Toob Expand FTTP Broadband to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole

Network builder and UK ISP toob, which aspires to cover 1 million premises across the South of England by 2027 with their new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, has today revealed that their coverage is being expanded along the Dorset coastline to include Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole.

Just to recap. The operator, which was originally backed by £75m from the Amber Infrastructure Group (here) and “up to” £87.5m from the Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund (here), last month secured £160m of additional funding (debt financing) from Ares Management‘s Infrastructure Debt strategy (here) – this can be upsized up to £300m over time to support future growth opportunities.

Until now most of the operator’s deployments have tended to focus on cities and towns in the Surrey and Hampshire areas of southern England (e.g. Southampton, Camberley, Aldershot, Farnborough, Fareham and Gosport etc.). As a result, toob has already covered around 140,000 premises on their own full-fibre network, with the “vast majority ready for service” (no specific figure for RFS was given), and c. 20,000 customers.

However, the operator has today announced that their network coverage is being expanded to include the neighbouring Dorset cities and towns of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, although we should caveat that this isn’t part of toob’s own fibre build. Instead, this reflects their existing agreement (complementary wholesale partnership) to harness Cityfibre’s FTTP rollout in the area, which until today had only been adopted in Portsmouth.

Approximately 95% of their customers are on toob’s own network, with the remainder on CityFibre’s network.

Nick Parbutt, CEO of toob, said:

“We are delighted to be able to offer our service to Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole. We believe that fast and reliable broadband is a necessity that everyone should have. We are committed to delivering the fastest and most reliable service, using the latest full-fibre technology, at an affordable price. Customers will benefit from speeds of 900Mbps for only £25 per month on an 18 month contract, with no in contract price rises; they can rely on toob to provide broadband that simply works.”

Customers of the service typically pay just £25 per month on an 18-month term for their 900Mbps (symmetric speed) package (£29 thereafter), which includes a router, unlimited usage and free installation. Suffice to say that they’re one of the cheapest providers in the market and this price applies regardless of whether you’re covered by toob’s own network, or the CityFibre platform.

At present, customers in the BCP area will only be able to “register their interest” in receiving the service via toob, which doesn’t yet appear to have gone fully live. But this may still irritate some of Cityfibre’s other ISPs in the same area, which tend to price their own 1Gbps packages a fair bit higher than toob does.