Toob Expand FTTP Broadband to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
Network builder and UK ISP toob, which aspires to cover 1 million premises across the South of England by 2027 with their new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, has today revealed that their coverage is being expanded along the Dorset coastline to include Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole.
Just to recap. The operator, which was originally backed by £75m from the Amber Infrastructure Group (here) and “up to” £87.5m from the Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund (here), last month secured £160m of additional funding (debt financing) from Ares Management‘s Infrastructure Debt strategy (here) – this can be upsized up to £300m over time to support future growth opportunities.
Until now most of the operator’s deployments have tended to focus on cities and towns in the Surrey and Hampshire areas of southern England (e.g. Southampton, Camberley, Aldershot, Farnborough, Fareham and Gosport etc.). As a result, toob has already covered around 140,000 premises on their own full-fibre network, with the “vast majority ready for service” (no specific figure for RFS was given), and c. 20,000 customers.
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However, the operator has today announced that their network coverage is being expanded to include the neighbouring Dorset cities and towns of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, although we should caveat that this isn’t part of toob’s own fibre build. Instead, this reflects their existing agreement (complementary wholesale partnership) to harness Cityfibre’s FTTP rollout in the area, which until today had only been adopted in Portsmouth.
Approximately 95% of their customers are on toob’s own network, with the remainder on CityFibre’s network.
Nick Parbutt, CEO of toob, said:
“We are delighted to be able to offer our service to Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole. We believe that fast and reliable broadband is a necessity that everyone should have. We are committed to delivering the fastest and most reliable service, using the latest full-fibre technology, at an affordable price. Customers will benefit from speeds of 900Mbps for only £25 per month on an 18 month contract, with no in contract price rises; they can rely on toob to provide broadband that simply works.”
Customers of the service typically pay just £25 per month on an 18-month term for their 900Mbps (symmetric speed) package (£29 thereafter), which includes a router, unlimited usage and free installation. Suffice to say that they’re one of the cheapest providers in the market and this price applies regardless of whether you’re covered by toob’s own network, or the CityFibre platform.
At present, customers in the BCP area will only be able to “register their interest” in receiving the service via toob, which doesn’t yet appear to have gone fully live. But this may still irritate some of Cityfibre’s other ISPs in the same area, which tend to price their own 1Gbps packages a fair bit higher than toob does.
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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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They really meed to sort area they first started in, Southampton for example, my area shows taking orders ob map, but postcode checker says no, claim they can’t put pole up as people objected to it, but seen no evidence of this.
You didn’t read the whole thing did you. It literally says that it’s part of their CityFibre agreement and not their own roll out.
Wind in the trees – I don’t think its an unfair complaint. Toob have been plastering the wider southampton area with advertising for about a year yet its not widely available and they are missing out many commuter towns in the area. While its possible to do two things at once Toob really need to get their own rollout in order (Toob if you’re reading this please stop advertising directly to me when you’ve told me you’ve plans to cover where I live. I get online advertising regular from you.)
Winchester, for instance.
Not the point Wind in the trees, Southampton as far as I know isn’t part of the CityFibre deal but their own.
@ash
While I agree, The point is that toob won’t be digging in streets and laying infrastructure home to home in those new areas as city fibre or one of its partners has already done so. It’s semi equivalent to toob providing service over openreach, like plus net do, while also building their own infrastructure.
The more revenue they have coming in, the more likely they are to survive to complete your neighbourhood.
I can’t see them making up that they couldn’t put a pole in and maps not being down to the individual area covered by a pole is how it is. Availability maps would look ridiculous if they were down to the individual property.
People have definitely been complaining.
https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/19763264.southampton-city-council-cannot-prevent-poles-put-city/
If they wanted to put a pole in and now can’t I presume it would’ve been over budget for them to build any other way. That hasn’t changed.
Example of a direct complaint against Toob. They’d have had the same treatment Openreach did in the wider Southampton area.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/10/locals-on-southampton-street-angered-by-toob-telegraph-poles.html
Sonic: Giganet are building in your patch as you know. No-one else besides Openreach is likely. VM are upgrading their network so much of the city will have three options: the limit of many places, Winchester definitely being one of those. Population density is too low and build cost in many areas of this beautiful, and small, cathedral city too high to support any more.
