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The boss of Liberty Global (Mike Fries), one of the parents behind UK broadband provider Virgin Media (O2) and associated network builder nexfibre, has reportedly claimed that the UK Government’s Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds MP, expressed that he was “anxious” for them to step in and rescue struggling alternative networks.
The past couple of years have been more than a little bumpy for the market’s many altnets. On the one hand, they’ve continued to drive positive competitive change and have built full fibre (FTTP) broadband lines to millions more premises – Summary of UK Full Fibre Builds. Many consumers are thus already able to enjoy the benefits, which is often reflected by faster speeds and lower prices.
According to INCA’s most recent report (here), full fibre broadband coverage delivered by altnets grew by 27% in 2024 to reach 16.4 million UK premises (or 15.2m if you exclude overbuild between the altnets) and could grow to 18.6m in 2025. But that growth rate of 27% also represented a slowdown from the 57% reported in 2023. This is because many altnets have also had to slow their deployments and make redundancies, while at the same time re-focusing toward efforts to grow customer take-up.
The above situation has been fuelled by a combination of factors, such as rising build costs, competition from rivals (e.g. overbuild, price discounts), the challenge of generating a viable level of take-up and the difficulty of securing fresh investment while interest rates remain stubbornly high. As a result, we’ve already seen a fair bit of consolidation in the market and plenty of job losses from various network operators.
On top of that, there’s also been some related disruption to the Government’s own Project Gigabit contracts (examples here, here and here) and yesterday’s 2025 Spending Review saw their target for delivering 99% UK coverage of gigabit-capable broadband being put back from 2030 to 2032. Suffice to say that the strains of this market are already well understood.
According to a new FT (paywall) piece today, the CEO of Liberty Global, Mike Fries, has now insinuated that the Government’s Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Jonathan Reynolds, is “anxious” for large network operators to acquired (merge) the UK’s struggling altnet broadband providers before they could collapse.
Both CityFibre and Liberty Global/VMO2 have previously already signalled a strong desire to consolidate (here and here), with others like Netomnia also considering expansion via further consolidation, so this is not a new prospect. But the idea that the Government may also be nudging them to do this does put a different spin on things.
Mike Fries told an industry conference on Tuesday:
“I was on the phone with Jonny Reynolds … the other day and he gets it: It’s not a good moment for the UK right now if fibre customers lose service and fibre investors lose money. They’re anxious to see us and others [get] involved here, you know, and we will.”
However, an aide to Reynolds said there was no record of any such comments being made, with the aide adding: “No one at the meeting remembers him [Reynolds] saying this. It seems that something might have been inferred from Johnny’s warm tone, but this is a commercial decision for [Liberty Global], not for us.”
In fairness, Liberty Global and Virgin Media do have some history when it comes to criticising or using robust language against altnets (example), so it’s perhaps not surprising that Fries may be keen to talk down their opponents in the sector again.
On Tuesday Fries similarly claimed that many many “desperate” altnets had dropped prices as a “last gasp” to survive and that, ultimately, they didn’t have the scale required. The latter point may be true for some players, but scale alone is not a guarantee of sucess either. As for low pricing, that has been a common factor for many years to help boost take-up vs established players and we haven’t seen this change much over the past year.
At the same time it’s worth noting that VM/nexfibre’s position is currently struggling with its own set of problems after joint venture partner Telefonica launched a strategic review, which has already impacted the operator’s ongoing deployment of FTTP broadband lines via nexfibre (here). Virgin Media has separately had some difficulty with losing customers from their broadband base – recent price hikes didn’t help (here) – and their plans for opening up Virgin’s existing network to wholesale via a new company (NetCo) have recently been paused.
Speaking of those NetCo plans, on Tuesday Fries said that the timing of Telefonica’s review was “highly unfortunate” and “not a well thought out position”. Fries added that the two sides would have to make a decision on whether to continue in the Joint Venture or “do something different” within the next 24 months, which in this fast-paced market is a worryingly long window of time to lose before arriving at a decision.
The truth is that the whole market, including VM/nexfibre, is currently under plenty of strain and almost everybody is busy adjusting strategies around that.