South Yorkshire ISP Origin Broadband Hails Growth Spurt

Doncaster-based ISP Origin Broadband appears to be recovering from last year’s rocky collapse of the failed £100m Digital Region network and has reported that turnover is up 400% on the last six months, with the provider adding 300 residential and up to 400 business customers a month.

The Yorkshire Post reports that Origin, which aims to become a national name, is now home to a total of 7,000 subscribers and their growth is also feeding into new jobs, with the provider moving to boost their current staff numbers to 85 by the end of 2015.

Oliver Bryssau, Origin Broadband’s MD and co-Founder, said:

“We are tendering for some massive contracts and our aim is to become a full national operator. We started in 2011 with no staff. Now we have 40 and that figure will rise to 85 by the end of this year.”

Origin has also invested to install some of its own hardware in BT’s telephone exchanges across South Yorkshire, which sounds similar to the kind of unbundled (LLU) networks that TalkTalk and Sky Broadband have built across the whole of the United Kingdom.

The ISP also claims to be the top regional supplier of Government Connection Vouchers, which are designed to help small and medium sized businesses to get a superfast broadband connection installed.

“We have recovered. [The Digital Region collapse] didn’t threaten the business, but we didn’t manage it as well as we would have liked,” added Bryssau. It’s understood that the ISP has recently received additional investment from Finance Yorkshire (£350,000 loan), HSBC and Finance for Enterprise.