FullFibre Ltd and Digital Infrastructure to Merge UK FTTP Networks

The consolidation train has started to pick up speed today after two UK builders of FTTP based broadband ISP networks – FullFibre Limited (Fibre Heroes) and Digital Infrastructure (BeFibre) – announced their intention to create a single wholesale company and a single wholesale platform, which will be a bigger, more ambitious single entity.

Until today FullFibre Ltd had been aiming to extend their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover “at least” 500,000 premises by 2025, and their build is currently targeting 80+ towns across parts of 11 different counties (e.g. Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire). But so far only around 35 of those are active, and their rollout progress remains unclear (in Jan 2023 they claimed to be passing 10,000 premises per month).

At the same time DI and sibling broadband ISP BeFibre had managed to cover 100,000 premises by June 2023 – selling cross over 30 locations (e.g. Crewe, Brentwood, Worcester, Clacton on Sea etc.) and doubling that by the end of 2023 – and were ultimately aiming to reach 1 million premises across 80 UK towns and cities by the end of 2027 (here).

However, it seems as if Basalt has opted to take the same approach as Fern Trading recently took with several of their FTTP networks (here), which in this case means the decision to merge FF and DI into a single network – bringing greater scale and combining routes to market.

The merger will create one of the larger offerings by UK alternative networks (AltNets), with a network accessible by over 250,000 homes and businesses Ready for Service (RFS) today, with an ambition to deliver 1 million live premises through a wholesale business model. A total of 67 towns are said to be actively in build or nearing completion and their coverage should reach 300,000 by the end of 2023.

Wil Jones, Partner at Basalt, said:

“The UK fibre sector is maturing and, through this merger, we will create a business with substantial scale, under a single wholesale platform. This will ensure long-term success and strengthen our position in the market to accelerate the plans of both businesses.

This consolidation places us well to take advantage of opportunities in the UK fibre market and continue our investment in network rollout across the UK, enhancing the platform’s ability to deliver increasingly essential fibre infrastructure in historically under-served areas.”

Oliver Helm, CEO at FullFibre, said:

“Both Digital Infrastructure and FullFibre have built exceptionally skilled teams, with complementary capabilities. Together, we will accelerate the pace at which we roll out and connect customers to our fibre network. The merged organisation will sit in the top tier of well-established, alternative networks. With this substantive scale, we will continue our single-minded focus on delivering exceptional network infrastructure to our ISPs, and their customers and communities in turn”.

The new target, which rather crucially lacks a clear timescale, is of course lower than the 1.5 million premises that would have previously been reached if we simply combined the two original and separate targets together. But the revised goal is perhaps now more realistic than it was before, and the operators claim to have a combined build rate of up to 40,000 new RFS per month.

Consolidations like this tends to produce various efficiencies, although such things can often result in a few redundancies, but nothing like that was announced today. In theory, the combined network might also be capable of attracting more interest and value if it were to be sold on in the future too, but only time will tell whether that’s something Basalt might pursue.