Fears mount over wave of 'alt-net' collapses ...

Regulators are drawing up plans for a broadband “supplier of last resort” regime in the event higher interest rates spark a wave of collapses and disruption.

Ofcom has been planning to ensure there is no disruption to broadband services as scores of providers reel from higher borrowing costs.

The financial pressures at TalkTalk, Britain’s fourth-biggest provider, are fuelling concern across the industry, although the regulator said its plans are not specific to any individual company.

The regulator has been in talks with BT’s Openreach division for more than a year amid fears that expected bankruptcies among small broadband network owners, known as alt-nets, could leave households facing uncertainty over their internet connection.

BT chief executive Philip Jansen this week warned it was a “hugely challenging” environment for many broadband providers amid surging inflation.

Speaking to analysts, he said: “Clearly there are going to be some changed in the industry over the next few years.”

Mr Jansen added: “If there are a few hundreds of thousands of customers, they need to be moved at some stage. We can do that, and we can do more as well. So look, we’re ready and waiting if ever required.” ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/04/broa...

I bet bloated Toad is just waiting for to grab the customers from a provider who go belly up. I rather go without broadband for a while than gop back to BT.

I'm not sure you necessarily need a "supplier of last resort", you just need to extend the one-touch switch to skip any sort of cooling off period delays in instances where the losing provider has ceased trading. For anybody on a Cityfibre or Openreach network there's no technical reason why they couldn't be running with their new provider within a day.

If we're talking about a situation where you're expecting BT to come in and pick up Gigaclear's customers then the amount of work required to prepare for that to take place is the equivalent to if one company was acquiring the other. I think it would be prohibitively expensive, this is nothing like the retail energy market.

I was a bit worried about this, being with a small alt-net, but it seems they (F&W Networks) are fairing rather well. £20m in the black.

Of course if a new alt-net just took out a huge loan right now to start a build, that'd be a whole different kettle of fish.

I think it's more likely that we'll see builds being delayed as they wait for more favourable interest rates from debtors.

This such old news. They started doing this months ago and probably actually started months before ISPReview and others reported upon it.. It this very reasion why I take no notice main stream media they are so behind what really going on and only want to perpetuate fear in the public.

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/4746496-fear...