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.
Why?
Yes it is just a PR stunt to get their name in lights and says nothing about absolute speeds people will receive, and isn’t that amazing a speed for what is really them talking about their back-haul from a particular street. BT are at 2.5Gbps as standard on FTTP but they haven’t gone down the route of suggesting that’s what they could offer, because that is shared between around 32 properties. Zzoom can use faster versions of this tech because they are starting from scratch, but BT and other companies can also easily upgrade to it (the fibre stays the same.)
Zzoom are using this faster speed to reduce install costs, as they can then split a single fibre between many more properties. This isn’t about the ability of offering a 10Gbps connection, as they can’t do that whilst also sharing that same fibre between 30 or more properties, its just about a bit of PR for a newly created company, with an awful logo.
Good to see fibre-to-the-press-release is ramping up again after taking a few months off
Will be great if they started in Hampshire
So he gets million selling a hyped up startup, which is now failing its commitments….. What’s to say zzoomm isn’t the same, sounds like a very cleaver —-
I don’t understand why companies want to roll out in Big city’s such as London. (Customer numbers I guess) because areas like that already have an array of companies offering faster broadband that FTTC. They should focus on smaller towns and city’s (and eventually get a monopoly). They will only be around for the initial launch before they are bought out by Virgin.
Cynically, I don’t think the ambition is to roll out at all. The ambition is to attract investment and eventually a buy-out. To attract investment they have to make it sound profitable, and that means targeting areas where investors can be convinced that there is a profit to be made – i.e. urban areas, but not the big areas that Cityfibre et al. are targeting.
Their logo belongs on a tub of Play-Doh.
Heard it all before, Virgin announced DOCSIS 3.1 several years ago, still far far away from being released. These companies will only enable such speeds if other companies compete for speed, they don’t, they compete on price. Broadband providers are like Pizza Hut, Dominos and Papa Johns, all the same price, all the same amount of food.