ZYBRE to Help Zoopla Show UK Broadband Details on Property Listings
Cloud gaming ISP ZYBRE has signed a deal with popular online real estate website Zoopla, which will enable them to add more details of home broadband availability to all of their property listings across the United Kingdom. Some of Zoopla’s rivals (e.g. RightMove) already have similar features.
The announcement follows neatly after last month’s report on developments at the National Trading Standards – Estate and Letting Agency Team (NTSELAT), which is reported to be considering updating the material information rules for property listings to require that agents include data on broadband ISP and mobile coverage (here).
The other important aspect of today’s news is that ZYBRE takes a wholesale solution from a large number of alternative fibre (AltNet) and major networks, including KCOM, F&W Networks, FullFibre Limited, MS3, Openreach (BT), CityFibre, Yatzi, OFNL and Gigaclear. As a result, Zoopla’s listings are likely to return a more reflective indication of local broadband availability than most.
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On the other hand, there are over 100 full fibre AltNets currently active in the UK, which means that even the data supplied by ZYBRE will have its limitations. But it’s still better than a number of other property listing sites, which often don’t even recognise most AltNets and may only show some limited data from Openreach based ISPs.
Jonny Robinson, ZYBRE CEO, told ISPreview:
“We’re pleased to be working with Zoopla to show prospective customers the speeds available when choosing a new home. Broadband is an important decision when moving house. Availability has become very complex with the new alternative networks now deploying fibre and most aggregates don’t show any alternative networks.”
We should point out that ZYBRE have not finished onboarding new networks to their retail broadband ISP service. The provider appears to be hoping to add availability for YouFibre, Lightning Fibre, Jurassic Fibre, ZZoomm, Fibrus, VXFIBRE (LilaConnect) and Fibre Nest in the future. But it’s yet to be confirmed if these are wholesale relationships, as ZYBRE also offers white-lable TV and landline replacement solutions to other altnets.
The approach to network aggregation being taken by ZYBRE is similar to other ISPs like Air Broadband, although it can sometimes make for a confusing array of prices and package choices.
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.
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they had it before back in 2018 and then all of a sudden stop showing it – i use rightmove and used to use zoopla a lot for this feature – this isnt new at all. lol
The idea isn’t new, but the news of ZYBRE doing it across multiple altnets for Zoopla is, and that’s somewhat of a first.
I hate the sponsored broadband thing on property websites. Like on rightmove, if there’s virgin media in the area then it will ONLY show virgin media, not all the options.
It feels like ZYBRE might end up acting as an interface between the access networks and the ISPs, allowing an ISP to sign one wholesale contract with ZYBRE (and use one set of APIs for provisioning etc.) and gain access to a large number of access networks. Clever move!