Gigaclear Founder Creates New UK City FTTP Broadband ISP Zzoomm

The founder and former CEO of UK rural fibre optic ISP Gigaclear, Matthew Hare, has quietly used £1m of his own money to setup a new broadband provider called Zzoomm, which is an alternative network (altnet) that will focus on building 1Gbps+ Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks to homes in smaller cities and suburbs.

Matthew did a reasonably good job of building Gigaclear up over several years into a serious provider (impressive given their focus on bringing “full fibre” to challenging rural areas), at least he did until 2017/18 when the ISP found itself struggling with the difficult challenge of scaling-up their rural focused FTTP roll-out to cope with several significant Government contracts (example).

Gigaclear ended up being purchased by Infracapital (Prudential fund) for £270m (here) and soon after that the scale of their aforementioned FTTP deployment delays became clear (some roll-outs have been set back by as much as two years). This ultimately resulted in the new owner re-shaping the company and replacing its management team, which included Matthew’s departure (here)

Nevertheless Matthew has today confirmed that he is set for a return to the growing market for “full fibre” services and has established a new ISP called Zzoomm. According to Companies House, the London registered business (Zzoomm Group Limited) was incorporated on 19th December 2018 (NOTE: Apparently it’s actual HQ will be setup in Oxford).

Matthew Hare, CEO of Zzoomm, said:

“The full fibre revolution is here, but many are currently left behind. Numerous small towns and suburbs still do not have any plans for full fibre from the network into the properties and are stuck with the pedestrian internet access speeds that is provided by copper wires. Zzoomm is targeting some of these 4.5 million homes which are still blighted by ageing copper infrastructure.”

At present Zzoomm is understood to be in the process of trying to secure “substantial” financial investment from a group of possible backers, but unlike Gigaclear the new ISP intends to target the more commercially viable and lucrative urban areas; specifically smaller cities (e.g. Hastings, Amersham, Weymouth and Huntingdon) and the suburbs of larger cities (e.g. London and Birmingham).

Over the past couple of years a huge amount of investment has been flowing toward “full fibre” altnet providers, which is being supported by various Government tax breaks (business rates holiday), funding initiates and regulatory changes (see the ‘ Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review‘ and ‘Budget 2018 Summary‘).

One obvious problem here is that Zzoom will not be alone in those markets for long. Openreach, Virgin Media, Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, Cityfibre (inc. Vodafone), TalkTalk, OFNL (GTC / BUUK) and others all have big plans (see our ‘Summary of Full Fibre Broadband Plans and Investment‘), which should help the Government with their nationwide FTTP coverage aspiration for 2033.

Nevertheless Matthew hopes to install Zzoomm’s first FTTP broadband lines during summer 2019 and the company has set itself an ambition to cover 1 million homes within the next 5 years (end of 2024), which is plausible provided they can fend off against more established rivals. The latter may explain their focus on smaller cities and suburbs, since a lot of the early urban FTTP roll-outs tend to target the biggest cities and central areas.