ISP Zzoomm Start UK Full Fibre Broadband Rollout in Oxfordshire

Good news. After months of preparation Zzoomm, which is a new ISP that aspires to cover 1 million UK homes with a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network by the end of 2024 (here), has this week started to build their first network in the Oxfordshire town of Henley-on-Thames.

Assuming the provider holds to their original plan then we should expect to see 6,800 premises being covered across the town by the second half of 2020, which suggests that their local rollout will take up to around 12 months. The initial work is being conducted by Zzoomm’s own in-house team of newly trained and locally sourced field engineers.

The decision to focus on Henley-on-Thames first makes sense since there’s an absence of existing “ultrafast broadband” networks. Instead the area is predominantly served via Openreach’s (BT) significantly slower Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) service. Zzoom has previously said that they’ll target smaller cities and the suburbs of larger cities, which often get overlooked by the initial “full fibre” plans of bigger rivals.

The ISP is also known to have based their network off ADTRAN’s latest XGS-PON technology and they’ve recently signed a strategic £2.5m supply deal with fibre optic firm Hexatronic UK. Sadly we don’t know how much the deployment in Henley will cost but it’s likely to be a fairly sizeable sum.

At the time of writing the provider has yet to issue an official press release on the start of their build, which began on Monday 23rd, and they’ve also yet to unveil what packages and prices will be offered to consumers. No doubt this information will be imminent now that their civil engineering side has begun.