G.Network Ponders Sale of London Full Fibre Broadband Network Again
Alternative UK network operator and ISP G.Network, which has deployed a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of London, has reportedly instructed bankers at Jefferies and Nomura to engage with potential buyers for the business again.
The operator originally held an aspiration to expand their fibre network to cover 1.3 million premises in the city by the end of 2026. But like many other altnets they’ve since been impacted by an increasingly competitive environment and rising costs (i.e. high build costs and high interest rates). At the end of last year this resulted in another round of job cuts and a greater focus on commercialisation, instead of new fibre build (here).
Despite the challenges, the operator has continued to receive funding from long term equity investor USS, including £85m in June 2024 (here) and “up to an additional” £150m (here) in July 2023. But it remains unclear how much extra funding USS might be willing to pump into G.Network in the future.
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According to G.Network’s most recent accounts (here), the company saw turnover increase by 85% to £10.2m in FY2024 and a gross profit of £7.3m (up 62%), with total assets of £453m (up from £394m). But they also suffered an operating loss for the year of £52.8m (down from a loss of £67.2m in the prior year). The switch in strategy toward commercialisation should help a bit.
Suffice to say that it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to read in the FT (paywall) that the provider’s banks – Jefferies and Nomura – have allegedly been contacting as many as ten other alternative network (altnet) providers over the past week to gauge their interest in a potential takeover.
G.Network reportedly attempted something similar last year (here), albeit without success. We suspect it may not help that they’ve already been partly overbuilt by Hyperoptic and CommunityFibre, which are much bigger players in London’s altnet space, alongside the established giants of Virgin Media (nexfibre) and Openreach (BT).
Residential customers of G.Network typically pay from £22 per month for a 300Mbps (100Mbps upload) service on a 24-month term with free installation, which rises to £28 for their 900Mbps (300Mbps upload) plan or £39 if you want symmetric speeds on that tier. Shorter 12 and 1 month contracts are also available, albeit at extra cost.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Be questionable whether anyone would want to pay anything close to the price they’ve put on their assets seeing how massively they’ve been overbuilt. CityFibre would be an obvious potential buyer seeing as they have very little presence in London but if they weren’t interested last year….
The investors are going to have to eat a heavy loss most likely. Their costs of deployment were enormous. They saw what happened to the cable companies and decided they liked the look of it, but worse due to lots of building in carriageways due to congested footpaths.
Absolute mess….
keyboard warriors in fell effect….
everything in business if for sale, there is not much in the way of new news here really..(at the moment) when they say “G.N is being aquired by…. ” then that will be news, untill then its just noise.
I’ve never understood the whole G-Network model.
From the outset they were obsessed with installing their own duct network rather than using PIA, seeing as some sort of differentiator!?!? Spent an absolute fortune digging up carriageways the most expensive part of the country to dig up carriageways. Alienated so many potential customers in the process as well as the local authorities, before finally embracing using Openreach PIA. But by then, as the article points out competitors had deployed and soaked up the customers, while they had amassed a huge debt pile to service.
G-Networks strategy of thinking the value of their company was all about laying their own duct network seems to be the strangest of any Altnet in London.
I’m not endorsing their strategy, however it’s worth noting the simple fact that there are parts of London where there isn’t PIA capacity at points as it’s now full. It’s somewhat of a diferentator and is not worthless, but at this point not worth what they paid for it.
If you build your network on PIA, the only assest is a fibre cable and the customers that you try to get on it..
duct is expensive, thats why not many Altnets do it.. but if the like of VM or CF want London then they will want duct – probably..
The only attraction for CommunityFobre would be that G.Network have actually built their own network versus using PIA as CF have. It’s too early for CF to acquire on a defensive basis though.
Alternatively it may be a case for either Openreach or Virgin to buy since they’ve largely not built anything worthwhile in London yet.
They have a fraction of customers that Community Fibre and Hyperoptic have, and then they are also overbuilding openreach FTTP and virgin. They dug up the entire street near me in Marylebone from the station to the exchange and it took them 3 months. Zero connections there
Then again this company was paying for London bus ads even before connecting anyone
Both Community and Hyper have been operational for longer than GN.
GN dont use exchanges either.. its all owned cabinets.
As many have said the writing was on the wall the moment I realised they were closing my street to trench down the middle of it when I already had two fttp options back in 2020 ish.
Almost all of their build was done at £xxx/per metre, just for the duct alone which was always going to be very challenging to make money from on £25/month subs.
They will be lucky to be clearing their operations cost at the moment, no chance they are even clearing the interest on debt, let alone touching the principle.
The first time the put the for sale board up they’ll of got some offers that they considered too low, so decided to take it off the market, investors will now be thinking ‘we should of just taken that offer’, it’s hard to see why else they’d do this.
To whom? CF if the price is right, but it would require alot of further capital to really “capitalise” on the investment by building into MDUs, so I think nexfibre is a more likely choice.
A wildcard to some, but I think this has legs and is what I’d explore in this particular case. Zayo take the trunk network; those 3-6 bore empty ducts stretching through the city, and someone else takes the fibre asset, or at least the fibre asset targeting resi/SMB customers. It’d have to be someone creative enough to do such a deal, so probably Jeremy/You fibre, community fibre or maybe someone from left field.
A loss of GBP 53mn on a GBP 10mn turnover suggests a more realistic price to the customer might exceed GBP 100pm. Those are the sort of prices people need to be prepared for.