Broadband altnet FullFibre Ltd to cut more jobs and outsource UK support
Sources have informed ISPreview that alternative UK broadband operator FullFibre Limited, which in 2023 acquired rival Digital Infrastructure (BeFibre) and in 2025 completed its merger with Zzoomm (here), has allegedly put around 50 staff on notice of possible redundancy and appear to be planning to help cut costs by outsourcing customer services offshore.
Just to recap. The combined Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network currently covers 600,000 UK premises (ready for service) and “over” 90,000 customers (Jan 2026 figure) across England – serving parts of approximately 110 market towns, which makes it one of the country’s largest altnets. This reflects both their open access wholesale fibre network, alongside their in-house retail ISPs, including Zzoomm and others.
However, despite the merger, network operators across the market continue to be under pressure from rising build costs, high interest rates and competition. On top of that it’s not unusual for operators that have just come through a period of network integration to make redundancies as part of cost and efficiency savings.
Advertisement
According to ISPreview’s sources, around 50 of the operator’s staff are alleged to have been notified that they’re now at risk of redundancy, pending the unusual consultation. Apparently, a good portion of the roles being cut are in field sales, but others such as installers and internal recruitment roles may also be reduced.
On top of that FullFibre is allegedly set to shift their customer service operations to the Philippines and India, which is often seen as a cost saving move, albeit one that can sometimes impact support quality.
A spokesperson for FullFibre Ltd told ISPreview:
“We have recently begun a consultation process affecting a number of roles across parts of the business. As we continue to grow and mature the business, and to remain as one of the leading UK Alt-Nets, we continuously assess how we can create a more efficient and agile organisation by taking advantage of new technologies and new ways of working. These changes can sometimes lead to a change of team size/skillsets within the business. Our priority is to support affected colleagues throughout the consultation process.”
Sadly, the situation above has been repeated by multiple network operators in the current market and so won’t come as much of a surprise. According to the latest records on Companies House, FullFibre’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Julian Smith, has also just departed as a Director of the company.
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.
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Revenues don’t hit target, cut costs, service falls, customers leave, revenue falls even further…
The race to the bottom on price is not helping anyone.
Sorry for those losing their jobs, not good at all.
This is one of the reasons I ifedand affed about going for a Altnet, when i was pushed from FTTC, how long will they keep going and that sort of thing, even as much as I hate Openreach, they are stable.
We will just have to see what happens, not impressed about customer services going to the Philippines and India,it reminds me of BT.
Hopefully I will not need them.
It is what it is, I presume Trump and Putin have not helped things either.
Why does it remind you of BT? All BT’s customer services people are in the UK.
All of BT Customers Services are based in the UK and Ireland, I think they have been for over 5 years but even so they aren’t great to deal with as they just want to upsell. Nevertheless, I still wouldn’t use an AltNet, they all seem to be financial basket cases.
Trump and Putin are not in charge of the UK economy and energy policy and budget. Labour is and they are doing everything to make it worse. Next budget will be catastrophic which will mean further job cuts
BT customer services used to be based in India, It was awful. don;t know what they are like now. My brother have just moved and the house he is going to have FTTP like his do, he phoned BT to get things changed and he said it went okay, don;t know if he has broadband yet, I doubt he even plugged in the router. They told him to take the router.
@john, It is Trump and Putin wars that is making energy and other stuff more expensive, sure Labour policies are not helping.
This isn’t a recent thing. They have outsourced support abroad for the last 9 months. I had to phone up last December and that was the first time getting through to support abroad. I had a TLOS about 3 weeks ago and it was an awful experience with the phone quality and support.
It normally is, I was with BT many years ago on ADSL and one of the reasons I left was because of the support as it was in India or some other country, I expect it still is.
So far touch wood I have had no problems.
My brother had an issue when he first got his and when i phoned, they sounded English, that was a few months ago.
I bet BTivor is loving this 🙂
I hope he’s paying you rent for living in your head like that, Ad.
Squirrel has a great relationship with Full Fibre. Our support is and will remain in Rutland UK. We have direct access to the UK Full Fibre NOC for troubleshooting and customer faults. A great alternative for BeFibre and Zzzooom customers who do not want foreign customer support
Just looked at your website. If only you did 2.3gig like I get with Zzoomm. £28 a month for 1Gig isn’t bad for 24 months. Maybe by the time my contract is up, I’ll take another look.
I did not even think we could get different service via the old Zzoomm network, but is seems like we can now.
I have just gone for a 24 month contract with Zzoomm,so will stick with them.
for the most part i don’t need customer service unless it is a network issue and thankfully the network have been pretty reliable.
I did a check and it is good to know there are now other options on the same network.
i know it it is difficult out there for altnets, laying a network is expensive and sadly you get people who seem to think that BT and Openreach is the only thing in town.
Zooooom did 1 road in our town – and then left
They were probably connecting the 2 towns to the north-east and south-west along with the city to the south together there.
Distress move.
Looks like some shenanigans with accounts filings may possibly be going on and overdue accounts further up the ownership chain.
Not sure how profitable it is when retentions offer 2.3Gbps for £20pm on a 24month contract and no price increase.
I imagine someone got a nice little bonus for taking a trip to Asia and setting this all up
When openreach was only delivering fttc, the altnets was the great alternative. Now openreach have a far wider spread the price becomes the product. When theres competition for a 1gb line, there is no difference except the monthly fee. I love altnets but this is inevitable as openreach expand and therefore taking customers back from the altnets
Not so.
The comparatively small number of Openreach FTTC customers who weren’t happy with the speeds they were getting and wanted full fibre is the major reason that full-fibre altnets building in “market towns” ended up with an unviable 15%+/- penetration.
Seems when deciding where to build, they just looked at cost per premises passed and didn’t make any sort of realistic sign-up level. If they did, they’d have built to the ADSL-only areas first, where they’d have got 80-90% signup.