XGS Is On:
The Giganet build in Winchester seems to have stalled. Not sure what is going on; there was a flurry of activity and it all seems to have gone quiet. I wrote to them and they said: “After my investigation of this address, it appears we do not have a date scheduled when the work will begin.” Not holding out much hope at this point.
VM are doing none of that sort. I wrote to them too (they refuse to supply to my property while some of my neighbours can get their services) and they said: “We’re sorry to say that things haven’t exactly gone to plan and we can’t bring Virgin Media to your area. We understand how frustrating this is, and can only apologise. Rest assured if anything does change we’ll be in touch.” I’ve been asking them for 7+ years.
Openreach – again no plans, at least until 2026. We haven’t even made it to their list of rollout locations. I wrote to the CEO and this is what they said:
“Firstly, the premises does have access to FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) currently and I understand this is the service you currently use but I understand that a full fibre (Fibre to the Premises/FTTP) is preferred. As we discussed there are no immediate plans with Openreach to bring FTTP to the area.
I’ve had a chat with the Senior Build teams for the Winchester Exchange and Winchester is a location which is not included within our Fibre First roll out which is to target 26 Million homes by 2026. I want to advise that we have not excluded the Winchester Exchange from our plans, we just simply haven’t had a plan commercially (Openreach Funded) for Fibre to the Premises yet. I know that this news is disappointing but the best advice I can give at present would be to stay close our website where we provide the most accurate information. Our plans can and do change so just because you are not within our plans now you potentially may be within our plans in the future.”
Yeah. Not happening any time soon.
That leaves us with… ZERO options.
Population density: Population density of Winchester (District) is on the low side, but it is higher than, say, Wiltshire or Chichester. Winchester city itself – it is fairly densely populated. Ranges from 2000 to 5300 persons per square kilometre, which is comparable to many other cities.
And bizarrely, Openreach /are/ rolling out to Twyford and New Alresford, both of which have much lower population density compared to Winchester city. There is no excuse to exclude us.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/population/population-density/population-density/persons-per-square-kilometre?lad=E07000094
Put this way, Winchester is very comparable to Salisbury which has way better FTTP coverage than us.
Without some sort of special intervention, we are not likely to get anything faster than FTTC for years to come. Many very rural locations are likely to be covered way before we do.
Just to add, Virgin Media only cover about 55% of properties in Winchester currently. As far as I can tell, they are not doing any large scale deployments here.
Problem with Winchester is that (ignoring newer suburbs) as England’s capital for hundreds of years, and relatively little development in the past few centuries, it’s sitting on some of the richest archaeology in Britain. In the 1950s and 1960s people preferred progress over pot shards, these days there’s moral outrage at the slightest hint of churning over old dirt. Even if you can get permission to dig for new ducts or pole foundations, as soon as you hit some scabby pottery fragment or old dog bone it all grinds very expensively to a halt until some professor has given his opinion on the matter.
London doesn’t quite have the same problem because most of the ground has been turned over so much already by intervening generations and those nice Germans, and the archaeological centres of other long established cities (York, Chichester, Salisbury etc) are mostly a lot smaller
with so many alt nets seemingly circling the drain, tapping into cityfibre’s locations looks like a good way to grow turnover to keep the investors happy while cracking on with their other areas.
If it keeps the bailiff at bay then its a good start.
The other alt nets would be wise to try and do similar before they end up folding.
Yep, I’m of the opinion that the best way forward for the altnets is to create a common wholesale platform so any isp can can access any network and also not overbuild each other which in my opinion is wasteful of expensive resources. Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet recently suggested this is what he would like to see. Then perhaps everyone can have a reasonable business.
@Big Dave – problem with that approach is not all altnets have the same capabilities/service expectations. We’ve had Trooli and Giganet installing where I am for 18+ months. Trooli seemed to just blow cables into the ducts where as Giganet have put in a lot of infrastructure (so many manholes to cover the equipment). While nether are live yet I’m hoping to hold out for Giganet as their deployment seems in my semi-professional view (I do a lot of LAN networks) far more professional and better quality. I’d want to know when signing up with an ISP which underlying network they use before I’d sign up. Otherwise it does sound like a good idea and something I think is happening with some of the bigger players.
What happens after 18yo the £25 is not sustainable.