Alternative broadband ISP toob, which perhaps questionably claims to be “the UK’s fastest broadband provider“, has today announced that their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in the Hampshire (England) market town of Fareham has started to go live for the first local homes.
In case anybody has forgotten, toob announced in October 2022 (here) that they would invest £7m to cover 19,000 premises in Fareham. The move complemented their other deployment efforts in the South of England, such as in Southampton, Portsmouth, Aldershot, Eastleigh, Chandler’s Ford, Camberley, Frimley, Ash, Farnborough, Green, Guildford, Mytchett, West Byfleet and Woking etc.
The operator, which was originally backed by an investment of £75m via the Amber Infrastructure Group (here) and more 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). The next locations to be reached will be Gosport and Lee-On-The-Solent.
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However, toob will not be alone in Fareham, since Virgin Media’s gigabit-capable broadband network is also present and Openreach are planning to build FTTP across the same town.
Nick Parbutt, CEO and founder of toob, said:
“At toob we want all members of the Fareham community to benefit from all that full-fibre can bring, so we provide all our customers with 900Mbps at only £25 per month. We firmly believe the deployment of full-fibre networks is an economic and social necessity and the current challenges we are facing only reinforces our view.”
As for that claim of being “the UK’s fastest broadband provider“, it’s linked to a limited speedtest based study of alternative networks that we did at the end of last year, using data from Thinkbroadband (here). But while it might be true to say that toob came top in a partial study of alternative networks in the UK (there wasn’t enough data to cover all AltNets), the provider probably shouldn’t extrapolate that to reflect a claim of being the “UK’s fastest” when their top package is 1Gbps (others offer 2Gbps to 10Gbps) and the network has very limited availability in only part of England.
Wrong town starting with Far (for me).
Just renewed with vm this month and got an email about price rise, hopefully I can leave vm once toob start going live for customers here in Farnborough
I’ve seen the fibre cables come out of the ground and get taped to telegraph poles in my part of Farnborough. So hopefully not too far away now as I want to leave Virgin Media as well. I’m out of contract so just waiting for toob now
I’ve seen them put cabs up and constant road works recently along the Farnborough road even down to Aldershot and by the Tesco’s roundabout.
I’ve been told they should be taking orders within 6 months but am hoping it’s much sooner.
https://bidb.uk/ Has been useful to see whats going on where
Re VM, i phoned and cancelled and they called back offering £26 pm for 1 gig including an O2 sim. I don’t get 1 gig but really can’t be bothered to complain, i will do if it means i can escape when needed though.
I was hoping it would be “Far”nham to give Swish Fibre some competition as loads of people who have been waiting on Swish for more than a year after they announced their service had “gone live” in Farnham. I’ve been waiting a year and half myself and have had nothing but excuses and delays from them.
Saw a van from https://fwnetworks.co.uk parked on my road a few weeks ago and they said they were installing fibre here too now, seems to be on behalf of https://heybroadband.co.uk/ if anyone has any info on them?
Would be great to a Swish Fibre section on the ISP list to hear from all the other disgruntled customers as they tend to delete negative comments on their Facebook adverts.
They are the fastest not because they sell the fastest package but because they only sell a 1Gbps package so the “slower” packages do not lower their average. You can see how Community Fibre which only sell 20mb/150mb/300mb/920mb/3000mb packages is much better and second in the table.
To be honest these average speed test aggregations are useless as measuring the “fastest ISP” because they don’t take into account the customer package. I will do it in a much different way. Take the highest ever speed in an area from each ISP. That’s a more relevant metric. Most customers won’t be in the top speed plan.
Sorry I just don’t get why these companies are willing to invest in overbuilding when there is already virgin and shortly openreach fttp, especially when there are other towns and villages in the Southampton-Portsmouth-Winchester-Romsey conurbation where there is an active interest in something better than shoddy fttc. For example, the semi-rural areas around Romsey like Ampfield, Braishfield etc…No hint there!