Hyperoptic

We meet the internet service provider that’s bringing gigabit broadband to new-build apartments and council tower blocks

It isn’t easy trying to set up a new fibre broadband network in the UK. You have the looming presence of incumbent BT and the sizeable network of Virgin Media to compete with – both of which are allowed to call their products “fibre broadband”, despite fibre featuring in only a fraction of the connection. Even when the government has money to dish out to fertilise the fibre broadband rollout, it designs a scheme (BDUK) that effectively hands all of the money to BT.

Not that Hyperoptic is really interested in reaching the rural areas that the government was targeting. Its strategy is focused on delivering gigabit fibre broadband to “multi-dwelling buildings” – blocks of flats or apartments where there are at least 50 potential customers to service. They range from expensive new-build apartments in London to social-housing blocks in Salford, with packages starting from as little as £9 per month and no telephone line rental necessary.

How does a startup network take on the multinational might of BT and Virgin? And how difficult is it to get fibre to a 50-year-old block of council flats? We spoke to the company’s CEO, Dana Tobak, to find out.

I’ll Be back

When Dana Tobak talks of disrupting the big beasts of the broadband industry, she speaks with the experience of having done so before. In 2005, Dana and her old university pal, Boris Ivanovic, started Be Broadband. She claims Be was the first British ISP to offer ADSL2+, the breakthrough product that pushed download speeds from 1 or 2Mbits/ sec up to a theoretical maximum of 24Mbits/ sec (although we all know speeds typically averaged at a fraction of that headline figure). Be was also one of the pioneers of local loop unbundling (LLU), the process where ISPs were permitted to install their own network equipment in BT’s telephone exchanges, making them less reliant on the former national monopoly. Be’s drive and cutting-edge technology caught the attention of O2, which bought Be in 2006, little more than a year after the company was founded. “The good news was O2 invested a lot more money in the network and launched their national broadband network,” said Tobak. “It has since sold that customer base and network infrastructure on to Sky, but certainly it was the best performing LLU infrastructure and received fantastic reviews for the technology.” Tobak was handcuffed to O2 for a period after the takeover and was then subject to a non-compete clause, but by 2011, she and Ivanovic were ready to take on the big guns again with another broadband breakthrough: gigabit end-to-end fibre. Prior to launching Be, Ivanovic had been running a broadband company in Sweden, which from as early as 2004 was offering fibre-to-the-building, similar to what Hyperoptic offers today. “They were offering 100Mbits/sec symmetric products back when O2 was just starting its 2Mbits/sec broadband offering from BT,” said Tobak. “It was really forward thinking... and, of course, the Swedes just ate it up.” Tobak and Ivanovic had intended to offer fibre-to-the-building during their time at Be, but O2 wasn’t interested in a product that wasn’t available to its entire customer base. So, the pair did it themselves, starting out in London in 2011, when Prices Court, a 133-unit development in Wandsworth, became the first residential property in the country to receive gigabit broadband. Hyperoptic has expanded to 12 cities in the UK, and although Tobak is coy about exact subscriber numbers, she claims the company has “substantially”