Full Fibre Altnet Toob Tops 50,000 UK Broadband ISP Customers UPDATE2
Alternative network builder and gigabit broadband ISP toob, which is deploying a full fibre (FTTP) network across parts of South England (they’re also sharing some of CityFibre’s infrastructure), has recently revealed that they’ve managed to grow their customer base to over 50,000 (up from 20,000 a year ago).
The Hampshire-based operator was originally backed by £75m from the Amber Infrastructure Group (here) and “up to” £87.5m from the Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund (here). During 2023 the operator also secured £160m of additional funding (debt financing) from Ares Management‘s Infrastructure Debt strategy (here), which could be upsized to £300m over time to support growth.
However, toob did recently run into a few challenges, which resulted in some redundancies and a change of build strategy (here). But the positive news today is that toob recently confirmed having passed the milestone of 50,000 customers, which is more than double the 20,000 they had this time last year.
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The provider doesn’t appear to have put out a press release about this (we spotted it via social media), which is a shame as this seems to be a good result. On the other hand, toob hasn’t issued an update on their network coverage in over a year, which makes it difficult to examine their relative take-up rate. So far as we can tell, the 50,000 figure was first stated on their website during early May 2024.
UPDATE 10:27am
Toob has informed us that they should be formally announcing having hit this number sometime this week.
UPDATE 20th June 2024
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The official press release has just been published, which also reveals that toob’s early network – deployed in Southampton – now has over 40% penetration and their overall network penetration is “almost” at 20%.
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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How many times are we going to see comments like “some redundancies” when these companies are laying off half their workforce?
The difficulty is that we won’t know that unless either the operator confirms a figure directly or those affected can provide some evidence to help substantiate a specific figure. Sometimes it’s just a small proportion, and others it can be more significant, so the situations do vary.
The workforce that is being laid off is (generally) the build workforce. At some point all builds will come to an end, and that part of the workforce will be made redundant. This is expected.
Important distinction that these 50k (if we can actually trust this number as number of TP reviews are on the low side) they do not represent 50% takeup on their 100k RFS (not 150k), I suspect maybe 1/3 of these are on the City Fibre network
Just to add. The 150k coverage figure is also about a year older than the 50,000 customers figure, so a fair comparison is not possible yet. As for on-net vs CityFibre, I recall late last year that only about 5% of their base was on CF and the rest were on-net. But that may of course have changed.
The 100k mentioned is the current TBB position. They are never more than a few months behind
Current tbb position is around 121,000 premises passed on-net and RFS i.e. no waiting on way leave
Generally goes up every day as always a little bit more to be found.
Any update from toob on when their network is open to wholesale via Cityfibre? It’s been a long time since they announced that it would be Summer 2024.
A big take up, City Fibre customers or not, interests to know split. How many others are +50k?
just wish I could get a connection,
1st order I was continually promised that they could doc it & where awaiting the 3rd party to install the infrastructure to the pole.
Apparently the work was done but they closed the order for me to reorder.
reorder and now I’m told the CBT is too low & needs raising before they can provide service.
I’ve had a look at the CBT and there is no fibre CBT on the pole.
this is now a year after the door knocker informed ordering was imminent.
I put the original order in in September
I’m seeing a lot of planning by toob in the Waterlooville area according to one.network. hopefully by the end of the year it will reach me!