“Last year alone, data use on our mobile network grew by more than a quarter as customers rely on our connectivity more than ever to stream, play, work, call, learn, bank, and scroll all hours of the day,” Jeanie York, chief technology officer at Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), stated earlier this year.

To support this data demand surge as its 5G network rollout ramps up, the telco says it invests a staggering £2 million ($2.64m) each day in its 4G and 5G mobile networks.

This commitment is part of its wider strategy to invest £10 billion ($13.18bn) to upgrade its network.

The carrier, which was formed from a merger between Virgin Media and O2 three years ago, serves more than 49 million customers across broadband, mobile, TV, and home phones in the UK, including 35 million mobile subscribers. This is a lot of data for any company to process.

DCD was invited to visit the company’s Network Management Center in Slough, UK, to understand how its data centers support its mobile network.

VMO2 claims the center is the company’s “operational nerve center.” It’s also home to Virgin Media O2’s Engineering Training Center, where the carrier has its largest mobile data center in the country, from which it manages traffic for its 3G, 4G, and 5G customers.

Dan Goodenough, VMO2’s technical site operations manager, says the data center is the “heartbeat” of the business.

“These are the sites where if something were to go wrong, you would feel it,” he says. “So, it’s one of the vital organs that we've got at Virgin Media O2.”

Across the country, VMO2 operates 550 technical sites, which consist of its Class A sites, which are its core sites that carry the largest amounts of traffic, such as its one in Slough.

The telco also has Class B sites, which are transit sites, and Class C, which are its smallest sites, otherwise known as network repeater sites.

Heritage

Its Slough data center has been in operation since the noughties, according to Goodenough.

Before the company’s merger between parent companies Telefónica and Liberty Global in 2021, the data center was previously managed by Telefónica.

Europe’s largest trading estate, the Mars Bar, and David Brent are some of the first things that spring to mind when Slough is mentioned, but the growing number of data centers in the town is hard to ignore.

According to Goodenough, Slough is the perfect location to have a data center, due to its proximity to London and the South West.

“Slough is like a data highway here for us in the UK. It’s got an abundance of fiber routings, plus great third-party facilities that you can utilize.

“As a company, we’ve got a great presence here, and there’s Equinix just down the road, which has a couple of data centers here too. The M4 corridor in general from London right to the South West with capacity is huge. It's a good input-output of our network.”

Virgin Media’s network management center consists of a live switch room, a test switch room, and, of course, its data center.

The carrier also has another 12 mobile data centers across the UK, seven of which are located in the south, notes Goodenough.

Monitoring the company’s network

The data center itself is where Virgin Media can monitor its overall network performance, as well as its broadband and phone mast network across the country.

Goodenough explains that the carrier can detect surges in traffic, notably if a video game such as Fortnite or Call of Duty has released an update or new game, there will often be a noticeable spike in data traffic.

He explains that the company implements a service protection period during times when there’s likely to be a lot of demand for data traffic, for example, sporting events such as the Olympics.

“We had a service protection period during the Euros and also the Olympics, where you don't want to disrupt service and don't want to take customers down during that period,” says Goodenough, noting that any non-urgent upgrades were put on hold while the sporting events took place.

The service protection period could last a matter of days or for as long as a couple of weeks, he explains.

“If you had potentially a piece of equipment that would look like it was on its way out, then we would try and get those through, or if there were damage to our fiber which would impact our resiliency then we’d upgrade those, but we wouldn't do any kind of filter changes or maintenance type stuff during the service protection period,” Goodenough says.

He highlighted that should an outage occur for a customer of Virgin Media O2, it can quickly identify where this has occurred within its data center, using a grid reference style system, designed to speed up the process.

Back in 2021, VMO2 deployed management software from EkkoSense across its entire estate. This software uses smart sensors fitted to data center equipment to monitor how much cooling each site needs at any one time, and can then report back on how to optimize cooling as demand changes. VMO2 says it expects the software to deliver energy savings equivalent to one million kilograms of CO2 year-on-year.

Ambitions to drive 5G and full fiber

The company has big plans to expand its 5G network in the UK, which currently provides coverage to more than 65 percent of the population.

Earlier this year, Virgin launched its 5G Standalone (5G SA) network in the UK. 5G SA is not reliant on older mobile generations and solely uses a 5G core network, and is based on cloud.

The service increases network capacity, cuts latency, and can handle a larger amount of connected devices. It is within the data halls, where its 5G network traffic passes through, while it also houses cloud storage.

“The data centers support the 5G Standalone backhaul and backbone networks, which provide the bandwidth and services customers receive,” says Goodenough.

“We invest in upgrading the technology within our data centers to handle to ever-growing demands of our customers, with data usage on an upward trend. This includes services we can provide the end user, quality of service, and capacity on the network.”

Several Faraday cages are also found on-site, allowing Virgin Media O2 to regularly test 3G, 4G, and 5G signals. A Faraday cage is an enclosure designed to block some electromagnetic fields, making it ideal for testing mobile signals to ensure no interference. Virgin Media O2 says the cages are used daily to put its technology through its paces.

Fiber goals

Aside from mobile, VMO2 has big plans for its full fiber broadband offering. At present, its fiber rollout has passed five million premises.

Earlier this year, the carrier, along with its backers, outlined plans to create a national fixed network company to rival BT's Openreach in the UK.

In February, the telco said that the NetCo will "underpin full fiber take-up and roll-out," and provide new financing optionality and a platform for potential altnet consolidation opportunities.

Along with Nexfibre, which is an independent fiber joint venture between Liberty Global, Telefónica, and Infravia, the separate networks will reach a combined total of up to 23 million homes, placing the company in a stronger position to compete with Openreach, which is aiming to deliver FTTP services to 25 million premises by 2026.

However, it’s not only full fiber that the carrier is serving up, it also has 5.8 million fixed subscribers, while its fixed-line network passes more than 17 million premises.

“From a fixed perspective, we've got nearly six million customers on that network, so we are heavily still investing and maintaining that network,” says Goodenough, stating that this will continue to be a big focus for the carrier, despite the company’s full fiber goals.

Out with the old

While VMO2 will continue to push ahead with its fixed network, the telco has outlined plans to get rid of older networks.

The telco will retire its 3G network next year, at which point it will also begin to phase out its 2G network, ahead of the country’s planned switch-off by 2033. Its 2G network accounts for just 0.1 percent of the total data traffic on its mobile network.

This transition will necessitate some changes in the data center, Goodenough says.

“As we are moving towards 5G Standalone and as we start to switch off 3G, we’re beginning to see a lot of the kit come out of our data center as we transition customers across to 5G,” he explains.

VMO2 has publicly said the retirement of these legacy networks will improve the company’s overall sustainability efforts and its wider goal of going net zero by 2040.

According to the carrier, its 3G mobile network carried less than four percent of all data used on its network last year, but accounted for 11 percent of the company's total energy consumption.

“What we tend to find with our data centers and technology, typically legacy equipment is much larger,” adds Goodenough. “Whereas newer equipment is much more condensed. As we start to bring out some of the legacy stuff on some of our data centers, it gives us so much more rack space that we can utilize here.

Taking data to the far Edge

As for where data is being processed, Goodenough sees more of it being processed at the far Edge of the network in the future.

He notes that the company has plans to deploy more of these macro sites across the country to match demand for data-hungry services, such as streaming platforms.

“Over time we will try and reduce that and start to use more far Edge sites, so you end up with smaller sites that are effectively just repeaters, made up of lots of switches.

“With far Edge, there are fewer points of failure there as well. If you can condense it down, then it’s also less energy consumption and then you can focus your investment and your engineering teams around those areas instead.”