ISP TalkTalk Loses UK Ultrafast Broadband Head to Virgin Media

The General Manager of “ultrafast broadband” at TalkTalk has switched sides and will soon join Virgin Media to become an Executive Director of Connectivity. The move comes ahead of both the ISP’s commercial G.fast launch and after their proposal to rollout 1Gbps FTTH/P to 3 million premises.

At present TalkTalk’s only real foray into the realm of ultrafast (100Mbps+) home broadband connectivity has been via their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) trial in the city of York (details), which is being conducted alongside infrastructure builder Cityfibre. Sky Broadband also played a part during the initial deployment phase and will retain wholesale access to the network during its on-going extension.

Outside of that the ISP has also been conducting trials of Openreach’s (BT) G.fast based broadband technology (here), which offers headline speeds of up to 150Mbps to 300Mbps and is currently being rolled out to cover 10 million UK premises by 2020. We expect the provider to launch their commercial G.fast packages sometime this year.

However, a significant development occurred in February 2018 when TalkTalk announced that they would invest £1.5bn in order to deploy a new FTTH/P network to 3 million UK premises (here). In order to do this they planned to establish a new company, which would be 20% owned by TalkTalk and 80% by Infracapital; the latter contributing £400m and TalkTalk £100m (plus it will then take on c.£1bn in debt).

The details remain sparse but it’s known that the Infracapital deal has initiated some degree of business reorganisation within TalkTalk. The FT (paywall) suggests that this may be the reason why TalkTalk’s GM for Ultrafast Broadband, Richard Sinclair, has decided to depart after four years at the ISP.

A Spokesperson for Virgin Media said:

“We are delighted to announce the appointment of Richard Sinclair as our new Executive Director, Connectivity. We look forward to him joining us in the next few months.”

We’re expecting TalkTalk to announce further details of their new FTTP company in the very near future.