YouFibre Follow Netomnia’s UK Full Fibre Build Slowdown with Hiring Spree

The decision by alternative broadband operator Netomnia (Substantial Group) to significantly scale-back their roll-out of full fibre (FTTP) broadband across the UK, which was recently followed by another round of redundancies (here), needs to be tempered against the fact that their retail ISP – YouFibre – are now busy hiring lots of new staff.

Netomnia has certainly had quite a busy year so far. At the last count the operator’s 7-8Gbps speed broadband network had already covered over 3 million UK premises (inc. 500,000 customers) and they were initially still expanding at pace. But the combination of wider market pressures and nexfibre’s (some shared parentage with Virgin Media and O2) agreement to buy Netomnia, which is still subject to an ongoing competition review, was later followed by a bit of a change in strategy.

Since then, Netomnia has been reducing their roll-out, which is also partly what fuelled some of the recent redundancies. But like many other vertically integrated altnets they’ve responded to this challenge by focusing on greater commercialisation, which has involved hiring a sizeable number of new sales agents on the YouFibre (retail) side of the business.

YouFibre has never stopped hiring, although a quick check of their careers feed by ISPreview (credits to Shaukat for the tip) identifies that they’re now in the process of seeking to recruit around 80 or so sales agents across the various localities they service (many of them described as being full-time “Door to Door Sales Executives“); that’s a fairly significant amount of local and regional sales staff. Some good news then, after the recent job cuts in their network business.

The above is of course to be expected from a commercialisation strategy and, now that Netomnia have switched to focus more on retail growth, we should also start to see take-up climb at a much stronger rate than before. Of course, this may become a moot point once the nexfibre deal gets clearance (assuming that to be the outcome), as the retail base will eventually be merged into VMO2’s figures.

The group’s most recent results to the end of Q4 2025 revealed that their revenues had increased to £104m (up 168% year-on-year) and they were delivering positive adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of £5m (up from £0.3m in Q3). However, Netomnia’s prior network build also meant that their Net Debt had grown by 69% in the year to total £905m (debt drawn to date including accrued interest less cash), which is up from £801m in Q3.