MZ

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...

The consolidation of the UK alternative network (Altnet) market is accelerating, but its execution is proving far more varied than early industry models suggested. While early research broadly assumed that consolidation would occur primarily through orderly, solvent corporate mergers between regional peers, recent market activity demonstrates that consolidation is advancing along multiple distinct tracks. The acquisition of the customer base and network assets of Airband Community Internet...

The value case for consolidation is almost always written as a cost synergy. The cost synergy is almost always deferred, because merging two networks is easy and merging two operating stacks is not. Independent networks are built as self-contained operations. Each carries its own business support systems for billing and customer management, its own operational support systems for provisioning and assurance, its own geographic inventory, its own field-service tooling — frequently a mix of...