Zzoomm’s Full Fibre Sees 20% Take-up in Sandhurst and Crowthorne
Broadband ISP Zzoomm, which aspires to reach 1 million premises in 85 UK towns with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network by the end of 2025, has revealed that take-up of the new service in the towns of Sandhurst and Crowthorne has already exceeded the 20% mark – only seven months after finishing the build.
Admittedly, take-up can vary a lot between locations, depending upon competition (overbuild) between rivals, consumer awareness and a variety of other factors (i.e. some of their locations will not be doing this well). But reaching 20% in such a short space of time is still a very promising start.
The operator, which is currently being fuelled by an equity investment of £100m from Oaktree Capital (here) and a £100m debt facility via an international banking consortium (here), has so far covered 150,000 premises (Ready for Service) across 29 locations (an extra 50,000 since February 2023) and they’re also home to over 12,00 customers (up from 3,700 in 2022).
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Customers who take the residential service typically pay from £29.95 per month (currently discounted to £19.95) for an unlimited 150Mbps (symmetric speed) package on a 12-month term with an included router, which goes up to just £54.95 (currently discounted to £19.95) if you want their top 2Gbps tier.
Chief Executive, Matthew Hare, said:
“The construction of our brilliant fast new network in Sandhurst and Crowthorne was a watershed moment for local homes and businesses. The old copper network in the area used by their old providers really held them back. For the first time, homes and businesses had a choice of network. And what a choice: A Full Fibre infrastructure that that is totally fit for the future that blows you away.
It’s clear that Sandhurst and Crowthorne residents and businesses have really understood the benefits of gigafast broadband and are taking advantage of our investment in future-ready Full Fibre broadband. We’re delighted to welcome so many customers to Zzoomm in only the few months since finishing the build. But this is just the beginning: recommend your neighbours and friends right now, and let’s get them Zzoomming too.”
The provider also used the opportunity to plug their refer-a-friend reward scheme (Zzoomm.com/refer), which has seen the company commit to over £20,000 cash referral rewards to customers so far this year. Customers can now earn £50 for referring a friend, family member or neighbour to Zzoomm and the friend also earns £50.
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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I’m not surprised take up is good. We only had Openreach around here, then Zzoomm came along and jump forward to today – Zzoomm, Trooli, Swish, Openreach FTTP and now just finished digging our street is Virgin Media.
20% take-up… Is that really something to celebrate?
I believe they’ll require much more than that to make a profit and regain in business long term.
20% take up in seven months, that is not bad, don’t forget a lot of people will still be in contract, Zzoomm was here 6 months before I was able to change to it.
I hope it improves, but they need to get improve their customer service. while i have not needed it there have been people complain that emails are not being answered, sounds like Talk Talk and BT.
It’s not bad if it’s just the first couple of months. Openreach went live in our street 2 years ago and now its just pushing towards 40%. Considering we have pretty good FTTC (i was getting the full 80mbps) that’s not bad. Swish are currently overbuilding the area and it remains to be seen what the take up is likely to be. I imagine for most people if Netflix streams without buffering that’s probably good enough for most people.
It is a positive to get 20% in that space of time. People often don’t realise that adoption grows slowly and organically with time, while getting to 20% in seven months is well above usual expectations.
Check out this early take-up data between March 2015 (roughly two years after the first build started) and December 2015 from the original BDUK Superfast Broadband (FTTC) programme with BT/Openreach. But remember that BT had a huge advantage back then due to there being hardly any (often none) infrastructure competitors and strong marketing/support from familiar big brand ISPs in the areas of deployment.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/03/q4-2015-bduk-bt-uk-superfast-broadband-take-figures.html
The figures for March 2015 vary between about 6% and 20%, but given the above, we’d consider this sort of adoption to be normal for a build in areas with little to no competition. Some build contracts were only 1 year old, others were 2 years+ and all of these were active deployments – meaning they hadn’t competed, so the rapid rate of rollout will have also been suppressing the take-up figure somewhat (i.e. homes being covered faster than customers can join).
Put another way, Zzoomm’s 20%, in at least those two locations, is very good for 7 months in a more competitive market and without big brand ISP support. The more they can add, the sooner those local builds will deliver a payback.
The other thing to remember is that the majority of customers are with large ISPs and so will be locked into 18-24 month contracts with onerous early termination charges. Such long contracts act as a significant brake on switching rates and work to make life difficult for altnets and smaller ISPs.
@Big Dave, you are fgoirgetting that a lot of people who go for Openreach network are already on their FTTC network via a ISP, so a lot of people will just keep to the ISP they have been with for years, they don’t look around.
in my street, Openreach FTTP have been available since December and while I can’t see all the houses, from what I have seen they have 4 houses connected, out of around 50, Zzoomm i see is 5, plus mine.
The debt at zooooom is growing as well. I wouldn’t expect these to be around within the next 5 years which i guess is why there is a lot of overbuilding happening
How the Openreach fanboys will love that.
This is an Openreach haters website anyway. Its only natural to hate the market leaders i guess.
@Jason, the market leaders who had the network dirt cheap and for years spent little money on it until they had to. I remember BT in the early days when they would drag their heals to fix a fault, not much better now to be honest. That was before they split into Openreach pretending that it was a separate company, something that are still doing.
Don’t be so quick to knock out alt nets, Bloated Toad is not doing so well at the moment, plenty of people who would get rid of them if they had the chance.
Having a monopoly of a network is not good, having a monopoly of anything is not good, they get lazy and care less about their customers than they do now.
Hate is a strong word, I don’t hate Openreach, but I am glad they have competition, my problem is the amount of money they get from the public purse.
I can tell your definitely one of the sore ones . Touchy subject for you then, Looking at Openreach repair performance it seems they are doing really well and over achieving their targets agreed with Ofcom.
I think its a different organisation to what you are referring to and maybe Openreach of old was most definitely underperforming .
@Jason, maybe now, but only because Useless Ofcom have at last got on their backs. My parents many years ago was left without a phone for days because Openreach or BT as it was then, could not be bothered to fix it. It was only when my Dad said he would not pay the next bill if it was not sorted that they got of their backsides.
Openreach.Bt have got competition now so if they don’t fix the problems, then people will go elsewhere.
It took me a while to decide to go to fibre as I was fine with what I was using, but now I am with fibre and on a non-openreach network, I hope I never have to go back to Openreach. I have decided that if Zzoomm did go under and I did not like the company who took them over, then I would go for a mobile network instead.
But people annoys me on here, it is as if they want companies to go belly, I bet some of them are rubbing their hands with glee at alt network going belly up or having problems,.
I hate people.