Rural UK Broadband Altnet Quickline Sees Revenues Grow to £3.9m
Alternative network ISP Quickline, which is rolling out a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) and wireless (FWA) broadband network across rural parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in England (3-Year Rollout Plan), has published their accounts to the end of 2024 and revealed revenues grew to £3.9m (2023: £3m). But they had an operating loss of £33.1m (2023: £28.8m).
Just to recap. Quickline’s network rollout is currently aiming to extend gigabit-capable broadband to a further 360,000 UK premises across thousands of rural communities (roughly 170k via publicly funded projects and almost 200k from commercial builds) and the provider hopes to end 2025 with a total of 200,000 premises passed.
Sadly, the latest results don’t provide any updated totals for current premises passed or customers, but we do learn that the company now has total assets worth £156m (2023: £86m) and total liabilities of -£97.7m (2023: -£136m). This gives them positive net liabilities of £58.6m (2023: -£49.7m).
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The average number of people employed by the company (inc. Directors) during the year reached a total of 334 (2023: 251). Quickline also received some other operating incoming from public funding, including £297k (2023: £0) from government grants, £1.235m from broadband contracts via the Building Delivery UK agency (2023: £686k) and £1.942m from the gigabit broadband voucher scheme (2023: £700k).
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that Quickline’s ultimate parent company is QCL Topco Limited, although they’re currently a few days overdue on their own accounts.
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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So a business which will have approx. 42.5% of its potential customers provided through public subsidy, and is more than halfway through its build program, still has a net loss eight times higher than its revenues?
Mental. Absolutely bonkers. A textbook example of how not to build a network. Anyone considering entering a 18 or 24 month contract with them is as daft as the investors thinking they’ll ever see their money again.
Would help if they notified customers sooner than 6 months that they had an outstanding balance. Maybe revenue would then go up. Shame is the actual broadband is decent.
“the company now has total assets worth £156m”
Assuming they have little in the way of assets apart from the network itself, and it says there are fewer than 200,000 properties passed, that values each property passed at >£780 which is very high – admittedly mostly rural.
But revenue of only £3.9m? If the average customer is paying £29 per month (£24.16+VAT, or £290 per year) then that’s only about 13,500 active customers.
A paltry take-up rate, combined with an extremely expensive network – things are not looking good.