An investor has written off its £24.1m stake in toob and handed the equity to the lenders
One of the two investors behind toob has stopped funding it. In an announcement to the market on Monday morning, International Public Partnerships said it had elected not to commit further capital to the full fibre network, and that it will transfer its equity to toob’s debt holders for what the announcement calls a de minimis amount. Almost nothing. The stake was carried at £24.1m at the end of December.
If toob is your provider, this is the altnet question in its plainest form. The same announcement puts the network at around 300,000 premises and more than 140,000 customers, built principally around Southampton and parts of southern England, and it names “structural headwinds” in the UK altnet market as the reason for walking away. An investor writing a stake down to nearly zero is a judgement about the business, and it is fair to read it as one.
It is not administration, though, and the difference is the whole story. toob is still trading and the network is still lit. Nothing in Monday’s statement changes your price, your contract or your connection. What changes is who holds the equity: the lenders will, once the final terms are agreed. International Public Partnerships keeps £2.6m of exposure ranking alongside the senior debt, plus an entitlement to a share of anything realised if toob is sold later, which hints at what it expects to happen eventually.
The numbers underneath it are not comfortable. ISPreview read the announcement across toob’s filed accounts to the end of December 2024, which show an operating loss of £23.50m on revenue of £14.03m, and total liabilities of £299m. It also notes the original ambition, a million premises across Dorset, Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex by 2027, a target that went quiet some time ago. This is the same pressure that put a winding-up petition on Fusion Fibre a fortnight ago. It has reached a bigger network in a gentler form.
So what should a toob customer do today? Nothing, honestly. Your service and your price sit where they were, and our page on toob carries what we track on its pricing, contract lengths and annual rise. The thing worth understanding rather than worrying about is what actually happens to your line when a small network changes hands, and our guide on whether altnets are safe to switch to goes through it properly. If you are weighing toob up against whatever else reaches you, the availability checker is the only thing that knows your street.
The genuine uncertainty is what comes next. Debt holders in control can restructure a business, run it as it is, or sell it, and ISPreview’s own reading is that CityFibre would be a natural buyer, since toob already uses its network outside its own footprint. None of that has been announced, and nobody has put a date on any of it. A network changing owner is not the same as a network switching off.