Zzoomm Start First Yorkshire FTTP Broadband Rollout in Thirsk

Alternative UK ISP Zzoomm has today announced the first deployment of their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network in North Yorkshire (England), which will take place in the poorly served market town and civil parish of Thirsk.

At present the operator, which is being backed by an “initial” investment of £100 million from Oaktree Capital Management (here), already has a number of active deployments in semi-rural towns and parishes across parts of Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Herefordshire. But today’s news marks their first foray into North Yorkshire.

Zzoomm will begin construction in Thirsk over the summer, and the new Full Fibre network is then planned to cover the entire town. Apparently 5,300 premises (homes and businesses) will benefit from this build, which is an interesting number since the town is only said to have a population of around 5,000, although the built-up area that surrounds does extend this to around 10,000.

On top of that we note that Openreach does have a rival FTTP deployment in the same town, although this only covers a fairly small area.

Matthew Hare, Zzoomm’s Chief Executive, said:

“We are bringing our fabulous Full Fibre to the people of Thirsk. They will experience extremely fast and reliable broadband services. With only 18% of the UK able to connect to true Gigabit speed broadband over Full Fibre, our quest to rip out the old copper infrastructure continues. We cannot wait to bring our Zzoomm service, customer experience and outlook to the people and businesses of Thirsk and put into the past slow, glitchy connections and poor service.

The lockdown has accelerated the move to new working arrangements and boosted the demand for online entertainment and learning. Zzoomm has demonstrated that Full Fibre meets the need and will catapult Thirsk into one of the best connected towns in the world.”

All of this should help to support the provider’s longer-term ambition to cover 1 million UK homes by 2025, although they’ll need to raise a lot more investment to reach that level of network availability. Residential customers typically pay from £29 per month for a 100Mbps package and that goes up to £99 if you want their top 2Gbps tier, which also happens to be one of the fastest home packages available.