YouFibre is hiring 80 doorstep sellers as Netomnia slows its fibre build
Netomnia, the network behind the broadband brand YouFibre, has cut back how much full fibre it is laying. Its retail side is going the other way. As reported by ISPreview, YouFibre is recruiting around 80 sales agents, a good number of them advertised as full-time door to door roles. Fewer new streets, then, and more knocking on the ones already done.
The build first. Netomnia’s network had reached more than 3 million UK premises, with about 500,000 customers on it, and until fairly recently it was still expanding at pace. ISPreview reports that the roll-out has since been scaled back significantly, and that another round of redundancies followed on the network side of the business. If the fibre is already outside your house, none of that touches you. If it is not, the honest position is that the plan behind it has got smaller, so a promise of coming soon is worth less than it was in the spring.
Two things sit behind the change of pace. One is the cost of the build itself: ISPreview puts the group’s net debt at £905m at the end of 2025, up 69% over the year. The other is the takeover. nexfibre, which ISPreview describes as sharing some parentage with Virgin Media and O2, has agreed to buy the group for about £2bn, and that deal is still in front of the competition regulator. We covered what rival providers make of it earlier this week.
The hiring is the part a household will actually notice. ISPreview checked YouFibre’s own careers listings and counted roughly 80 open sales roles across the areas the network already serves, many of them titled Door to Door Sales Executive. So expect a knock, if you have not had one already.
None of which is a reason to slam the door. The deal an agent brings can be a good one, and plenty of people have bought broadband that way and been perfectly happy. Two things are worth knowing before you sign on the step, though. Check the address yourself rather than taking the leaflet’s word for it, because the patch an agent covers and a live serviceable address are not the same thing. And if you do agree there and then, the government’s doorstep selling rules give you 14 days to cancel most contracts agreed away from a shop.
The real uncertainty is what happens to prices once the takeover clears, because the retail customers would eventually sit inside a much larger group, and nobody has said what that means for a renewal. Until then the useful moves are the dull ones. Start with the availability checker to see what is genuinely live at your address, and if your street is one of the ones still waiting, our guide to when the fibre roll-out reaches you explains what a slower build actually changes.