LONDON, (Reuters) – Virgin Media O2 of Britain announced Friday that it was in negotiations with its financial partners for funding a fibre network that would cover seven million properties. It is now stepping up the competition to BT to be the first to offer ultrafast broadband connections.

Telefonica (NYSE) will become the broadband and mobile provider in the joint venture with Liberty Global (NASDAQ;). The new network will also make it available for wholesale to other operators, according to company.

Virgin Media O2 already has increased the speed of its network and plans to increase these speeds to fibre by 2028.

As it reported its highest quarter-end performance since 2006, with 53,000 fixed-line additions and 142,000 in 2021, the company confirms that they are in talks to invest.

It added 2.7million connections to mobile in 2021. This includes wholesale customers. Virgin Media O2 reported that 129,000 new mobile contracts were added in its final quarter.

Lutz Schuler, chief executive of the joint venture, stated that the eight month-old joint venture was strong and growing the 45% fixed-line customers with mobile.

He stated that Volt was our first converged product and is now in its fourth month of existence.

Schuler stated that Virgin Media 02 will offer its whole network to wholesale partners, eventually covering 23 million homes.

Sky and TalkTalk, broadband providers like Sky and TalkTalk will then be able to compete with BT. BT aims to increase its fiber network to 25,000,000 premises by the end of 2026.

If you had to choose between sticking with one supplier and having the ability to compromise a little bit with one, which would you pick?

However, the company did not feel pressured to make wholesale deals.

He said, “We aren’t committing wholesale revenues to finance 7 million homes,” “Virgin Media, as anchor tenant, is more than sufficient.”