Toob Expand FTTP via CityFibre into Worthing, Brighton and Hove
Network builder and UK broadband ISP toob has today announced that their coverage via CityFibre’s existing Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network has been expanded again. This time they’ve moved toward East Sussex and are now becoming available to homes in Worthing, Brighton and Hove.
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), recently 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.
As part of that, toob are aiming to build their own full fibre network to cover 1 million premises across the South of England by 2027, which has so far tended to focus on cities and towns in the Surrey and Hampshire areas (e.g. Southampton, Camberley, Aldershot, Farnborough, Fareham and Gosport etc.).
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However, the provider also have a complementary network partnership with CityFibre, which has already enabled them to expand their availability into Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. But today’s news sees them add Worthing, Brighton and Hove to that list.
Nick Parbutt, CEO of toob, said:
“We are delighted to be able to offer our service to Worthing, Brighton and Hove. 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 CityFibre.
One catch is that those covered by CityFibre’s network in the three new locations can currently only “register their interest” in receiving the service (i.e. it’s not yet fully live to place an order). Sadly, it’s unclear when this will change, but we imagine it won’t take long, as broadcasting an expansion without providing an ability to place a proper service order is far from ideal.
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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Why not Eastbourne?
Looks to me like they’re concentrating on contiguous areas for expansion via CF, and that would make sense for a smaller ISP who rely on local advertising, leaflet drop and field sales for their sales and marketing.
Eastbourne is a logical next step (along with Bexhill & Hastings if they have CF), but if they try to do all the way from Worthing to Hastings, their efforts will be very thinly spread across fifty miles of coastline, and that’s more costly and likely to achieve lower sales. The ideal is local advertising and news presence, follow up with leaflet drop as soon as RFS, and a week or two after the leaflet drop have field sales knock on every single door. The trickiest of those is door knocking, because it’ll take several passes over a number of weeks to get say 95% of doors answered. If spread across a much bigger area then the time gaps become bigger, and by the time you get the door answered it’s “Toob who?”
Surprising they’re able to offer at the same fantastic price, when it’s (a) outside their wholesale network, and (b) not part of that original deal they made with CityFibre. The first time they made a deal with CityFibre, they were able to swap access to their networks.
Possibly sacrificing some profit margin and or using a greater subsidy.
And it’s possibly important for CF as well. They need more connected properties to get their asset utilisation up, and adding another ISP, especially somebody who can differentiate as “we’re local” is all good for them. If CF had to compromise on the pricing for toob, then so long as that’s still getting CF a credible operating margin both sides still win.
The only way it doesn’t work for CF is if toob are cannibalising customers from existing CF ISPs. CF will acutely aware of that churn risk amongst their wholesale customers, but I’m not sure they can do too much about it.
CityFibre are pretty desperate. Once a month or so they write to me offering me £50 to sign up with one of their providers.
@xgs
Vm must be really desperate if they are offering huge discounts plus freebies to get people to join their platform.
I’m currently getting 1gig for £20 on vm.
VM have always had a massive range of pricing for any specific offer – customer who know the retentions game can beat VM’s new customer pricing, but anybody without the time, skill and determination will find that they’re paying well over what they might otherwise have got.
And underlying that is of course that VM are desperate to retain customers. Project Lightning was an expensive failure in terms of delivering either growth or margin. Customer numbers have been pretty static since that started back in what 2017, and ARPU has shown a modest downward trend even in cash terms – factor in inflation and it’s even worse. The welcome distraction of the O2 merger gives things to shout about in financial results, but doesn’t actually change the poor returns the cable business gives. Hence why VM are so aggressive in terms of retentions, because relatively static customer numbers are apparently tolerable despite the vast Ligtning capex, but they need to avoid declining customer numbers as that’s something they can’t twist into a positive, or gloss over.
VM more desperate than CF? Probably not because it take a long time to crash a multi-million customer business, on the other hand a day of reckoning will come.
Does anyone have any update on the CF rollout in Brighton? Seems that the area just north of me (Kemptown seafront) went live last year, now nothing more. Are we looking at months or years?