Virgin Media has named Manchester as the first U.K. city to benefit from its Project Lightning scheme to extend its high-speed broadband network to additional premises, and said it will start work on the first 20,000 homes and businesses in the city this week.

The cable operator unveiled Project Lightning in February. Under its auspices, Virgin will spend £3 billion to fill coverage gaps in its network, making it accessible to a further 4 million U.K. premises by 2020, increasing its footprint by almost a third.

In all, Virgin will pass an additional 150,000 premises in Manchester, although it did not specify exactly when. Those premises will all be in the city itself; the operator said it will connect more homes and businesses in neighbouring towns, giving priority based on demand. Would-be customers can register with Virgin to express their interest in gaining access to the network.

Virgin is promising Manchester residents access to broadband speeds of 152 Mbps, which it claims is as least twice as fast as the maximum speeds available from BT, TalkTalk and Sky.

In May Mike Fries, CEO of Virgin's parent company Liberty Global, said Project Lightning was "off to a great start" with trial deployments.

The operator passed 36,000 homes in the first six weeks of the project and aims to reach 150,000 by the end of the year, Fries said, thanks to an acceleration in build-out in the second half. He sees the project "really ramping up in 2016 and beyond."

Premises passed in the trial phase showed penetration in line with the company's expectations and "ARPUs above what we had hoped to achieve," Fries said.