ISP Zzoomm Adds 8 New Towns to UK FTTP Broadband Rollout
Network operator and UK ISP Zzoomm has today announced a further £44 million expansion of their effort to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which will add another 8 market towns across parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands this Autumn.
Until now the provider, which launch in 2020 and aims to reach 1 million premises across 85 UK towns by the end of 2025, has mostly focused its rollout on towns in parts Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, North Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire. Some of the first locations to benefit from this were Sandhurst, Crowthorne, Hereford, Crewe, Cannock, Thirsk, Northallerton and Easingwold.
The operator has already covered 50,000 premises (July 2022 figure), which is up from 10,000 in December 2021, and the addition of 8 new towns today will ultimately add another 56,000 premises to that total, once completed. This adds to the 7 recently announced towns of Congleton, Stokesley and Great Ayton, Northwich, Sandbach, Sherburn-in-Elmet, Winsford and Wombourne, covering 86,000 properties.
The new expansion is expected to cost the provider a further £44m to deliver.
Zzoomm’s 8 New Full Fibre Towns (Sept 2022)
Bewdley
Middlewich
Tadcaster
Ripon
South Elmsall
Hemsworth
Bolton
Upon Dearne
Thurnscoe
As usual, some of these towns are already covered or will soon be covered by gigabit-capable networks from rival operators, such as Openreach, CityFibre, Virgin Media (VMO2) and so forth.
Matthew Hare, CEO of Zzoomm, said:
“Zzoomm offers homes and businesses in these market towns a brilliant Full Fibre service with unmatched speeds that isn’t reliant on the slow, unreliable copper used by other broadband providers in the area. We
are proud to be bringing a competitive and attractive service to unleash the potential through fabulous new communications infrastructure.We are moving faster than ever before to expand our Full Fibre network. As we continue to expand and announce new Zzoomm towns, we see significant interest from residents in getting something better. Once our networks go live, we see strong uptake for our Full Fibre services. We now have over a quarter of a million homes and businesses live, in build or about to be built, and we will be announcing our next phase of towns in the coming weeks.”
Customers on the new network currently pay from £33 per month for an unlimited 150Mbps (symmetric speed) package on a 24-month term with an included router, which goes up to £99 if you want their top 2Gbps tier (or £66 for 900Mbps+) – that also happens to be one of the fastest UK home broadband packages available. Most packages do attract a £20 one-off activation fee, but they’re also offering the first 6 months of service for free.
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 and Linkedin.
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This is good news for my area, but the prices above 150mbps are expensive, and they tie you into a 24 month contract.
What would you expect to pay for a symmetric 2 gigabit connection then?
It’s not so bad I suppose, considering the 6 ‘free’ months. The 450mbps package works out at the equivalent of £33 p/m over 24 months, hopefully they’d be a price cut by then.
I think most would prefer a 12 month contract.
It’s £99 in the article though that may have been added after original publication.
Not too bad at this current time in the market and (get this Openreach) its SYMMETRIC!!!!! not some cr***y capped low upload speed.
It’s a joke that I pay 40 quid for 5-25 upload on BT
Customer service when you have problems after activation is very poor.
No IPv6 and according to support there is no need for it.
Ipv4 addresses appear to be bought from overseas which haven’t had records fully updated and sometimes bbc will say you are not in the UK.
The default router is rubbish
they have been working outside my place over the past couple of weeks, and l have caught users saying their routers are trash but luckily l already have the hardware l need (2 TP-Link routers with DHCP and gigabit ports) when they become available in the area without using their own. but l am contemplating grabbing a new router so l can better network our house.
I follow their local facebook page and going by that their customer service seems to be awful and yes and so is their router.
A fair few complaints on there.
Yep customer service is great up until you get installed and locked into the contract. After that it takes days for a reply to an email and often they will reply back with other stuff and not answering the question.
There is also packet loss peak time at weekends which might be a local issue or elsewhere but it’s not a good sign if capacity is already an issue
I fear they may be expanding too fast before they got other networks finished, I fear something will go belly up and Matthew Hare will end up flogging it like he did with gigaclear.
Still doing work around the corner I think, they seemed to have finished down this road. As others have said, I have heard their router is rubbish, they used to give two routers, but now only one, seemed to have cut down already.
At least around here at least they are using BT telegraph poles and not going underground like they have in other streets
They aren’t one team of contractors going from town to town, AD. If they waited until every street in a town were built before starting another they would have an awful lot of towns and cities surveyed and planned alongside very bored staff waiting for things to do.
The actual build takes far longer than the surveying, planning and the network engineering so it would be crazy to bottleneck it by waiting until civils in an area were complete.
Your implication they should be completing one town before starting another is a recipe to go under.
Respectfully they’ve done this before and have much more of an idea how to do it than you or I. They and the other altnets must build as fast as possible, they can’t afford to wait until Hereford is finished.
@An Engineer, I can see what you are getting at, but they need to make money to expand and if their network fails to take hold in one place, then they are going to lose out. Who is to say that they will get enough connections here to break even? Granted they are having money chucked at them by some investors, but at some point in time, these investors will want their money back, after all that is the whole point in investing.
If openreach fibre is available in the same place, then zzoomm and other alt networks are going to find it difficult to get customers unless they offer something better. If someone is already with say sky broadband on FTTC and sky FTTP is available via Openreach, what reason would they have to change to another network? The majority of people would not know who runs what network, all they care about is a connection and if they can get a faster connection with the same ISP they are using then they will stay with them.
I think there will be too many alt networks and some of them will go pop. I also think that zzoomm here in Hereford may be one of them, people in Hereford tend to stick with what they are used to, it is not London or other big cities.
But we will see, Openreach seems to be behind here, maybe their strikes have not helped.
@An Engineer:
“The actual build takes far longer than the surveying, planning and the network engineering so it would be crazy to bottleneck it by waiting until civils in an area were complete.”
I agree, though this can also be the Achilles’ heel for a number of altnets. Quite often it can take up to 2 years for an altnet from the time of a coverage announcement to the actual final coverage of homes, by which time the altnet will have lost too many potential customers to other fibre providers, especially when Openreach does a faster deployment.
An altnet needs have proper rollout plans, and must have done appropriate market research, otherwise it can end up in a kind of an early gold rush scenario with too many loosers in the long term.
@Ad47uk: “If someone is already with say sky broadband on FTTC and sky FTTP is available via Openreach, what reason would they have to change to another network?”
A major reason to still switch over to an altnet could be the offer of symmetric fibre, something Openreach with its old GPON technology doesn’t offer.
An issue with Zzoomm might be the usage of CGNAT techniques, or lack of IPv6 support, which could invalidate certain use cases especially for business users. Faster speed is good, but there is more than that to consider.
I’m on zzoomm 900/900 in Cannock. It’s been superb. Speeds always flat out. Few people have had messy street installs, normally those without poles. Mine is supplied overhead and was one of the first connected in cannock.
I had a fault a few days after connection which was sorted within the hour, probably because the guys were still in the street and I asked them if they had caused it, they had without knowing.
All in, I’m very happy. Gone from 48/14 to 900/900.