Broadband ISP Zzoomm Sees 20 Percent Full Fibre Take-up in Shiplake
Alternative network provider and UK ISP Zzoomm is in the news for a second time today, albeit this time to celebrate the fact that their new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in Shiplake (Oxfordshire), which only went live on 20th December 2023, has already exceeded a take-up rate of 20%.
The Shiplake build is an extension of their original deployment across Henley-on-Thames, which was itself completed in 2021. The Shiplake extension has so far delivered 50% of the build to date and will cover some 600 properties once it completes in February 2024.
The operator, which is being fuelled by an equity investment of £100m from Oaktree Capital (here) and a £100m debt facility via an international banking consortium (here), originally held an aspiration of reaching 1 million premises across 85 UK towns with their full fibre network by the end of 2025. But like many other networks, they’ve recently had to slow their build and cut jobs (here).
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Despite the challenges, Zzoomm reported in late December 2023 that they had already managed to cover 185,000 premises (RFS) across 25 towns (up from 150k on 30th June 2023) and were home to over 20,000 customers (up from 12k at the end of May 2023).
Chris Collinson, Chief Commercial Officer at Zzoomm, said:
“We are delighted to drive innovation through access to our gigafast Full Fibre network to homes and businesses in Shiplake.
It’s clear that Shiplake residents and businesses have really understood the benefits of gigafast broadband and are taking advantage of our investment in future-ready Full Fibre broadband.
We’re delighted to welcome so many residents of Shiplake to Zzoomm in only the few weeks since finishing the build.
At Zzoomm, we believe that everyone should have access to reliable, future ready broadband.”
We have to give credit to Zzoomm for being one of the few AltNets that is willing to put both network coverage and customer figures in the public domain. Customers who take the residential service typically pay from £29.95 per month (currently discounted to £19.95) for an unlimited 150Mbps (symmetric speed) package on a 12-month term with an included router, which goes up to just £64.95 (currently discounted to £54.95) if you want their top 2Gbps tier.
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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They are digging near me this month. About 1/2 a mile away I hope they come here they have some really good packages
i have been with them since June last year and while they have had a few problems, one being that a major Fibre trunk went down and slowed the system to less than my old FTTC speeds, over the last couple of months the service have improved immensely. I pay for 500Mb/s and get a bit more than that.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, it does pay to get a decent router, while some people have found the included router ok, I had a muck around with it and I did not like it at all. I use a TP-link router.
Considering that I never wanted FTTP in the first place, I am pleased with the service I get, certainly for the price and for people who are in a Zzoomm area, I would recommend Zzoomm
That is pretty impressive to be honest.
I wonder if Zzoomm will have to change its name due to the more well-known video conferencing app called Zoom? – Seems risky to go with such a name when you are just starting and could pick literally anything else.
I must admit, I wish they did choose a better name, it gets confusing when talking about them to other people. I presume they put the double zz and double MM on to separate them from Zoom.
As for using the word Zoom, there are a couple of companies that use the same word. Zoom is also a manufacture of studio equipment, including my field microphone.