New Techy Focused Broadband ISP Olilo Goes Live for UK Consumers
The United Kingdom may not exactly be short on broadband ISPs at the moment, but today we welcome another one into the fold – Olilo. The new internet provider claims not to be targeting the mass market and has positioned itself more as a product for the “niche market … of geeks/nerds/homelabbers, sysadmins” etc.
The service has been in the private trial phase for the past few months, but recently began to open up for new customers, and their website certainly exudes that ‘coder’ vibe through its design. Prices start at £36 per month for speeds of 900Mbps and go up to £50 for their top 2.3Gbps plans (5Gbps is “coming soon“), supplied via both Openreach and CityFibre’s respective FTTP networks. But new connections do attract a one-off installation charge of £60 to £130, depending on network.
The good news is that Olilo doesn’t do CGNAT, but instead offers static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses by default (dual-stack) and seems to have a mix of 12-month and no contract options. On the flip side, you will need to bring your own router in order to use the service, as they don’t currently bundle their own options into the packages.
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Liam Mulryan, Director of Olilo, said:
“We’re stripping out the contracts, hidden clauses and vague promises that plague traditional ISPs, and replacing them with straight-up transparency, technical freedom and speeds that actually match what’s on the tin.
We’re built for the geeks, the sysadmins, the home-lab tinkerers and anyone who hates being treated like they don’t know how the internet works. That means static IPs, no throttling, no traffic shaping, bring-your-own-router if you want, and real-time visibility of how our network is running – all on simple rolling terms so you can leave any time (where our partners allow flexibility with contracts we try and give everyone monthly rolling, and where we haven’t yet we are working with partners to try and get this done).”
Liam originally helped to found another internet provider, Yayzi, before moving away at the start of 2025 to setup his own independent ISP in the shape of Olilo with a new team and ideas etc. (company details). The provider currently appears to be running its own core network (after initially using Velox).
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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Could be a good competitor for Merula on OFNL.
@Name
think OFNL will be too slow and restrictive for them.
I like the vibe. Good luck to them. I might consider them next contract renewal assuming early customers report a good service.
This looks decent. It is rare to have relevant and complete information right in front of me without excessive marketing trickery.
Since they are marketing it for home labbers, I think it would be good if they could supply additional v4 addresses (even if it would be £2-3/address).
Will they roll out their service to VDSL or does it stay FTTH only?
They do provide more IPs. /29 block for £6 a month it says on their pricing tables
I somehow missed it. Thank you for pointing it out!
£6 for a /29 seems to be a fair price. I’ll keep this ISP in mind when CF will finally be live here and I can switch.
ooh! Looks good. A company providing broadband not broadband plus router plus full home WiFi plus plus plus extra costs. I hope their customer service is good. Now all I need is a fibre connection 🙁
I put in my postcode and it says:
“CityFibre are yet to service this address. If you’d still like to join us, contact us and we’ll look at other alt nets.”
But the checker doesn’t mention Openreach at all – which I have. Hence it’s unclear if the checker isn’t looking at OR at all, or if they have only partial OR coverage.
It’s not an OR checker, in any way.
Looks great, although they seem to have gone ‘too geek’ and misrepresented the CityFibre technology options. As far as I know, you can’t actually select a GPON or an XGS-PON service from them. If you’re in an XGS enabled area, you’ll get an XGS-PON service.. They are presenting the illusion of technical choice, when it isn’t.
A /48 seems a little unnecessary for home, but nice to have. But PPPoE? Doesn’t work great with some devices that their target audience is likely to have (eg. Ubiquiti).
Are geeks and nerds going to be using Ubiquiti?
We don’t use PPPoE (except on OR) We use DHCP on CityFibre 🙂
/48 might be unneeded for the home, but the feedback we had was a /48 was a must haha.
CityFibre is DHCP not PPPoE 🙂
Very much so. Ubiquiti has a large market with people that run home labs. The combination of ‘enterprise-lite’ features behind a slick management interface is appealing.
You can configure VLANs, layer-3 features, advanced WiFi, policy-based firewall etc. Everything you need to run a pretty sophisticated home lab. It isn’t pfsense / opnsense / etc. so there are features they don’t have. But it does pretty much everything even more advanced home lab users want.
I think that they will find a lot of their customers are running Ubiquiti kit.
@Liam thanks for the response.
It was PPPoE on OR that I was thinking of, given I’m not in a CF area. It has overhead and isn’t as nice to configure compared to IPoE. I’m not an expert, but I thought it was considered legacy technology? It isn’t a deal-breaker though, as my UCG-Fiber has PPPoE hardware offload. But on older models they can hit a ceiling with PPPoE.
The /48 makes sense and I believe is the recommendation anyway. It can make configuration earlier, so it’s nice to see and great that you have that as the default.
Whether you need a /48 depends on how many networks/VLANs have at home. For me it is quite important.
Interesting. I always took Ubiquiti stuff as influencer-bait. Wireless fine, with quirks, gateways overpriced and underfeatured for gateway use devoting resources to doing everything instead of just routing, switching and firewall.
The recommended ipv6 block sizes for delegation are /64 or /48, but /56 is also acceptable.
Bear in min there are 2^80 /48 available in ipv6 or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 in long form. You loose a few for special ranges but im sure you get the drift
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3177#section-3
Notably Olilo aren’t listed as a customer on the Cityfibre website. Does anyone know which reseller they buy through? Same question for Openreach?
As far as I remember this is something that needs agreed on with CityFibre, some of those listed aren’t even direct customers with them
As far as I can tell that list is accurate for residential services. Which ISPs listed aren’t direct customers @james?
Perhaps @Liam can confirm if they have direct network links to Cityfibre?
The article mentions Velox. We’re using them as our aggregator and on our own core for L2 hand off, they’ve been absolutely rock solid for us (and for other providers who use them too) this is for both OR and CF
I hope that helps
@Liam Olilo
What sort of ping times can someone living in North Scotland expect on your Cityfibre FTTP packages? Is < 20ms possible?
We’ve some customers in Glasgow getting 12ms. So I suspect sub 20ms wouldn’t be an issue for you.
Not available through Openreach at the moment, have checked, seems it’s CityFibre or nothing! Not a great start!
They do have Openreach too but for some reason the test is restricted to CityFibre only.
If you click on Order Now at the top you’ll be taken to a page where you can choose a 12m Openreach contract.
Fantastic. I wish Olilo well as I’m sick of every other ISP trying to shoehorn extras in like wifi as a subscription, etc. Let me use my own kit and I’m happy.
FWIW, they may be underplaying the “availability in select areas”. OK, it’s an FTTP only provider. But a few postcodes I checked where Openreach FTTP is available were negative, and one with CityFibre was negative.