News

In the company’s latest annual report directors warned that the business could collapse “in August 2024 or sooner” 

TalkTalk has staved off defaulting on its debt by securing a refinancing package exceeding £400 million, led by its founder, Sir Charles Dunstone. 

Announced today, the deal involves shareholders — including Dunstone, Ares Management, and Toscafund — immediately injecting £65 million in interim funds into the company. 

An additional £170 million is set to follow, contingent upon the finalisation of binding agreements among all involved parties. The total refinancing package is reportedly worth £400 million.  

Assets currently held separately, such as TalkTalk’s Virtual1 subsidiary and the customer bases from Ovo and Shell, will also contribute. 

As part of the agreement, the company’s bank lenders and bondholders have agreed to extend two approaching debt deadlines from November and next February to September 2027. This extension affords TalkTalk additional time to roll out its strategic initiatives for PlatformX (its wholesale division) and its consumer division. 

TalkTalk have been struggling with debt for several years, with the total currently standing at around £1 billion.  

Earlier this month, it was reported that Macquarie, who had been in line to acquire a £450 million stake in PlatformX, had walked away from the deal. Reports have suggested that Macquarie could reopen negotiations if TalkTalk’s financial situation improves. 

“The company is pleased to announce that the key terms of a refinancing transaction have been agreed between a group of senior secured notes (SSN) holders, a group of revolving credit facilities (RCF) banks (the SSN group and RCF group together represent approximately 60 per cent of the company’s secured debt), Ares Management Funds and the company’s major shareholders,” said the company in a statement. 

“The proposed transaction will leave the company well-funded to deliver the respective strategic plans of PlatformX Communications and TalkTalk, continuing to capitalise on their strong positions in the market.” 

Join the conversation on the UK connectivity market at this year’s Connected Britain, 11-12 September in London. Get tickets here!  

Also in the news:
NTT to launch new AI company ‘NTT AI-CIX’
Thousands of kms of fibre could be left underutilised warns asset reuse specialist
IOH launches Southeast Asia’s largest digital intelligence operations centre

News 

The UK mobile operators will all be promoting the campaign on their various platforms 

This week, Mobile UK, the trade association for the UK’s mobile network operators (MNOs), has launched its Better Connected Rural Campaign, which aims to raise awareness of the benefits of connectivity to rural communities. 

The campaign began today with a podcast episode featuring Iain Milligan, Chief Network Officer of Three UK, which discussed how mobile connectivity is transforming the UK’s agricultural industry. 

Mobile UK’s Director of Policy and Communications Gareth Elliott will also host a vlog of a trip to the remote Scottish island of South Uist, meeting with local residents and council leaders to discuss the importance of connectivity in remote locations. 

Throughout this week, Mobile UK will be posting and sharing content using the hashtag #BetterConnectedRural. 

All four of the UK’s MNOs are part of the Shared Rural Network (SRN), a joint initiative between the UK government and the MNOs to significantly improve rural mobile coverage. The project involves sharing infrastructure between the operators to ensure that coverage gaps are filled, as well as deploying new shared sites in hard-to-reach locations. By 2025, the SRN aims to see 4G coverage expanded to cover 95% of the UK’s geographic area.  

EE is currently the only operator to have completed its first phase of its SRN rollout, achieving its 2024 targets in January, six months ahead of schedule.  

To complete the first phase of the project, operators have to get rid of coverage ‘partial not-spots’ by extending the reach of their 4G networks. ‘Partial not-spots’ are defined as areas that receive coverage from at least one operator, but not all of them.  

For EE to have completed this phase before its rivals should not come as a great surprise; as the UK’s largest operator, most of this target could be achieved by upgrading the company’s existing sites. EE’s rivals, on the other hand, all need to deploy more new sites to meet their own commitments.  

In fact, this deployment process is taking longer than hoped, with Virgin Media O2, Three UK, and Vodafone jointly requesting a deadline extension of 18 months in order to hit their SRN coverage targets. This request was rejected by the UK government, putting additional pressure on these operators to accelerate their efforts in the coming months. 

Join Iain Milligan on the day one CXO keynote panel at this year’s Connected Britain, 11-12 September in London. Get discounted tickets here! 

Also in the news:
NTT to launch new AI company ‘NTT AI-CIX’
Thousands of kms of fibre could be left underutilised warns asset reuse specialist
IOH launches Southeast Asia’s largest digital intelligence operations centre

News

The deal will see Altice UK’s 24.5% stake in the business transferred gradually to India’s second largest telco, Bharti Airtel

This morning, it has been announced that billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice UK is selling its stake in BT to Bharti Airtel.

