Netomnia Raise Extra £160m and Target 5 Million UK Premises for FTTP Broadband
Alternative network operator Netomnia (Brsk and ISP YouFibre), which has now expanded their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 2.4 million UK premises RFS (up from 2.2m end of Feb 2025) and connected 310,000 customers (up from 270k), has boosted their coverage target to 5 million premises and raised £160m in debt funding.
Just to recap. Netomnia is currently in the process of completing their merger with Brsk (here) and had previously been aiming to expand their full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to reach 3 million premises by the end of 2025 (inc. 1 million customers by 2028). The service is currently available across parts of over 90 UK cities and towns.
The good news today is that the network operator has raised another £160 million in junior debt from I Squared Capital and Palistar Capital. This investment builds on an £880 million senior debt commitment, bringing total funding support to £1.04 billion.
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The move helps to support Netomnia’s current annual build rate of 1 million premises, which also means that they’re now increasing their target from 3 million premises serviceable by the end of 2025 to 5 million by the end of 2027. The group is also expected to achieve positive EBITDA in 2025.
Jeremy Chelot, Group CEO of Netomnia, YouFibre, and brsk, said:
“This £160 million junior debt facility represents resounding market confidence in our execution and financial discipline. As we connect thousands more homes and businesses with the UK’s most powerful internet, this funding ensures we can sustain our growth trajectory while delivering strong, long-term value.”
Mohammed El Gazzar, Senior Partner, I Squared Capital, said:
“Netomnia has firmly established itself as one of the UK’s leading alternative broadband providers through a unique combination of rapid deployment, operational excellence, and cost efficiency. With one of the lowest build costs in the market, a highly experienced management team, and strong backing from premier sponsors, Netomnia is well positioned to continue its impressive growth trajectory. As part of our European strategy, we are pleased to support the company’s next phase of expansion, helping extend reliable, affordable fibre connectivity to millions more homes across the UK.”
The development positions Netomnia to become one of the UK market’s largest broadband networks. Not to mention that they’re also working toward becoming one of the first internet providers in the UK to deploy 50Gbps broadband (50G PON) technology via Adtran and are planning to launch their own mobile service this year too.
Crucially, they’re doing this at a time when most other altnets have had to pause or slow their builds in order to focus more on commercialisation, which stems from pressures being caused by rising build costs, high interest rates and competition.
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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Netomnia have had a bad few weeks for outages lasting hours.
Member of the family was new with them and within a couple of weeks of each other, two big outages that lasted 12 hours+. Good thing was they emailed admitting a service issue, bad thing is that youfibre or netomnia don’t have a service status page on their Web site. Really bad.
Other than that though, the symmetric service is great speeds all the time, just need to concentrate on stability.
Hopefully, this was a blip, but will be deciding contract fate if more of them. All operators suffer outages, it’s just whether the quantity over a year is single hand figures or more. As TV moves to be delivered by IP all ISPs need to get ther act together.
I think what really matters is how the outages are handled by the operator than the quantity of them. Customers will be much more willing to put up with them if they published post-mortems and the steps they’re taking to prevent that type of outage from occurring again – it significantly boosts morale and gives clear insight to those who want/need it.
A good example for this is Cloudflare as they extensively document each and every outage and incident they encounter.
Outages suck, but they happen and are ultimately inevitable and sometimes unavoidable, so communication with customers is key 🙂
Just joined them, So good news for the continueing investment from the city.
Hopefully that means they will continue to expand their footprint across Midlothian as part of their Musselburgh exchange development (since they appear to consider that the “planned area” for that area is to be sourced from the Musselburgh exchange). They seemingly cut back on their plans in late 2024 and haven’t seen anything to indicate they are expanding that coverage.
The map is useless, compare that to Think Broadband and you’ll see them building outside the marked area in Scotland
Where can you see Netomnia building outside the area?
Similar situation in West Lothian. They got halfway through East Calder and then got bored it seems :-/
Winchburgh in West Lothian is outside their highlighted area
Here in North Wales on One.Network every now and then Netomnia work turns up south of Wrexham, as in the original area which got dropped.
@James: While Winchburgh has had some development, most of that build appears to be for the many new build properties being constructed there, rather than any kind of serious build to the town itself. Hopefully Netomnia will announce something soon regarding their build plans for 2025 and beyond, as its been way too quiet on that front for a while now……..
Jeremy said a couple of years ago they only needed 13% take up to break even. They are now on the cusp of hitting that milestone.
“Break even” as in “EBITDA positive”? Or does that level of take-up also cover servicing the enormous accumulated debt?
From what he said at the time I took that to mean full profitability, servicing debts etc.
In January I was promised to go live in 3 months. Again nothing happening. Cable bundles in poles at least 2 years, just need to do splicing.
Now it’s 4 years since first Youfibre phone call about going live by December 2021 in PE13 3TL… .
Very disappointed, just promises…. Stuck with outdated OpenReach FTTP who not offering symmetric speeds.
Yes, similar here. In 2022/2023 they sent letters to each house in my road saying fast, reliable internet was coming (CT16 3AS) and then kept quiet.
Towards end of 2023, I sent emails to customer service asking where it was, even gave alternative routes of getting the fibre up an alley way (hidden) using an extra pole or 2 from the road opposite where they have cabled. The route is by overhead BT poles from a chamber 400M away on main road if they followed the BT route.
No idea what the hold up is, but the good news is that BT Openreach renewed the telegraph poles and their network team was trying to put a CBT up the pole. They said May 2025 was the date when the road would have BT FTTP. The fibre is already done on the main road as saw them (Openreach) late one evening last year with a huge drum of fibre.
I really want Netomnia 2gbps + static IP, so hoping they follow behind BT and put their CBT up. It’s been a long wait and FTTC has been filled to capacity for ages on the cabinet. Rest of family have Netomnia/You Fibre through my recommendation and got them off Virgin Media, and one BT.
I highly doubt they “promised” you, do you have it signed to headed letter paper?
They may have said, the current time line looks to be X date but this may change
Cool. If they can add Berkhamsted back into their plans, that would be nice.
They seem to be the real deal