Creditors Allegedly Set to Take Control of Rural UK Broadband ISP Gigaclear

A major newspaper has claimed that creditors of the indebted Abingdon-based alternative broadband ISP Gigaclear, which has built a full fibre (FTTP) network across 612,000 premises in rural parts of England and is home to c.160,000 customers, are set to take control of the business after an attempt to sell the company failed.

The provider currently still holds an aspiration to extend their network reach to 1 million UK premises. However, like so many other alternative networks (altnets), they’ve recently also had to scale-back their network build and cut jobs, due to the pressures from high interest rates, rising build costs and a highly competitive environment (here and here). Nobody ever said deploying fibre optic cables into rural areas was easy or cheap.

Suffice to say that funding has recently become somewhat of a hot topic for Gigaclear, particularly after reports emerged in November 2025 that they had begun hunting for a buyer (here). A consortium of the provider’s existing banks then followed that report up, in December 2025, by agreeing to pump “at least” £80m of new funding into the company (here), which Gigaclear said meant it was now “fully funded to deliver its plans“.

As Nathan Rundle, CEO of Gigaclear, said last month: “There’s still more work to do to close the digital divide but combined with our achievement of EBITDA positivity earlier this year and strong customer growth, this funding reflects a business that is financially secure, operationally robust and focused on sustainable long-term delivery.”

However, according to a new report in the FT (paywall), the company’s creditors, including the UK taxpayer-backed National Wealth Fund (NWF), as well as banks such as NatWest and Lloyds, are now allegedly “set to take control of heavily indebted broadband provider” after Gigaclear failed to find a buyer for the business. The creditors are also said to have explored options, such as writing down their debt (this could impact taxpayers too, due to the NWF’s involvement via a £240m guarantee on the aforementioned £1.5bn debt facility).

At the time of writing, most of the parties involved are said to have declined to comment on the report, although Equitix did express disappointment that “the financial performance of the investment did not meet the targets that Gigaclear set itself”. The expectation is that the company’s creditors will assume control of Gigaclear and then attempt another sale process. None of this is expected to have an impact upon their customers, which will continue to receive the same service, although related cost-cutting can sometimes impact service and support quality in other ways.

The reported move comes shortly after another altnet broadband provider with similarly significant financial challenges, G.Network, was acquired by FitzWalter Capital for an undisclosed sum (here). Barely a week had passed before G.Network then followed that up by filing a Notice of Intention (NoI) to appoint an administrator (here).

As time goes on, we may well see more indebted altnets going down a similar path during 2026, particularly if they fail to find a consolidation partner via more traditional approaches. Quite a few altnets have already spent 2024 and 2025 trying to find such solutions, but only a few have done so and the longer it takes, the more painful the outcome could become, especially for investors and creditors.