The move will see Altice UK transfer its 24.5% stake in the business to Airtel piecemeal, with an initial instalment of 9.99%. The rest of the stake will be transferred following the prerequisite security checks by the UK government.

The financial value of the deal was not announced, but is reportedly around £4 billion.

“We welcome investors who recognise the long-term value of our business, and this scale of investment from Bharti Global is a great vote of confidence,” said BT CEO Allison Kirkby in a filing statement.

“BT has enjoyed a long association with Bharti Enterprises, and I’m pleased that they share our ambition and vision for the future of our business. They have a strong track record of success in the sector, and I look forward to ongoing and positive engagement with them in the months and years to come.”

Drahi first took a 12.1% stake in BT back in 2021, creating Altice UK specifically for the purpose. Since then, Altice UK has slowly grown its stake in the business to today’s 24.5%, with Drahi consistently assuring stakeholders that it had no intention of taking over the UK largest telco.

This did not stop rumours flying, however, with reports last year suggesting the billionaire was looking to increase his stake even further, potentially up to 29.9%

In the last year, however, Altice’s fortunes have changed. Drahi’s considerable telecoms empire has been built on a mountain of debt that now stands at around $60 billion. Interest on these debts already account for the majority of the Group’s operating capital, with some of these loans maturing as early as 2027. As such, the Drahi has recently reversed course with Altice, moving to streamline the business and sell off its less critical business units.

This, it seems, is the primary motivation for the sale of the company’s stake in BT.

For Airtel, on the other hand, the acquisition represents a vote of confidence in Kirkby and her long-term strategic vision for the UK operator.

“BT to my mind has a much brighter future ahead and they need to be following their strategy, if I may say, even more boldly,” Bharti chair Sunil Bharti Mittal told reporters.”We are not in this for making a buck or looking at stock markets up or down. We are long-term telecom investors.”

Airtel is not the only company to show growing interest in BT in recent months. Earlier this summer, America Movil’s owner, billionaire Carlos Slim, purchased a 3% stake in the business for £400 million.

Join the conversation around the UK’s connectivity landscape at this year’s Connected Britain, 11-12 September in London. Get tickets here! 

Also in the news:
NTT to launch new AI company ‘NTT AI-CIX’
Thousands of kms of fibre could be left underutilised warns asset reuse specialist
IOH launches Southeast Asia’s largest digital intelligence operations centre

New data from Thinkbroadband has provided an updated independent assessment of how big – in terms of network coverage (premises passed) – the top 20 largest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks in the UK have become by the end of July 2024. In this article, we compare that data against official coverage claims.

One of the challenges with keeping tabs on the rapid UK growth of full fibre broadband networks is that some network operators often make coverage claims that are difficult to independently verify. This is relevant because we’ve often times found that the official “premises passed” figures put out by some providers may not entirely reflect reality.

For example, in some cases those figures could include part-built networks that aren’t fully live yet and, in other cases, the network may be technically built, but customers in some of the covered areas won’t be able to get it ordered or installed by an ISP (i.e. not yet truly “Ready for Service” – RFS). Similarly, in a smaller number of cases, operators can sometimes make mistakes in their data (example).

The latest State of Broadband Report (July 2024) from TBB is thus very useful because we get an up-to-date run-down of how much coverage has been independently verified to exist (RFS) across the largest alternative network (altnet) operators in the full fibre space. We can then compare TBB’s data with the official coverage claims from operators.

Naturally, there are a few caveats to consider when doing this, which need to be reflected for the proper context. Firstly, TBB is not perfect, and they do sometimes miss bits and pieces of network coverage (please email them if you spot this). Secondly, conducting independent analysis of network builds like this is slow and laborious work, thus over the years we’ve tended to perceive that TBB’s latest data can be 2-3 months behind actual build.

Such a time lag, which is likely to vary between operators, may not seem like much, but it can create disproportionately large gaps between independent and official figures. Big gaps are most likely to occur during the early ramp-up phase of a new network build, where smaller networks may go from having a few tens of thousands of premises passed to hundreds of thousands and all within the space of a year (some networks are still in this phase).

Suffice to say, it’s wise not to make the mistake of automatically inferring that a big gap is because an altnet may be overstating their coverage. In addition, we’ve also dated the official claims below as most operators only very occasionally provide an update on their build progress and some haven’t done one in a long time, which will thus be out of step with TBB’s latest modelling.

