Digital & IT
Nick Parbutt, CEO and Co-Founder of toob
Published: October 10, 2023 | Updated: 10th October 2023
In 2017, toob CEO and Co-Founder Nick Parbutt was working on Vodafone’s full-fibre strategy, a role which left him worried about the UK’s infrastructure.
“It was really evident at the time that the UK was massively falling behind other European countries on full-fibre,” Nick explained.
“I was thinking ‘this is not a good place to be, we’re way behind where we should be for both consumers and the economy as a whole.”
So, in 2018 Nick and Co-Founder Michael Banwell left Vodafone, receiving an initial investment of £75 million from Amber Infrastructure Group to kickstart the business.
The next step was to decide where to start building toob’s fibre network.
“We had the choice of Brighton, Portsmouth or Southampton.
“In the end we picked Southampton because we had very good engagement with the local council, who were very welcoming and saw the benefits of deploying the infrastructure.
“People think of the South Coast as being uniformly wealthy, but parts of Southampton are quite deprived. Part of what we do with our service is to make it as accessible as possible. This means not just focusing on the wealthier areas where you might have the most uptake.
“In Southampton, before we came along and still today, you have OpenReach with its largely copper network and Virgin with its cable, but we’re putting fibre all the way into the home – that’s the difference.
“The others have fibre in the network but the last connection to the home is through copper wire or cable. toob is deploying full fibre, a fibre connection all the way into the home, this allows us to deliver a faster, more reliable broadband service.
“The broadband market is very competitive, however a lot of those organisations are also large corporate organisations and are pretty faceless to the ordinary consumer, so there is space for a regional champion to take them on.
“We can do this because fundamentally we have a superior product at a great price that is backed up with really strong customer service.”
One advantage of being a local business is the ability to get involved with the local community – and it’s something which is important to Nick.
“We want to be here for a long time, to do that we need to be supporting the local community and serving as much of the community as possible.
“Community work both builds our brand and lets us give back to the communities we’re in. We want to be here for tens of years and the way to do that is to be present in the areas we’re covering.”
This principle has translated into a number of community initiatives, including sponsorship of community radio station Unity 101, supporting firefighters Stuart Vince and Craig Sadler when they took on the World’s Toughest Row in support of Mind Matters, and being the first business to support Southampton’s bid for the 2025 City of Culture.
“We’re a local business, here to serve the local community with great broadband. It’s as simple as that. We want to be the local champion.”
In order to supply great broadband, Nick has taken a couple of lessons from his time at Vodafone.
“When I was working for Vodafone, a large volume of the calls into the call centre would be about billing and charging issues, and a lot of the time it wouldn’t be because it was wrong but because the pricing was so complex customers didn’t understand it.
“If you have to explain it to someone it’s too complicated.”
“We have one tariff, which is £25 for 900Mbps. We try to make it as straightforward as possible.
“Our overall philosophy is we deliver what people want, broadband that simply works. You wouldn’t expect your lights to dim at 7pm when everyone turns theirs on, but that does happen with older broadband infrastructure – it won’t happen with full fibre.”
