Ares has put more money into toob, and will not say how much
A month ago one of toob’s backers wrote off its stake and walked away. On Friday the lender left holding it put more money in. The Hampshire network says Ares Infrastructure Debt has made a “successful follow-on investment”, as reported by ISPreview. It has not said how much.
The recap matters, because this is the second half of a story we ran in August. International Public Partnerships elected not to commit further capital and handed most of its original £24.1m stake to toob’s debt holders, which effectively passed control to Ares, already toob’s main credit partner. So the money going in now comes from the party that ended up owning the place.
ISPreview puts toob’s own fibre network at around 300,000 premises and the business at 140,000 customers, and estimates 80,000 to 90,000 of those sit on toob’s own network with the rest carried over CityFibre’s. Two appointments landed alongside the investment: Kevin Dean as executive chairman, Sarah Herriman as chief financial officer.
What it changes on your bill
Nothing. Not today, anyway. An investment is not a price change, a service change or a contract change, and nothing announced on Friday asks a toob customer to do a single thing. What it does do is answer the question August left hanging: there is money behind the network, and nobody is switching it off.
The accounts underneath it are still hard reading. ISPreview reports an operating loss of £17.82m for the year to December 2025, on revenue of £26.05m, with total liabilities of £355.28m. Revenue nearly doubled and capital spending dropped by roughly two thirds, which is the shape of a company that has stopped passing new homes and started concentrating on selling to the ones it already reaches. It is a long way short of the million premises toob once hoped to cover across Dorset, Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex by 2027.
What to watch next
Consolidation, first. ISPreview’s own reading is that toob will probably still be looking for a consolidation partner, and that is the event which actually reaches customers: a change of owner rather than a change of lender. Our guide to a provider takeover covers what a new owner may and may not change about a deal you have already signed.
Then there is your own contract, which is the part you control. None of this moves a price this week. But the date your term ends is the point you can leave without paying for the privilege, and that is worth knowing whoever owns the network by then. Out of contract broadband explains where you stand once you are past it.
If toob is on your street, the toob provider page has its current prices and contract lengths, and are altnets safe is the honest version of the question sitting underneath all of this.