Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Canadian investment firm Northleaf Capital Partners, which backs alternative UK rural broadband provider Quickline, has reportedly started to go cold on a potential acquisition of the incumbent broadband and phone provider for Hull (East Yorkshire), KCOM, from Australian investment group Macquarie.
Regular readers might recall that Northleaf expressed an interest in buying KCOM all the way back in May 2026, albeit almost certainly for a much smaller sum than Macquarie originally paid for the operator. But a new report in The Times (paywall) alleges that the competition watchdog’s provisional opposition to nexfibre’s (VMO2) proposed £2bn acquisition of Netomnia has raised questions about whether further consolidation in the UK broadband market will face regulatory obstacles, which seems to be causing Northleaf to get cold feet.
Quickline is currently funded by c.£500m from Northleaf, as well as c.£300m of public subsidy from four Project Gigabit contracts (here, here and here), plus c.£225m in term loans and debt guarantees from the National Wealth Fund and a £25m term loan from NatWest. As of August 2026 their full fibre broadband network covered 260,000 premises (excluding fixed wireless coverage, which also covers c.200,000 premises – not all gigabit-capable) – mostly across rural parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The operator currently aims to extend gigabit-capable broadband to 360,000 UK premises.