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The CEO of ISP Zen Internet, Richard Tang, has today shared three recent interviews with the bosses of several alternative network providers, including B4RN (Tom Rigg), MS3 (Guy Miller) and Quickline (Sean Royce). Each provides a useful progress update on their efforts to deploy full fibre (FTTP) broadband across different parts of the UK.
The first interview is one that combines both MS3’s Guy Miller and Quickline’s Sean Royce. Just to recap, Hull-based MS3 is an Asterion-backed network builder that originally aspired to cover 535,000 UK premises with their gigabit wholesale fibre broadband network across the Hull and Humber region of England by the end of 2025. MS3 tends to be a bit more of an urban builder and one that is backed by an unspecified amount of private investment.
By comparison, Quickline is backed by c.£500m from Northleaf Capital Partners and tends to focus their builds on rural and semi-rural parts of the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire regions of England. The operator has previously indicated a desire to cover 500,000 premises using a mix of fixed wireless and FTTP technologies by the end of 2025, but it’s been a while since they reported on overall build progress (although they do issue lots of smaller community updates).
The new interview largely focuses on the many challenges of urban vs rural builds, which using the differing perspectives of Quickline and MS3 helps to illustrate why it’s often so much more expensive to tackle rural areas. None of this is particularly new territory for the pages of ISPreview, but we do get some useful progress updates from both providers and a few key quotes.
MS3’s boss reveals that their FTTP network has now passed 207,000 premises as Ready for Service (RFS), although their raw homes passed footprint is currently on about 234,000 (up from 210,000 in Oct 2024) and they’ve got just under 18,000 customers (up from 15,000 in Oct 2024).
“We’ll continue growing the customer base, we’ll continue building the network out. In terms of long-term targets … the market will determine that over the next few years and access to funds etc. We’re quite a rarity in that we are debt free and it’s fully equity invested,” said Guy Miller, while appearing to hint that they’re currently more focused on commercialisation than new network builds.
“The great thing there is I’m not accruing enormous amounts of interest per year and I’ll start reporting EBITDA positive at the end of this year … We’ll wait until the markets are more sensible before we commit to a huge RFS target,” concluded Guy while looking toward the future.
Guy also touched on the recent merger between CityFibre with local rival Connexin, which has similarly been deploying FTTP into some of the same areas as MS3: “It doesn’t make too much difference to us. Connexin are a good local brand, [but] they’re a smaller network than ours, and we’ll carry on doing what we’re doing really well, I think.”
However, Guy did acknowledge that “there is an amount of overbuild” between MS3 and Connexin (quite a sizeable one in Hull), which does pose a risk. Not least due to CityFibre’s stronger reach with major ISPs, although much may yet depend upon whether CityFibre decides to overbuild even more of MS3 and KCOM’s patch in the future.
Interestingly, both MS3 and Quickline seemed to support the idea of a grand consolidation between altnets in the future (something CityFibre wants to lead). But both operators also said they want to ensure they’re stable as independents first and don’t feel a need to rush into doing a merger (with CityFibre or other operators) on bad terms.
In terms of Quickline’s progress, Sean said they expect to reach 200,000 premises passed with FTTP by the end of 2025 (up from 65,000 premises in Nov 2023). The four Project Gigabit contracts they hold will also deliver 180,000 premises by completion around 2027/28 and they aspire to add another 200,000 commercial premises that will be wrapped around the publicly funded build. “We’ll have a premises count of around half a million [500k] and that is fully funded,” said Sean when looking toward the end of those contracts.
B4RNs Interview
Richard Tang also separately did a new interview with Tom Rigg, the CEO of rural network provider B4RN. This provider is somewhat of a rarity in the market as they’re a registered Community Benefit Society (i.e. they can’t be bought by a commercial operator and profits go back into the community) and one that often engages local volunteers to help build their network.
Tom reiterated that B4RN are continuing to deliver an average take-up of 50% and are connecting an extra 1,000 customers to their network each year. The rural FTTP network itself currently reaches roughly 30,000 premises RFS (up from 27,000 premises in August 2024) and they expect to end up with maybe 40,000 to 50,000 RFS in total once their existing plans reach completion.
The above may seem small by comparison to other altnets, but it’s worth remembering that as a rural builder, this still reflects a fairly sizeable level of geographic coverage. The interview doesn’t really add much else in the way of new information, although both Tom and Richard expect that the current consolidation will “end up with a few big players“. But while Tom believes B4RN will continue to be a niche independent in that future market, Richard does see “all of it consolidating … I do think that long-term, into the 2030s, it will end up joining together with two big players left.”
All the aforementioned interviews took place during the recent Connected North 2025 conference in Manchester, and more are due to follow. Take note that, at the time of writing this, the YouTube videos were not yet available for public consumption, but we’ve included the links above (they should convert to embedded videos once live).