Broadband ISP VISPA UK Faces Compulsory Strike-off Action UPDATE

Customers of UK ISP VISPA may be concerned to note this week that the broadband provider has suddenly become the subject of a “compulsory strike-off” notice, which usually occurs when Companies House finds reasonable grounds to believe that a limited company is no longer trading.

The small Manchester-based ISP recently began to deploy their own gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the town of Marple (here), which is in the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport (Greater Manchester) and is home to a population of 24,000. On top of that, they also run their own Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network around parts of Cheshire and sell Openreach based fibre packages.

As we recall, Vispa were aiming to cover around 10,000 homes with their FTTP network by around Q2/Q3 2022 (here), but it’s unclear how much progress has been made on that. The provider had separately been selling FTTP packages to new build homes covered by infrastructure from British Fibre Networks (i4 Technology Group), but they recently stopped doing those due to a lack of support from BFN and other “issues” (here).

However, we note that the provider is still actively hiring new FTTP engineers and sales staff to support their own build (here), which would normally indicate some confidence in their future rollout plan. Suffice to say, we were a little surprised to see Companies House publish a First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off on Tuesday.

In this case, we note that VISPA has failed to submit its annual accounts on time (they were due by 31st January 2022) and this is likely to be the reason for the strike-off notice. Late accounts can be caused by all sorts of things, from financial problems to admin delays or errors etc.

Companies House Statement

The Registrar of the Companies gives notice that, unless cause is shown to the contrary, the Company will be struck off the register and dissolved not less than 2 months from the date shown above [29/03/2022].

Upon the Company’s dissolution, all property and rights vested in or held in trust for, the Company are deemed to be bona vacantia, and will belong to the Crown.

As above, VISPA now has a couple of months to respond and, assuming the issue is resolvable, then they may be able to get the action reversed. We contacted VISPA yesterday morning to clarify the situation but, at the time of writing, they have yet to respond. Hopefully this is a problem that can be fixed.

UPDATE 9:07am

VISPA has informed us that they are still trading and their accounts will be filed shortly, which should stop the strike-off action.