Consolidation & M&A
By Ashley Poling, VP Business Development, COS Systems · 2 September 2026
UK altnet consolidation is not slowing because fibre stopped being valuable. It is slowing because buyers cannot absorb what they acquire.
AlixPartners put it in one line this summer: anyone can buy fibre, but almost no one can integrate it. That diagnosis was written for the American market. It describes the UK more precisely.
Why is UK altnet consolidation slowing down?
The capital is available and the assets are cheap. The constraint has moved to operations.
CityFibre put over 400 roles at risk in January 2026 and a further 200 in July, citing consolidation moving slower than anticipated. Netomnia put around 100 staff on notice in the same month. Both are consolidators, not targets. Neither is short of funding.
ISPreview’s tracker counts 3 announced deals in 2026 against 6 in 2025. Valuation disagreement is the reason usually given. Absorption capacity is the reason usually left out.
What does the take-up gap actually cost a consolidator?
Ofcom’s Telecoms Access Review statement of 17 March 2026 records altnet take-up averaging around 18% against approximately 38% for Openreach. That 20-point gap is the whole thesis of consolidation. Buy the passings, raise the penetration, take the margin.
The gap is also wider than the average suggests. Point Topic’s Q1 2026 figures put Toob at 36% and Community Fibre at 32%, with Netomnia at 17% and Trooli at 8%. G.Network was serving roughly 25,000 customers across a network reported at 255,000 premises when it filed for administration in January 2026.
Enders Analysis puts sustainable profitability somewhere near 40% penetration. The largest altnets lost £1.5bn in 2024 on around £9bn of debt, with financing costs averaging 121% of revenue.
So the acquirer’s business case is a penetration case. Every month of integration delay is a month the acquired network keeps running at its old take-up.
How long does it take to integrate an acquired altnet?
Published UK evidence gives a range of roughly 7 to 20 months, and only for the customer-facing layer.
CityFibre reported integrating Connexin within 7 months. FullFibre merged Zzoomm’s operational, commercial and technology systems inside about 9 months, retiring the BeFibre brand and migrating those customers. Netomnia agreed to buy Brsk in June 2024; Brsk customers were not notified of the YouFibre migration until February 2026, with phased migration running through the first half of that year.
Freedom Truespeed took the honest route and said so publicly. On completion in April 2026 the group stated there would be no immediate change to service delivery, with systems, processes and teams integrated over time.
Three brands, three timetables, one platform question underneath all of them.
Why does OSS/BSS decide the timetable?
Because the network merges on paper long before the systems do.
Two altnets with the same technology rarely share a product catalogue, a service definition, an address model or a provisioning workflow. PXC described its own altnet onboarding problem as a patchwork quilt of disparate technologies, varying OSS/BSS maturity and inconsistent taxonomies. That is a wholesale aggregator describing the same heterogeneity a buyer inherits on day one.
INCA’s Wholesale Standards Initiative exists for this reason. Max Fernando, who chairs it, framed the problem directly: retail ISPs have pointed out the costs and complexity associated with needing to onboard new networks.
Standardising the wholesale interface helps the ISP above. It does nothing for the operator holding 4 incompatible back offices below.
What does the buyer’s own stack have to absorb?
Most diligence examines the target. The harder question is what the buyer can run.
Three things have to work on the first day after cutover. Provisioning has to reach the acquired network without two systems both believing they control a live service. The first bill after integration has to reach the right customer on the right plan. Support has to see plan, order and network status for a subscriber whose records came from somewhere else.
Billing is where this becomes expensive. Recon Analytics, analysing 1.47 million US survey responses between 2022 and 2025, found that 35.8% of customers who called about a billing issue intended to leave, against 18.8% who did not need to call. Migration cutover is exactly when billing breaks.
Churn at the moment of integration is the most expensive churn there is. It arrives precisely when the penetration case is supposed to start paying.
Can you consolidate systems without migrating subscribers?
Yes, and the sequencing is the entire argument.
Rip-and-replace treats cost consolidation and revenue protection as one project. They are not. Cost sits in duplicated operations, licences and teams. Revenue sits in the subscriber relationship: the brand they signed up with, the customer portal they log into, the bill they recognise.
A wholesale layer above the acquired networks separates the two. The acquired operator keeps its brand and its customer portal. Its billing stack keeps running. Provisioning, ticketing and wholesale settlement move first, because those are invisible to the subscriber and expensive to duplicate. Subscriber migration happens later, per network, on the buyer’s timetable.
Profitability then improves twice. First from retained revenue and cross-sell across every brand in the group. Then from phased system consolidation that lowers unit cost without a churn event.
This is not a new mechanism. Running many service providers over shared infrastructure, with clean separation of commercial and operational responsibility, is how Nordic municipal networks have worked for 2 decades. Consolidation reverses the direction: 1 operator, many networks. The machinery is the same.
What consolidators should ask before the next deal
The CMA’s Phase 2 statutory deadline on nexfibre and Substantial falls on 15 December 2026. That decision shapes whether the UK ends with 3 wholesale platforms or 2. Either way, the deals continue and the tail of roughly 80 altnets keeps shrinking.
One question separates buyers who compound from buyers who stall. Not what is it worth. How many networks can we run before something breaks?
That number is a capability, and it can be built before the next term sheet.
COS Wholesale Engine is the wholesale layer described above. It sits over acquired networks as a normalisation layer for provisioning, ticketing, wholesale billing and reporting, without forcing migration off the systems already running. It is in live production with wholesale operators in North America, and COS Business Engine runs live operations for broadband operators in Sweden and Finland. COS Systems has been certified to ISO 27001 since May 2026.
See how COS Wholesale Engine handles multi-network operations
Frequently asked questions
What is post-acquisition OSS/BSS integration?
Post-acquisition OSS/BSS integration is the work of making an acquired network’s operational and business support systems function alongside the buyer’s own. It covers provisioning, service activation, ticketing, billing and reporting. It is usually the longest task in a broadband merger and the one that determines when synergies arrive.
How long does altnet integration take in the UK?
Published UK examples range from roughly 7 months to over 20. CityFibre reported integrating Connexin within 7 months. Netomnia’s acquisition of Brsk was agreed in June 2024, with customer migration to YouFibre beginning in early 2026. Timelines depend on how far subscriber migration is attempted alongside system consolidation.
Why do broadband acquisitions lose customers after integration?
Most integration churn traces to billing and support failure at cutover. Customers receive an unfamiliar bill, an incorrect plan or a support agent who cannot see their record. Forced brand and portal migration compounds this by changing the subscriber experience at the same moment.
Can an acquired ISP keep its own brand and billing system?
Yes. A wholesale layer above the acquired network can take over provisioning, ticketing and wholesale settlement while the acquired operator’s retail brand, customer portal and billing stack continue to run. System consolidation then happens in phases rather than as a single cutover.
What is the altnet take-up gap?
The altnet take-up gap is the difference between the proportion of passed premises connected on altnet networks and on Openreach. Ofcom’s Telecoms Access Review statement of March 2026 recorded around 18% for altnets against approximately 38% for Openreach. Closing that gap on acquired networks is the core financial case for consolidation.
How many altnets are left in the UK?
Around 80 remain active, from roughly 100 at the 2023 peak, according to ISPreview’s consolidation tracker and KPMG’s 2025 analysis. No regulator publishes an authoritative count. Analysts including Enders and KPMG expect the market to settle around Openreach, VMO2/nexfibre, CityFibre and a tail of smaller and niche operators.
