Full Fibre ISP Connexin Acquires Rival Provider Wisper Broadband

Digital infrastructure provider and UK ISP Connexin, which is investing £80m to deploy a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of Hull and East Yorkshire (here and here), has this morning announced the acquisition of local rival Wisper Broadband for an undisclosed sum.

Few of our readers will have heard of Wisper Broadband before, but they’re a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) provider that has been serving homes across parts of the same region as Connexin for many years – often with download speeds of up to 60Mbps. The provider is believed to be home to “thousands” of customers, although specific figures have not been provided.

Through the new acquisition, Connexin said they’re aiming to give the people and businesses of East Yorkshire “better value, greater choice and higher quality broadband“. Wisper Broadband customers will see no immediate changes to their current service, billing or support. But they’re likely to be among the first to benefit from the operator’s new full fibre network (i.e. a quick way of boosting take-up).

Furqan Alamgir, Co-founder and CEO of Connexin, said:

“I would like to thank Mike and Paul from Wisper and we are thrilled to welcome Wisper Broadband and its customers to the Connexin family as we continue to grow our presence in Hull and East Riding.

As a local company, we are passionate about providing the best online experience to the people of Hull and the surrounding area. Through the acquisition and the roll-out of our own full-fibre network, it brings us another step closer to doing just that and creating the fairer, more diverse and best-in-class broadband offering that the region has long deserved.”

Michael Foley, Managing Director at Wisper Broadband, said:

“Wisper Broadband and Connexin have worked very closely together over the last 10 years and always had a similar objective – to give the city an increased choice in broadband providers.

As technology has progressed, we have seen a significant increasing in the requirement for full fibre and a fairer marketplace within Hull, as such we are extremely excited to join forces with Connexin at such a key time in their Fibre rollout and am confident that over the coming months Connexin will bring the next generation of full fibre to the people of Hull, watch this space…”

We should point out that Connexin are not the only gigabit-capable broadband operator trying to crack KCOM’s local monopoly – MS3, Grain, Quickline and others have also recently announced network expansion programmes, which will focus on some of the same areas.