A £250m bid is being lined up for TalkTalk's broadband customers
If TalkTalk is the name on your broadband bill, the company behind it may be about to change. Sky News reported on Wednesday evening that the investment firm Alchemy Partners is being lined up to back a bid from Opus Broadband for TalkTalk’s consumer arm, the part of the business that serves about 1.8 million customers. One person close to the process put the price at around £250m. Nothing has been signed, and Sky’s own sources cautioned that a deal might not be concluded at all.
Opus Broadband is not a household name. It used to be called 6G Internet, it is run by Tahir Mohsan, the former boss of Tiny Computers, and ISPreview reports that it is connected to the wireless network operator IX Wireless. Buying TalkTalk’s retail customers would take it from a small wireless provider to one of the biggest broadband suppliers in the country in a single move. Sky called it an audacious swoop.
The sale only works in a particular order. Sky says any deal for the consumer arm would follow an agreement for TalkTalk to hand its wholesale network, PlatformX Communications, to Octopus Investments, which manages the broadband infrastructure group Fern Trading. Together the two would amount to a full break-up of the company Sir Charles Dunstone founded more than twenty years ago. Vodafone has looked at the consumer side too, and if no sale is finalised the retail business could stay where it is.
The reason any of this is happening is debt. ISPreview, reading the group’s latest annual accounts, puts net debt at £1.2bn before leases and £1.96bn with them, on a statutory pre-tax loss of £465m for the year to 28 February 2025.
For your bill today, this changes nothing. A reported bid is not a sale: there is no date, no letter and nothing to do. Nothing has been said about prices, brands or the terms existing customers are on either, and that is the part worth watching rather than the headline figure. Alchemy Partners and TalkTalk both declined to comment.
It is not the first time TalkTalk customers have changed hands this month either. Around 120,000 went to Rise Fibre, and another 13,500 are due to move to Fleur Telecom on 1 September. Those were batches of accounts sold off the edges; this would be the whole retail business. If you would rather choose your next provider than be handed one, our guide to what happens when your deal ends is the place to start, and the availability checker will show you which networks reach your address.