Top 20 Largest UK Full Fibre Networks by Coverage – July 2024

Operator
Premises Jul 2024 (Jan 2024) – TBB Analysis

Official Claim

Openreach (BT)
14.8 million (12.5m)
15m – Jul 2024

CityFibre
3.8m (2.9m)
3.6m Built (3.3m RFS) – May 2024

Virgin Media (RFOG)
1.6m (1.5m)
It’s complicated (see below)

CommunityFibre
1.5m (1.3m)
1.3m homes & 185k businesses – Nov 2023

Hyperoptic
1.1m (1.1m)
1.73m – Jul 2024

Nexfibre (Virgin Media)
1.1m (546,000)
1.28m – Jul 2024

Netomnia (YouFibre)
1m (745,000)
1m RFS – Jul 2024

Brsk
583,000 (390,000)
573,050 RFS – Jul 2024

Gigaclear
508,000 (389,000)
500,000 RFS – 27th Mar 2024

Trooli
421,000 (334,000)
370,000 RFS – 19th Jul 2024

FullFibre Limited
379,000 (172,000)
339,000 RFS – 23rd May 2024

Fibrus
353,000 (291,000)
354,000 (337k RFS) – 31st Mar 2024

AllPoints Fibre
289,000
none

KCOM
281,000 (276,000)
297,000 – Mar 2023

G.Network
250,000 (248,000)
330,000 – Mar 2023

F&W Networks
238,000
410,000 RFS – Feb 2024

Grain (Grain Connect)
211,000
220,000 RFS – May 2024

Zzoomm
202,000 (182,000)
200,000 RFS – Jun 2024

ITS Technology (mostly biz fibre)
191,000 (187,000)
none

MS3
184,000
200,000 (171,814 RFS) – May 2024

As usual, we aren’t going to micro analyse each operator above, but most of TBB’s real-world focused estimates of Ready for Service (RFS) coverage are roughly where we’d expect them to be when compared with official claims. But there are a few caveats to point out above for certain operators.

Firstly, Virgin Media’s network is currently in the middle of a major upgrade, which is seeing XGS-PON based FTTP being deployed into areas that could previously only access their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network. Currently, it’s a little bit difficult to track these XGS areas, and thus TBB has only included the figure for their older Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFOG) based FTTP build.

Meanwhile, the nexfibre build is technically a separate company and so gets its own entry, despite only selling packages via Virgin Media. The official nexfibre figures also haven’t yet been updated to add 175,000 premises from Upp’s recent merger, but that should happen soon. Officially, Virgin Media and Nexfibre claim to have passed a total of 5 million premises with FTTP.

Elsewhere, Netomnia and Brsk are in the process of merging, thus in the future they’ll combine and would be today delivering around 1.6m premises passed – putting them above CommunityFibre in the above table. As for CityFibre, it’s currently unclear whether TBB’s figure of 3.8m has included their recent acquisition of Lit Fibre or not (technically Lit’s premises have yet to be integrated into City’s network).

The table this time also includes the additions of F&W Networks, Grain, AllPoints Fibre (this largely reflects the combination of Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre and Giganet) and MS3. Finally, it’s important to remember that a lot of these FTTP operators are overbuilding rivals in different parts of the country, particularly dense urban locations. But if we were to just look at the UK coverage of alternative networks (excluding Openreach, Virgin Media and KCOM) then they’d reach 35.9% of premises (up from 30.78% in Jan 2024).

The Horsham-based Telecom Acquisitions Group (TAL), which is a holding company for several familiar UK residential broadband brands (Home Telecom, Eclipse Broadband etc.), has today announced that they’ve acquired the remaining residential customers of ISP Gigabit Networks that were on CityFibre and FullFibre Ltd. networks.

In case anybody has forgotten, TAL first announced in June 2024 (here) that they’d acquired the CityFibre (FTTP) linked residential customer base of ISP Gigabit Networks (here), which left the retail ISP to focus on the business connectivity (wholesale etc.) side of their operations. The move impacted some 2,000 customers.

The change today is that TAL have now purchased the remaining residential customers that were on both the CityFibre and FullFibre Limited networks, which in total represents an additional circa 2,300 customers. As usual, the acquired base will be switched to TAL’s Home Telecom ISP brand, which pledges to “respect and honour the customers current prices and terms and conditions.”

This is on top of a record month in July 2024, which saw the group deliver 3,748 new sales through organic growth (some 500 of that alone came from new customers via MS3’s full fibre network) – putting them ahead of their forecast for the 2024/2025 year.

Nigel Barnett, TAL CEO, said:

“We are really pleased with the further acquisition of the remaining customer from David Yates Gigabit Networks. The first tranche of customers migrated very successfully with no loss of service or customers, allowed us to obtain the remaining residential base. Going forward with our organic growth, we will still look towards any further possible acquisitions whatever the size to complement our growth.”

