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.
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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.
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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‘full time “Door to Door Sales Executives“ … Some good news’
Door to Door sales people are *never* good news.
There was one on the forum last year doing nothing but touting, hopefully we don’t see many more
It will be interesting to see if YouFibre is indeed subsumed into the VMO2 brand (or whatever that becomes) (if the acquisition goes ahead) or if it will be retained to focus, say, on fibre-only customers not seeking multiplay options.
They need to hire some support staff, and fix their horrible congested network in the Brsk areas!
Curious where? I’ve had no issue
I’ve been complaining for months to support, also was client of Brsk. Definitely leaving after the end of my contract.
Send me an email AK and I am sure I can help solving your issues.
The churn rate of d2d staff at Youfibre is huge, most don’t last 3/4 months
They’ve advertised for D2D and field sales role under every location under the sun for years. Presumably due to churn, growth and partly external optics
https://web.archive.org/web/20250328090904/https://www.youfibre.com/careers/
Not what I’d characterise as a “hiring spree” as suggested. No criticism of YF
I tend to spend as much time as possible with someone who knocks on my door, fully well knowing I won’t be purchasing a thing. The this country episode comes to mind where the older gent tells his life story
And when you do that you’re actively spending your time trying to make someone lose their job. The job that pays their mortgage and feeds their family. Why would you do that? What is wrong with you?
You’re not harming the company they work for who will just sack them and hire someone else – you’re choosing just to harm the individual.
Appalling behaviour.
I was at the receving end (as was most of the country) of d2d energy sales back in the day.
A bunch of lying scumbags would be generous to most of them – not all, I’ll grant. But bad enough that the practice was banned.
So don’t pull that “just trying to earn a living, guv” line. The call centre scammers on the phone clearly feel them same too when I’ve held them on the line for 15-20 minutes. Finally giving my email address as “[email protected]” (yes, it will work) when they ask for it causes an impressive double-take, followed by
It’s a service to the broader community.