We’re a small business telecoms provider based in Manchester. Founded in 2018, still independent, still small enough that the engineer who fixes your line is probably the same one who designed it.
The UK business telecoms market is full of providers that are technically not BT but are basically reselling BT’s Openreach product with a markup, a bad portal, and a call centre in another time zone. We started 5xyz to do the opposite: own the network where we sensibly can, partner where we can’t, and answer the phone ourselves.
The founders (Ben and Sara) spent a decade between them at Daisy, Gamma and a now-defunct ISP that got bought in 2017. We started 5xyz in a shared office in Northern Quarter, Manchester, with one Openreach EAD circuit, a Cisco ASR, and one customer who’d agreed to let us port their numbers if it didn’t take down their accounts team.
Six years on, we have: