The navigation on our site has had a visual refresh and been optimised for speed.

The sign up button that appears on mobile now responds to the speed the user scrolls at, to make interaction more intuitive.

Customers will now receive an invoice for their setup charge which can be dowloaded from My Account.

The tech team spent 2 weeks focussing on improving performance of the site, and they delivered! The user experience is a lot faster now.

If you’re trying to move home with us you can no longer select your current address to “move to”. (yes some people tried this 👀)

We’ve removed date of birth entry from the sign-up flow. By signing up to Cuckoo you now agree that you are 18 years old or over.

For further tech updates keep an eye on the Cuckoo content hub, where each month we’ll be showing what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

Tech Update - March 2021

Welcome to the inaugural tech update for Cuckoo. These updates will cover all things product development for you to marvel over, or in some cases think “I’m so glad they solved that”.

Only eight days until spring officially begins 🌼

This month, we're sharing some of our plans for 2021, as well as an update on what Valentine the cuckoo has been up to.

And this is not Cuckoo-related, but for anyone struggling to get through this last lockdown, we'd recommend this 'One way road to beer' countdown.

There are many things on our roadmap. So we thought we’d share a couple we’re particularly excited about:

As the FTTP roll-out in the UK continues, here at Cuckoo we’ve started to test the service.

It’s still early days, but we’re hoping to be able to offer you the option of fast FTTP speeds as soon as we’re confident we can transition you over smoothly. We’ll be sure to keep you updated.

And if you want to know what installation actually looks like, here's a super informative video made by an Openreach FTTP engineer.

2. Content Hub - fancy expanding your broadband knowledge?

Here at Cuckoo, we have loads of broadband-related info to share, but nowhere yet to share it. This will soon change with a new Content Hub launching on our site next month.

Here's a sneak preview of our work in progress:

The Content Hub will be a home for guides, blogs & updates from the team. And if you have an internet specialist subject and fancy sharing your knowledge with others by writing a guide, do let us know!

For anyone now as invested as we are in the progress of Valentine the cuckoo (who we intro’d in last month’s newsletter), we wanted to keep you updated on his return migration.

There's big news this month: following a long stretch in the Angolan rainforest, Valentine is on the move for the first time. He's beginning his journey north towards Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond. Fingers crossed he makes it!

This month we're giving you a sneak peek at our Cuckoo roadmap, and an update on Valentine the cuckoo.

Monthly newsletter - March 2021

We’re making broadband simple, for good

Before we dive into our 60-day tech adventure, I feel it’s important to give some explanation to how broadband actually works. Now, most people know that the Internet is a global network of billions of computers and other electronic devices. But how does your home actually get online?

I’m not going to go into packets, protocols, IP addresses, socket layers, or routers in this article. There are many great write-ups in the wild, written by much more intelligent people than me. I highly recommend ‘How Does The Internet Work’ by Stephen Li.

The Internet works through a packet routing network in accordance with theInternet Protocol (IP), theTransport Control Protocol(TCP) and other protocols.

As an Internet Service Provider or broadband company, we are the enablers. At Cuckoo, we have coined what we feel is the best analogy when it comes to explaining what we do: the ‘3 layered cake’

Top layer
Here’s us. Switch customers. Fix issues. Bill them. Do good.

Middle layer
Think kit at telephone exchanges and network centres. They route the data.

Bottom layer
Lay and own the wires. Digs up roads. Think Openreach, Virgin Media and HyperOptic.

There are lots of different technologies to connect consumers at home. The best are Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and the latest capability Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). Cuckoo will sit on top of these technologies to provide the consumer experience. We don’t care whose cables they are, as long as it provides the best service for our customers.

“Cuckoo is network and infrastructure agnostic. We are the consumer layer for the internet that acquires, bills and services people”

Acquire customers
We acquire customers through our website. We’ve created a best-in-class signup journey that allows customers to switch over to us in minutes. Our UX principles are smooth and simple.

Bill customers
We have developed our own proprietary billing experience. It enables us to manage customers over the cloud, no matter what technology or service they are using on our network.

Service customers
Our continuing endeavour is to provide the best customer experience in the industry. We constantly iterate to improve the tools and experiences for our customers, from our referral engine to our support hub. As we drive forward we are looking at opportunities to automate our service layer and develop in-house self-help tools so customers can help themselves, all from their Cuckoo account.

We have a technology agnostic approach at Cuckoo, though we do have some principles when writing and deploying code.

We’ve built our stack so that it can scale. We’re building on top of AWS and as far as we know, we’re the first fully serverless ISP in the country. What this means is that when you click to join, we can carry out computing functions really, really fast. Even at scale, without having to rent racks of servers.

“Some ISPs still manually add each customer at the end of a working day”

People across the world suffer from rubbish broadband. We’re building our tech stack so that it is network, infrastructure and region agnostic. Watch out Australia.

We code fast but tight. We have a small integrated team that means we can move quickly. Sprint by sprint.

Our approach is to use the best technology for the job. For example, we wouldn’t build a bloated C# application to call a single endpoint that returns an address. Below is our customer-facing sitemap: each of these interactions connects to a different part of our tech-stack.

So we’ve now switched our first customer. And built our website, billing and service infrastructure to test with our first batch of users. Here’s what you can look forward to:

We have our new website launching very, very soon. Current one here.

Interested in joining the team? Fill out this survey.

Next month we’ll publish a blog on pricing.

Our first customer is live on Cuckoo broadband today. That’s no mean feat in a lockdown. We’re building our broadband company on the principle of transparency, so here’s how we’re doing it.

Building a broadband company in 60 days; the Cuckoo tech story

Valentine’s Day is drawing near, so we’d like you to meet Valentine. He’s one of three cuckoos being tracked as part of a project run by the British Trust for Ornithology (that’s birds). We’re on tenterhooks to see how he fares on his long journey back from Angola.

From Community member to Broadband Eggspert

We set up the community to enable our customers to help shape the future of Cuckoo. It also allows us to support each other with anything from hardware advice to book recommendations.

What we didn’t expect was to find our future team member there!

Jake first posted on our community back in November to help someone who was struggling to connect to their Sky box. And now three months later, he’s a fully-fledged member of our Service team: a Broadband Eggspert.

One customer was having trouble with their Wi-Fi. It simply wasn’t discoverable at all.

Eventually the cause was found: their cat.

In this month's newsletter, we intro you to an actual cuckoo. As well as a Jake's journey from Community member to Eggspert, and the unlikely cause of a customer's Wi-Fi issues.

Tech Update - March 2021

Features

Fixes

More from Cuckoo

Monthly newsletter - March 2021

Building a broadband company in 60 days; the Cuckoo tech story

Monthly newsletter - February 2021

How fast can you go?