ISP TalkTalk Delays Results Pending FibreNation UK FTTP Deal

Budget broadband ISP TalkTalk intended to publish their latest financial results today but this has just been delayed as a result of “advanced negotiations with interested parties” over the future of their sibling FibreNation business, which has been trying to drum up £1.5bn of investment to support their UK “full fibre” roll-out.

At present the provider’s FibreNation (wholesale company) sibling has a long-term aspiration to cover 3 million UK premises with a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network. Excluding their existing rollout to 54,000 premises in York, FibreNation recently started its rollout to 61,000 premises in Dewsbury (here) and on top of that they aim to cover 100,000 premises across Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon in the future.

The challenge for TalkTalk has been in trying to gather enough investment to support their plans, which has so far attracted some interest from several possible investors (here) and one potential buyer in the shape of former York deployment partner Cityfibre (here).

One possible problem above is that the ISP originally had a backer for it’s £1.5bn FibreNation plan – Infracapital – but they allegedly pulled out due to a disagreement over the value of the new network. As such it was considered a possibility that other investors could potentially run into a similar obstacle when they reached the same stage of negotiations.

Nevertheless TalkTalk wouldn’t be delaying their results unless a major announcement was imminent. The plan now is to publish their interim results by the end of this week instead of today, so we should find out before the end of play on Friday.