Rural Broadband Altnet Truespeed in UK Merger Talks with Freedom Fibre

Aviva-backed alternative gigabit broadband operator Truespeed, which has only just merged with County Broadband to create a single full fibre operator covering 177,000 premises (RFS) and 41,000 customers in England (here), is reportedly in talks with Freedom Fibre about the possibility of consolidating into an even larger network.

Just to recap. The newly merged Truespeed currently focuses upon serving rural premises in parts of Devon, Wiltshire, Somerset Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk with their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. But over the past couple of years they’ve also had to deal with the same challenges as many other altnets (i.e. rising build costs, high interest rates and growing competition) – resulting in some job cuts, a build slowdown and greater focus on commercialisation (here and here).

Much as ISPreview pointed out after Truespeed and Country Broadband confirmed their plans to merge in July 2025, the combined network is still relatively small in terms of premises passed and was thus likely to become a target for other consolidators in the future.

This brings us to Freedom Fibre, which has already done some consolidating of its own with the VX FIBER deal in 2023 (here). But they’ve since faced similar strains to Truespeed (here, here and here), which also included the need to scale-back and withdraw from some of the government’s Project Gigabit contracts.

Nevertheless, Freedom Fibre has so far built their own FTTP network to cover 350,000 premises (inc. 25,000 customers) across various parts of England and North Wales, albeit primarily parts of Cheshire, Greater Manchester, North Wales, Staffordshire, Suffolk, Essex and North Shropshire. Suffice to say that there’s no overbuild between Truespeed and Freedom Fibre, although they do come quite close in the northern part of Bristol.

According to Sky News, Truespeed and Freedom Fibre are now in discussions over the possibility of reaching a future merger agreement, which could in theory create a single full fibre network that covers around 530,000 premises and 66,000 customers. This would give the combined business a stronger position within the market, but further consolidation in the future still seems likely to help grow more scale.

At present these are just talks, and we don’t yet know whether they will result in a deal. Such an agreement would make sense, even if it does turn out to be another stepping stone toward an even bigger consolidation further down the line. Sky states that all of the parties declined to comment.