iCon and Macquarie Ponder Investment in TalkTalk’s FibreNation FTTH

Budget UK ISP TalkTalk appears to be having some success in courting interest from investors in their sibling wholesale FibreNation company, which proposes to build a 1000Mbps “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband network to cover 3 million UK premises. The latest to enter the ring are investment firms iCon Infrastructure and Macquarie.

At present the new independent wholesale company only has around 50,000 premises passed in York (a big chunk of this was originally built with support from Cityfibre and Sky Broadband) and they’re just starting to build into several new towns including Harrogate, Knaresborough, Dewsbury and Ripon (here).

However the new network seeks to go a lot further and TalkTalk has previously indicated that reaching 3 million premises could cost around £1.5bn (i.e. £500m in equity and £1bn from debt). Initially Infracapital had tentatively agreed to help fund the build but that deal fell through following a dispute over the valuation of their proposed network (here), which left the ISP hunting for alternative investors to help co-fund the project.

Since then reports have indicated that the Goldman Sachs backed Cityfibre project could be looking to acquire 100% of FibreNation from TalkTalk (here), which may not be quite what the ISP had in mind. We suspect TalkTalk would only sell like this if they could extract a good price and some degree of preferential wholesale access to Cityfibre’s wider FTTH network (difficult to do given CF’s existing deal with Vodafone).

The good news, according to The Telegraph (paywall), is that another investment firm – iCon Infrastructure (they previously ran train leasing company Porterbrook) – also appears to have thrown their hat into the ring. A third potential investor firm – Macquarie (they recently gobbled up KCOM in East Yorkshire for an inflated price of £627m) – is also reported to be sniffing around FibreNation.

Admittedly it’s not unusual for investment firms to show a serious interest in such projects, although turning that interest into a tangible agreement has so far proven rather difficult for TalkTalk. The prospective investors will no doubt be very mindful of Infracapital’s dispute and as such the ISP may have to surrender more control of their future FTTP network if they want to get the funding locked down. Easier said than done.