Five Moves for the Next Eighteen Months

This series opened with a farmer paying twice for connectivity that a household thirty miles away gets from a single line. Everything since has been an attempt to explain why that gap persists in a sector that has already built the infrastructure to close it.

Here is what we think it adds up to.

1. Audit what is orderable, not what is passed

"Premises passed" has no standardised, legally binding definition, and the gap between a premise a network runs past and a premise a customer can actually order from is where valuations quietly inflate. Any diligence process that accepts a stated coverage figure without reconciling it against genuine service availability is pricing an asset it has not examined.

2. Underwrite the take-up curve, not the footprint

Sector-average take-up sits at roughly 18% against business plans that typically assumed 30–40% for sustainable profitability. The variance between operators inside that average matters far more than the average itself. An operator with a smaller footprint and a rising penetration curve is a materially different asset from one with a larger footprint and a flat one, and per-premise multiples do not distinguish between them.

3. Price the 2026 regulatory position — including its instability

The Code reforms and the Access Review both improve rural economics and both arrived after most models were built. Rebuild the model. Then stress-test the geographic classification underneath it, because the tailwind and the risk come from the same place.

4. Treat behavioural friction as a diligence input

The reasons households do not switch — installation anxiety, satisfaction with a connection that is merely adequate, unfamiliarity with an unknown brand — are not marketing problems to be solved after close. They are properties of a specific footprint that determine what take-up is achievable there. An operator that has demonstrably overcome them in its own communities has built something that does not appear anywhere on the asset register.

5. Sequence the integration before you sign

Decide which operating stack survives, what everything maps to, and who owns the migration, while you still have the leverage of an unsigned transaction. After close, each of those becomes a negotiation between new colleagues, and the synergy case quietly rebases.

None of these five are clever. They are the questions that get skipped when a process is moving quickly and the competitive pressure is to bid rather than to examine.

The sector's problem was never that it built too much fibre. It is that coverage was treated as the achievement, when coverage was only ever the precondition. The next eighteen months will sort operators by which of them understood the difference.

Sources: INCA, State of the Altnets 2026; Enders Analysis; Light Reading, on the definition of "premises passed"; TalkTalk/Frontier Economics, "Unlocking the Gigabit Dividend"; Ofcom, Telecoms Access Review 2026–31; Pinsent Masons, on the April 2026 Code reforms.