgin Media, whilst committed to investing billions in UK roll out, will concentrate on major towns and cities first to help them recoup their investment.


Recent research indicates that the UK’s fastest broadband is fibre optic as opposed to the speeds offered from older copper telephone wires used by various ADSL broadband suppliers.

Virgin Media is one of the few ISP’s offering fibre optic cable broadband with speeds up to 20Mb available and 50Mb not far away.

Virgin Media Fibre Optic Broadband

With fibre optic broadband from Virgin you can download a song in 2 seconds, a whole album in just 30 seconds, or a TV show in 3 minutes, so there’s no need for you to hate waiting for your downloads to be completed.

With prices starting from £4.50 a month, its worth finding out more on Virgin fibre optic broadband in our review here.