Alternative Broadband Operator FullFibre Cuts Jobs Post Zzoomm Merger
Alternative UK network operator FullFibre Limited (Fibre Heroes), which in early March 2025 completed its merger with Zzoomm (here), has in the past few weeks begun to notify staff of further redundancies. Most of the cuts appear to be coming from their internal fibre build and supporting teams, and this also extends to some senior leadership levels.
Just to recap. The newly combined full fibre (FTTP) broadband network currently reaches 600,000 premises (ready for service) and “over” 70,000 customers (up from 65k+ in January 2025) across England – serving parts of approximately 110 market towns, which makes it one of the UK’s largest altnets. This reflects both their open access wholesale fibre network alongside their in-house retail ISPs (BeFibre and Zzoomm).
Readers may recall that the merger announcement talked about delivering “funding for new builds“, albeit without providing any solid figures (they’re trying to secure it) or setting any new coverage targets, and at the same time spoke of achieving “greater operational and financial efficiencies through economies of scale“. But they’ll still need to spend time and money conducting the physical integration of both FTTP networks.
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However, the reality is that such mergers often also result in job losses, which frequently occur as the larger company moves to remove duplicate roles and deliver on those “efficiencies“. On this front, ISPreview recently noted a sharp uptick in people expecting to be made redundant from the business. Most of this occurred around 2-3 weeks ago, and credible sources informed us that around 50 jobs are to be cut.
A spokesperson for both companies told ISPreview:
“Post the recent merger announcement between FullFibre and Zzoomm, we can confirm that we are now entering into an organisational review which delivers on our business strategy to combine the two companies into a single operating model.”
The reality is that, short of a major funding announcement, the newly combined group seems likely to focus more of its efforts upon commercialisation of their existing network – much as the wider market has done (due to pressures from rising build costs, stubbornly high interest rates and competition etc.). But the operator did also previously that they’re now “well-positioned to drive M&A across the fragmented sector“, although it remains to be seen whether they’ll continue to be consolidators or become one of the consolidated.
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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11pc take-up; that is very low.
That’s not as bad as you’d think, some areas will be higher and the lower new areas you shouldn’t really count until at least 2 years old when people might start switching
Not the worst take up. One altnet had only managed 7%.
I suspect above average, it’s the ones that keep quiet about take up I’d be most concerned about.
@James: Of course it is bad.
@ FFF: It does not worry me, I have funds invested in the AltNets.
@Big Dave: You may well be right. I have not seen any figures comparing the AltNets, but I doubt AltNets with very low take-up would want it to be widely known.
They were supposed to be doing Dankshire Town. Another alt-net came in, but haven’t finished the job.
Perhaps if they spent less money on pretty vans and more investing in a relativity affluent area gagging for decent broadband, the uptake would be higher.
The merger was more of a Full Fibre takeover of Zoom. So I will have a good guess at where the job losses are going to be.
Well, you’re definitely not in the know as that is incorrect!
Big props for Netomnia and Brsk for not cutting jobs and actually caring for the people who brought them forward
I feel for the people losing their jobs, sadly it happens, jobs have been lost where i work because the company decided to get rid of things they did not think they needed, but in my opinion doing so have made the products worse quality.
I expected some jobs would go.
I am satisfied with the service I get from Zzoomm, we see what happens later on.
John posting about Netomnia and Brsk not cutting jobs, not yet maybe, but time will tell.
I feel for the FullFibre team who went through similar not too long ago when they merged with Digital Infrastructure.
These things happen as part of any merger, but I’ve seen no improvement service from FullFibre – still far too many outages, it’s ridiculous – so it seems like more of a cost cut than a focus on customer growth and satisfaction.
It’s a shame because I’m sure the next axe will be on the retail ISPs and one will go, but surely sensible heads will prevail and they’ll at least try and operate both brands using different propositions and growth strategies.
Still, all about the profit eh…
No, it’s all about reducing the losses. Otherwise everybody will lose their jobs.
We had an install from them the other day, and there was a wait of about 15 – 20ish minutes for the team in the office to activate the connection. I think the engineer mentioned something about staff lay offs since it was an unusually long wait.