CityFibre Agrees to Sell UK Broadband ISP Lit Fibre to co-Founders

Network operator CityFibre, which earlier this year announced the acquisition of Lit Fibre’s full fibre network (here), has today resolved the problem of what to do with that provider’s customer base by agreeing to sell the retail ISP side of the business to the company’s co-founders, Tom Williams and Ben Bresler.

CityFibre is typically both a network builder and wholesale operator, which naturally prefers to steer clear of delivering the retail side in order to keep their many ISPs happy (i.e. avoiding a competitive conflict of interest). By comparison, Lit Fibre was a more vertically integrated operator, which both built their own gigabit broadband network and also sold related packages directly to homes and businesses.

Suffice to say that CityFibre’s main interest in Lit Fibre was their FTTP network of over 220,000 premises (expanding up to 300,000 by completion of Lit’s remaining builds), and not the customer base of over 10,000 users. The new deal solves this by splitting Lit Fibre’s network from its retail ISP.

The deal means Lit Fibre’s existing customers across Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Worcestershire, Essex and Suffolk, will continue to receive services from Lit Fibre, albeit now owned by Lit’s original co-founders. Lit Fibre is also now fully onboarded to CityFibre’s national FTTP network, enabling it to offer symmetrical speeds of up to 2.5Gbps over that network too.

Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre, said:

“Our strategy has always been to be the wholesale provider of choice, building a nationwide, full fibre network that enables all of our partners to access market-leading products, pricing and service and gives consumers a greater choice of full fibre ISPs. We are really pleased to see Lit Fibre continue with its co-founders, who are passionate about the business, and we look forward to continuing to partner with Lit Fibre across our network.

As the nation’s third digital infrastructure platform, we continue to evaluate potential acquisition opportunities alongside accelerating CityFibre’s build to reach at least 8 million premises across the UK.”

Tom Williams and Ben Bresler, Co-Founders of Lit Fibre, said:

“Lit Fibre has built an enviable reputation for providing excellent service and support and we are delighted that we will be able to continue delivering that for our customers into the future, along with our partners at CityFibre.

The landscape for internet services is changing where the in-home experience is becoming more important. We believe consumers should expect more from their internet provider and Lit Fibre has an exciting roadmap of product improvements including improved WiFi coverage and enhanced security and protection for all connected devices to meet these higher expectations.”

The deal will support CityFibre’s aspiration toward covering up to 8 million UK premises with their new 2.2Gbps speed network (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity, c.£4.9bn debt and c.£800m of BDUK / public subsidy) – representing c.30% of the UK. So far, they’ve covered around 3.8m premises and have connected 400,000 customers (8th May 2024).

CityFibre’s wholesale network is otherwise supported by various UK ISPs such as Vodafone, TalkTalk, Zen Internet, Sky Broadband (later in 2025) and many others, but they aren’t all live or available in every location yet (mix of technical reasons and exclusivity deals).