UK Full Fibre ISP Hyperoptic Get New Director of Business to Consumer
City-focused broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has so far extended their full fibre (FTTP/B) broadband network to cover “more than” 1.4 million UK homes across parts of 64 UK towns and cities, has today announced the appointment of Caroline Rider to become their new Director of Residential Broadband.
Caroline has 14 years of experience in commercial development, revenue generation and growth – having previously worked as the Head of Commercial at Acumen Commercial Insights. Prior to that, she was also the Head of Commercial at mobile operator SMARTY.
Hyperoptic are clearly hoping that the new appointment will help to “grow its expanding customer base and revenue“, which follows last year’s build slowdown and redundancies (here). The operator has since begun putting more effort into growing customer take-up and aim to expand their customer base to total 500,000 in the near future (currently 300,000 on 5th October 2023).
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The operator previously hoped to cover 2 million premises with their gigabit-capable broadband network by some point in 2024 (the original target was for the end of 2023), although it’s currently unclear when this target will be reached.
Lutfu Kitapci, CCO and MD of ISP at Hyperoptic, said:
“Caroline’s prowess in driving commercial success and company revenue is second to none. At Hyperoptic, she’s poised to unleash growth through her strategic foresight and marketing prowess. We’re extremely pleased to welcome her into our team.”
The news comes shortly after one report indicated that Hyperoptic were also attempting to raise up to £500m of additional capital in order to continue their network expansion (here).
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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At the moment the status of their network and customer support is a bit of a shamble. You get social media guys trying to sort out tech issues. Not blaming them, they put in the effort and it is to be appreciated nonetheless, however it is clear that with the latest round of layoffs they impacted the service level.
For example, their ipv6 stack is completely broken, and even though it is clearly not a priority for everyone, it is a bit of a shame that there is no one capable of fixing it. Feels like going back to virgin media, with no ipv6 and helpless customer support (to be fair, cs is still a step up from vm, I don’t think anyone can get that bad unless they really try to).
It’s a shame they have got that bad and fairly quickly.
When I was with them between Summer 2019 and late 2021 when I had to move and could not take their service with me, they were great and even did a review as well and hear they have gone downhill so quickly is a surprise to me.
Lay offs were about 5% of the staff if that.
I’ve been with them for about 6 years now, on a 1Gbps package.
It’s a bit worrying to hear they’re struggling, but you wouldn’t know it from their service which is always reliable, and I’m getting the speed I’m paying for. And I’m more than happy with the price, as they always match “new customer” pricing whenever I renew.
I hope they can succeed, but perhaps focusing on MDUs isn’t the growth area – I know several homeowners (semi-detached etc.) that would sign up with Hyperoptic, and have tried, but always been turned down.