Toob Prep Full Fibre Broadband for 19000 Premises in Fareham
Alternative network ISP toob have today announced that they will invest £7 million to extend their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband infrastructure to cover 19,000 homes and businesses in the Hampshire (England) market town of Fareham.
The operator, which was originally backed by an investment of £75m from funds advised by the Amber Infrastructure Group (here) and recently secured “up to” £87.5m from the Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund (here), is currently aiming to cover 1 million premises across the South of England by 2027 (mostly in Surrey and Hampshire).
So far the operator has begun or announced deployments for a number of cities and towns in the South of England, such as Southampton, Aldershot, Eastleigh, Chandler’s Ford, Camberley and Frimley, as well as other locations such as Ash, Farnborough, Green, Guildford, Mytchett, West Byfleet and Woking etc.
Advertisement
The latest location to join that list is Fareham, which is not far from their primary build in Southampton. Detailed network planning is said to have already commenced in Fareham, with build activity due to start imminently, and the first customers could then be connected by the end of 2022.
Customers of the provider typically pay just £25 per month for the first 18-months of service (£29 thereafter) to get an unlimited 900Mbps (symmetric) broadband package with an included wireless router, which comes with free installation.
Nick Parbutt, CEO of toob, said:
“I am delighted to announce that we are bringing full-fibre broadband to Fareham. Families and businesses require fast and reliable broadband and full-fibre is the best technology to deliver this experience.
Our customers tell us every day how much better our service is and the benefit this has brought them. Whether it’s taking one of the stresses away from working at home, running their business more efficiently or having the whole family able to connect to the internet with no slowdowns or buffering.
We want everyone to be able to enjoy these benefits, so our service is simple and affordable. One speed, 900 Mbps on download and upload, at only £25 per month.”
In terms of the local area, at present the only gigabit-capable rival is Virgin Media, although Openreach do have plans to extend their own FTTP network across the same area. Broadly speaking, there should be room for a third operator in the area, and it’ll be interesting to see which one can get their FTTP into the ground first.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Trial Runs UK Fibre Broadband Cable via Yorkshire Water Mains
Toob are happy to take the tax payers money to roll-out FTTP, but it seems they cherry pick the best parts of a location, for example large parts of Eastleigh are not included and now Toob have the best part, what chance is their another provider will pick up the pieces.
Toob are taking from the people and geo-isolating those in less favorable locations.
In my town they are doing the estates of terraced homes and flats first leaving the older detached homes.
Not sure what constitutes the best parts but they are certainly going for most properties passed per £ vs deeper pocketed households.
Since when did toob take taxpayers money? This is a commercial operator, which is conducting a commercial build. They will tackle what makes the most business sense, as you would expect.
ispreview has reported it.
“The funding itself stems from the Amber Infrastructure”
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/03/full-fibre-isp-start-up-toob-secure-75m-investment-for-uk-rollout.html
Amber Infrastructure website: “The Fund is a Limited Partnership vehicle, backed with a cornerstone commitment from HM Treasury’s landmark £400m Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund (DIIF) initiative.”
https://www.amberinfrastructure.com/our-funds/national-digital-infrastructure-fund/
Unless I am mistaken, HM Treasury is partly funded by taxpayers right?
If toob is entirely private funded, then sure it would be expected of them to supply the most profitable areas, even if that means isolating others.
But if funding came from the treasury, then shame on them.
That’s a loan David, not a grant.
Shame as it appears that they have now had to enable CG-NAT, previously had a real dynamically assigned IPv4 from Toob.
They have now added static IPs as an option which wasn’t available before.
Have you considered using IPv6? They definitely give out plenty of those addresses.
There isn’t really a need for public IPv4 addresses for residential broadband anymore. Eventually all ISPs will use CGNAT or similar.
I find the issue these days will be connecting in from a Virgin Media connection which still has no IPv6 support or from a business connection which either has IPv6 completely disabled or not included in the leased line package only a block of IPv4.
I’ve had to deal with customers that are trying to connect into work using things like Parsec Teams but are unable to connect due to the CG-NAT on their side of the connection.
TCP based VPNs / connections are fine but usually anything that uses UDP the experience is entirely dependant on the implementation of CG-NAT. Toob’s seems to actually be pretty good but I have seen Origin’s implementation fail to redirect traffic correctly.
I asked Toob about this yesterday by email, their response was as follows:
“We enabled CGNAT earlier this month.
We are currently able to offer our customers a static IP free, for 6 months, and then an additional £8 thereafter.
If you would like to give us a call on 0800 368 9458 one of our customer service advisors will be able to get this applied for you.
Our Customer service team are available Monday-Friday 8am-9pm, Weekends and bank holidays 9am-5pm.”