The TAL Group is now home to over 100,000 broadband customers and has returned a turnover of £40m.

A new news report coming in this morning suggests that debt ridden UK broadband ISP TalkTalk may have finally reached a £400 million deal with its lenders. The deal could be announced today and would buy the operator time to resolve their underlying financial woes by extending the group’s debt maturities to 2027 – avoiding an ugly default.

According to Sky News, the deal will see TalkTalk’s shareholders (led by founder Sir Charles Dunstone, as well as Toscafund and Ares Management) agreeing to immediately inject £65m into the company, with a further £170m to follow. Some leadership changes would also occur, with CEO Tristia Clarke becoming a Non-Executive Director in September 2024 and being replaced by James Smith, while Dunstone will remain Group Chairman.

The £235m capital injection would then be complemented by an asset package (i.e. parts of the company normally held separately) worth roughly the same value (i.e. capital and asses worth a total of c.£400m) to entice lenders, which is expected to bundle-in wholesaler Virtual1 and the customer bases acquired from SSE Broadband (Ovo) and Shell Energy (here).

TalkTalk has declined to comment on this, but we will update again today if that changes.

In a surprise development, Bharti Global, the Indian multinational conglomerate, has this morning formally agreed to acquire French billionaire Patrick Drahi’s (Altice UK) stake of 24.5% (issued share capital) in national broadband and telecoms giant BT Group.

The move comes only a couple of months after the richest man in Latin America, Carlos Slim, became one of BT’s largest shareholders after he took a 3.2% stake in the company (here), which at the time was said to be worth around £400m. BT’s other major shareholders include T-Mobile Holdings Ltd. (aka – Deutsche Telekom) on 12%, BNP Paribas (Suisse) SA on 10.8% and Schroder Investment Management Ltd. on just 2.12% etc.

Breaking news.. more to follow..

A small number of Virgin Media’s (O2) broadband ISP customers, which appears to be largely impacting those on their latest 2Gbps full fibre package via nexfibre’s new XGS-PON (FTTP) network, have recently been suffering regular spikes in network latency (ping) and packet loss. But the good news is that the provider is working on a permanent fix.

The problem was first brought to ISPreview’s attention over a week ago after some of Virgin Media’s customers, primarily those who enjoy playing fast-paced online multiplayer games, noticed an unusually predictable period of disruption. In most cases this seemed to be occurring once every hour or so, which resulted in several seconds of disruption for gamers (i.e. lag and warping effects due to a ping spike).

Latency itself is a measure of the time (i.e. the delay in milliseconds – 1000ms = 1 second) that it takes for a packet of data to travel from your router to a remote server and then back again (ping). The shorter the delay, the better. This is particularly important for fans of fast-paced online games, where a low ping (lower figures are better) can result in smoother gameplay, while high pings and spikes disrupt play.

Issues with latency often go hand in hand with Packet Loss, which is the term given to a problem that occurs when some of the data packets being transmitted between two or more points (e.g. servers) on the internet effectively go missing or are incorrect. The connection will autocorrect for this, but doing so can result in a delay (e.g. increased latency / high ping times) and, at its worse, data corruption.

Suffice to say that online gamers are often the first to notice when something unusual is happening with connection latency, although such issues can also impact other services too (we’ve had reports of connectivity problems with remote desktop/VPN apps and call dropouts etc.). We should add that all networks can sometimes suffer problems with latency and packet loss, but such issues are usually localised and may be related to congestion or routing/peering problems. In this case, the issue wasn’t localised and had a predictable pattern, which suggested another cause.

What’s the cause?

After a bit of digging, ISPreview found that this specific issue typically seemed to be occurring for customers on Virgin Media’s latest 2Gbps speed broadband package on nexfibre’s network (FTTP – XGS-PON) with their HUB 5x router (note: there are indications that others may be affected too). Some of those impacted by this had previously upgraded from the provider’s 1Gbps tier, where they suffered no such problems.

Take note that not every user will be able to spot problems like this (i.e. active online gamers are more exposed to it), thus many others may not know if it’s occurring or even impacting them. Nevertheless, several threads on Virgin’s own Community Forum (here, here and here) can be linked to the same issue, which strongly suggests that the culprit is Virgin’s RealSpeed system.

For the uninitiated, RealSpeed reflects the router agent that SamKnows (CISCO) developed in order to more proactively and accurately measure the performance of broadband lines, which can also help to spot problems. The system runs at regular intervals, although normally it does so in a seamless way and customers should not notice. But something about either the 2Gbps service or the HUB 5x router may be conflicting with that.

