Hyperoptic Grab Liberty Global Vet Duncan Macdonald as New CTIO
Network builder and UK broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has so far extended their gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP/B) network to cover over 1.2 million homes (275,000+ customers), have announced that they’ve snapped up Liberty Global veteran Duncan Macdonald to be their new Chief Technology Innovation Officer (CTIO).
The operator, which recently announced a number of redundancies and appeared to suffer a slowdown in their pace of build (here), currently expects to cover 2 million premises with their network by some point in 2024 (the previous target was for the end of 2023).
Otherwise, the new CTIO is said to have 25 years of experience in the telecom industry, with the last 16 years as part of the Liberty Global group. Duncan’s most recent role was CIO at Liberty Global-owned Sunrise, in Switzerland, and at Swiss cable operator UPC Schweiz before that. He played a central role within Liberty Global between 2016 and 2018, managing consumer IT across 11 European Telcos, having overseen a large-scale transformation of the mobile IT stack for Virgin Media in the UK.
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Hyperoptic Founder and CEO, Dana Tobak, said:
“Duncan is committed to driving real business impact through the CTIO role, and he has the experience, expertise and attitude to push Hyperoptic to the next level of performance and efficiency. We continue to grow our network, our customer base and our profile, and Duncan will play an important role in supporting that growth as part of a very talented and experienced leadership team.”
Customers of the service typically pay from £25 per month on a 24-month term (plus £29 activation) for a 50Mbps package, which rises to £45 for their top 1Gbps plan with free activation (currently free for the first 3 months of service). The provider also offers a social tariff for those on benefits.
As a side note. The figure of 1.2m homes mentioned in this announcement is only a tiny improvement on the 1.15m stated in February 2023, which leads us to suspect that it may just be a rounding of the original figure, rather than an accurate update of their build progress since earlier this year. Hyperoptic plan to issue an updated build figure sometime next month.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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1.2 million homes and 275,000 customers, that’s about 23% take up.
Not bad compared to some other Altnets.
It’s not great considering the service they provide.
It also has over 10 years while a lot of altnets have less than half the time. Takeup takes time to buildup
@John
If Altnets have to wait 10 years to achieve reasonable levels of Take-Up, there’s going to be big problems for most of them.
They’ll simply go under drowning in debt.
Perhaps not. I don’t think Liberty Global have ever paid a dividend, yet they’re still around after many more years than they deserve. And look where Dunco comes from……