New UK Full Fibre ISP Zzoomm to Rollout 10Gbps Broadband

New internet provider Zzoomm, which was launched last month by Gigaclear’s founder and aspires to cover 1 million homes with Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology within the next 5 years (here), has announced that their network will deliver broadband speeds of 10Gbps to those they cover.

According to the announcement, Zzoomm will use ADTRAN’s next generation XGS-PON solution and equipment to deliver a 10Gbps “full fibre” service to the homes and businesses they cover. In terms of coverage, the 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).

The roll-out is expected to start during this summer and is initially being supported by an investment of £1m from CEO Matthew Hare, although they’re currently trying to secure additional investment from a number of potential backers. This will be essential if they’re to stand any chance of achieving their target.

Matthew Hare, CEO of Zzoomm, said:

“This is all about future proofing – 10 years ago, one Gigabit was considered sufficient to meet future speed needs but this is no longer the case.

Working with ADTRAN, we are building out a robust infrastructure that’s fit for the coming decades. Zzoomm will deliver 10 Gigabit speeds to homes and businesses – both downloads and uploads – in towns and suburbs, some 400 to 500 times faster than the average speeds across copper infrastructure.

We are targeting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses that are still hampered by ageing copper infrastructure. They will no longer be hamstrung by dated communications networks with Zzoomm’s new full fibre network.”

Ronan Kelly, ADTRAN CTO for EMEA and APAC, said:

“We are enabling operators across Europe, like Zzoomm, to make significant progress in connecting homes and businesses to advanced services that enhance subscriber experience and quality of life.

This partnership is another proof-point that the market is choosing 10G PON technology over 1G PON variants deployed over the last two decades.”

We should caution that they aren’t the only provider building a 10Gbps capable network like this and London focused ISP Community Fibre (CF) announced a similar deployment last year (here). Similarly many of the existing full fibre networks, such as those being deployed by B4RN, are already technically capable of pushing to a peak speed of 10 Gigabits per second (10,000Mbps+ if you prefer). Lest we forget Hyperoptic’s trial (here).

The issue is that, outside of a big business environment, such speeds are completely pointless for home users today as most computers couldn’t make use of that (e.g. few people have 10Gbps LAN ports or WiFi that can do better than a few hundred Mbps) and most internet services cannot run at speeds even approaching such performance. Heck many of them have enough trouble getting close to 1Gbps, let alone 10Gbps.

However this does make for a good piece of marketing and helps to show how easy it will be for “full fibre” networks to adapt in the future, when consumers eventually find ways to harness such capacity. We’ll also be interested to see how much such packages will cost for residential users, assuming Zzoomm actually offers such a tier.