A Virgin Media spokesperson told ISPreview:

“We’re aware that a small handful of customers may be experiencing latency spikes and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. Our team has taken steps to help minimise any disruption while continuing to work on a permanent resolution as a priority.”

In terms of the steps that Virgin Media has taken to “help minimise any disruption“, we know that one of those has involved switching off the RealSpeed agent on the lines of those who have complained. As soon as RealSpeed was switched off, then the problems with latency and packet loss (occurring hourly) went away.

In addition, Virgin Media has also reduced the background testing to use a much lighter schedule and tightened their cross-traffic detection system, meaning tests will only run if no traffic, or a very small volume of traffic, is passing across the customer’s connection.

Some of the latency spikes were so bad that they peaked at up to 1000ms, which is enough to cause brief connectivity and performance problems for a lot of services. But other spikes were more modest, and experiences do vary. Virgin Media does not currently have a huge pool of customers on their 2Gbps service and so there won’t be a vast number of complaints, although the first issues were raised back in early May 2024.

Alternative network operator toob, which has deployed a gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband network across parts of Southern England (parts of Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey), appears to have been suffering from a service outage “across our network” this afternoon.

The situation appears to have started at just after 5:30pm this afternoon and promptly spread to a significant portion of their customer base. According to a statement posted via X/Twitter (here): “We’re aware of an issue currently impacting customers across our network. Telephone lines are extremely busy at this time but please be assured engineers are working hard to restore service. Our teams thank you for your patience.”

The provider has also posted a related update to their Service Status page, although it’s a bit more generic. The good news is that in the last few minutes customers have started to report that their connections have returned to normal, which hopefully means that the issue is resolved.

UPDATE 7:13pm

Toob’s service status page now reports that “there are currently no known service interruptions.”

Elon Musk’s Starlink (SpaceX) service, which operates a mega constellation of ultrafast broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the UK and the world, has issued a new update to explain how they dynamically adjust their network to mitigate the “significant risk” of causing interference for radio telescopes.

At present Starlink currently has 6,313 LEO satellites (c.2,000 are Mini GEN 2A) in Low Earth Orbit at altitudes of c.500-600km and they’re in the process of adding thousands more by the end of 2027. Customers in the UK typically pay from £75 a month for a 30-day term, plus £299 for hardware on the ‘Standard’ plan, which promises internet latency times of 25-60ms, downloads of c. 25-100Mbps and uploads of c. 5-10Mbps.

However, SpaceX’s engineers have recognised that direct transmissions from their satellites (as well as others) “towards the eye of radio telescopes” may pose a “significant risk of interference to astronomical research“, which is why they’ve spent the past few years working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to develop new techniques to “mitigate this risk“.

The goal being that everybody gets to enjoy streaming more cat videos, while simultaneously protecting and enabling critical radio astronomy sciences to continue their work unabated by the new mega constellation polluting the sky above their heads. But a new update from Starlink has shed a bit more light on how they’ve tackled this problem.

Starlink’s Statement on Radio Astronomy

Engineers from SpaceX and NRAO have determined, through years of collaborative experiments, that the direct transmissions from satellites towards the eye of radio telescopes may pose a significant risk of interference to astronomical research. To mitigate this risk, the teams from SpaceX and NRAO have developed techniques that enable Starlink satellites to avoid transmissions into the line-of-sight of radio telescopes by leveraging Starlink’s advanced phased array antenna technology, which can dynamically steer satellite beams away from telescopes in milliseconds.

These techniques are made possible by a real-time data sharing framework between radio astronomy observatories and Starlink that provides the Starlink network with a telescope’s planned observation schedule, including the telescope’s pointing direction (aka “boresight”) and its observed frequency band. With this information, the Starlink network can ensure that satellites passing near the boresight of a telescope dynamically redirect their beams away from the telescope.

This boresight avoidance method protects the telescope’s observations while ensuring Starlink service remains uninterrupted for customers near the telescope, and it is now live and operational for the Starlink network and NRAO’s Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The same approach has also been deployed for the Green Bank Observatory in the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia (USA) and there’s even a research paper covering the results from that. Nevertheless, there are thousands of radio telescopes around the world and thus SpaceX intends to continue its work with the radio astronomy community, which aims to expand the implementation of this to “other observatories in the USA and beyond“. Quite how far they’ll get with this remains to be seen.

SpaceX added that it maintains an “open invitation to other radio astronomy organizations from around the world” to implement the approach to help protect their important scientific research. But Starlink isn’t the only company or country looking to build such a mega constellation in Low Earth Orbit and we can only hope that all the others are being mindful of this problem too.