ISP Toob Puts New 1Gbps Broadband Network Live in Fareham

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.

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.