First Customers Live on ISP toob’s 1Gbps FTTH in Southampton

Portsmouth-based UK ISP toob, which was setup by a group Vodafone’s former directors and is being supported by an investment of £75m (here), has announced that the first customers have now gone live on their new symmetric 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in Southampton (Hampshire).

The Southampton build alone – using “full fibre” kit from ADTRAN (TA5000) – is expected to cost £50m to complete and will cover 100,000 premises by the end of 2021. The operator also has longer-term plans to expand beyond that and aspires to cover a total of over 1 million properties across the South of England.

At the time of writing toob says that their service is currently only available in a few apartment blocks to the south of the city centre, with more becoming available within the “next few weeks“. Network construction is also said to have begun in the Bevois area, although at present we can only see work being conducted by Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media in that area.

Customers can expect to pay just £25 inc. VAT per month to access toob’s unlimited 900Mbps+ (average) symmetric speed service on an 18 month minimum contract term, which is accompanied by a £49 one-off installation charge. The pricing is incredibly low for a commercial FTTP provider on a Gigabit tier and indeed it may be one of the cheapest in the market.

Nick Parbutt, toob’s CEO, said:

“I am delighted to launch our hyperspeed broadband in Southampton. Our first customers have told us how much of a positive impact fast, reliable broadband has had.

Whether our customers are streaming movies, shopping, studying, working, or gaming or all of these at the same time, our hyperspeed broadband has the speed and reliability to deliver it all without slowing or interruption.

We look forward to continuing our roll-out across Southampton and bringing the benefits of hyperspeed broadband to the whole City.”

One reason why toob is so cheap might be to help them peel customers away from Virgin Media, which is by far their biggest rival in the city. The reason for this is because Virgin Media recently made Southampton their first Gigabit broadband city with an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 technology, which at a stroke made 1Gbps+ download speeds available to everybody within reach of their network.

The CEO of Virgin Media, Lutz Schüler, recently warned that he intended to “fight back” against smaller alternative network providers and “will use everything to keep them out of our city” (here), although they can’t match toob for either price or upload speeds (Virgin can only offer a maximum of 50Mbps upload on their Gigabit tier).

On the other hand toob has nothing to compete with Virgin’s Pay TV platform and their coverage has a long way to go before it can match Virgin’s local cable network. Suffice to say that Southampton should be an interesting test case to see how smaller and more affordable altnets fair when they go up against an established Gigabit network. Some models suggest that around three Gigabit providers should be able to survive in dense urban areas.