Alternative Broadband Operator FullFibre Cuts Jobs Post Zzoomm Merger

Alternative UK network operator FullFibre Limited (Fibre Heroes), which in early March 2025 completed its merger with Zzoomm (here), has in the past few weeks begun to notify staff of further redundancies. Most of the cuts appear to be coming from their internal fibre build and supporting teams, and this also extends to some senior leadership levels.

Just to recap. The newly combined full fibre (FTTP) broadband network currently reaches 600,000 premises (ready for service) and “over” 70,000 customers (up from 65k+ in January 2025) across England – serving parts of approximately 110 market towns, which makes it one of the UK’s largest altnets. This reflects both their open access wholesale fibre network alongside their in-house retail ISPs (BeFibre and Zzoomm).

NOTE: Zzoomm was originally supported by £224m in capital = £100m debt via banks (here), £12m from private investors (“big chunk” of that comes from Matthew Hare) and £112m via Oaktree Capital (here). By comparison, FullFibre Ltd was backed by investment from Basalt Infrastructure Partners LLP.

Readers may recall that the merger announcement talked about delivering “funding for new builds“, albeit without providing any solid figures (they’re trying to secure it) or setting any new coverage targets, and at the same time spoke of achieving “greater operational and financial efficiencies through economies of scale“. But they’ll still need to spend time and money conducting the physical integration of both FTTP networks.

However, the reality is that such mergers often also result in job losses, which frequently occur as the larger company moves to remove duplicate roles and deliver on those “efficiencies“. On this front, ISPreview recently noted a sharp uptick in people expecting to be made redundant from the business. Most of this occurred around 2-3 weeks ago, and credible sources informed us that around 50 jobs are to be cut.

A spokesperson for both companies told ISPreview:

“Post the recent merger announcement between FullFibre and Zzoomm, we can confirm that we are now entering into an organisational review which delivers on our business strategy to combine the two companies into a single operating model.”

The reality is that, short of a major funding announcement, the newly combined group seems likely to focus more of its efforts upon commercialisation of their existing network – much as the wider market has done (due to pressures from rising build costs, stubbornly high interest rates and competition etc.). But the operator did also previously that they’re now “well-positioned to drive M&A across the fragmented sector“, although it remains to be seen whether they’ll continue to be consolidators or become one of the consolidated.

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