Giganet snaps up fellow UK fibreco Cuckoo

UK ISP Giganet has purchased Cuckoo as it looks to expand its fibre footprint and provide ‘the holy grail in connectivity’.

Giganet is part of the ‘Fern fibre family’, as it puts it, which also includes Jurassic, Swish, Allpoints Fibre and Vorboss. Having absorbed Cuckoo into its operations it will now make that the lead consumer brand for its core residential customers, while the  Giganet brand will be more enterprise focussed.

The company launched its fibre broadband service to households just over a year ago and bolstered by a £250 million funding injection from Fern Trading, and now reaches over nine million homes across the UK. The acquisition of Cuckoo ‘will accelerate their growth nationwide’, we are told.

“Today’s acquisition marks a meeting of minds at a time when consumers deserve more from a utility as critical as the internet,” said Jarlath Finnegan (pictured, right), CEO, Giganet. “Our vision to be the best ISP in the UK aligns perfectly with Cuckoo’s goal to be the fastest and fairest, and of course, the most trusted, bringing to the market a fresh challenger that puts customers first.

“What’s more, by combining the best standards in customer services with network systems excellence, both business and consumers will experience the holy grail in connectivity – high speed and incredible reliability. We’re really excited for the future of this partnership.”

Alexander Fitzgerald, CEO of Cuckoo (pictured, left) added: “This is great news for customers. Cuckoo’s expertise lies in building brilliant customer experiences thanks to our supremely talented team of developers, designers, marketers, and customer service experts. Giganet are experts in building and running networks. Together we will deliver faster, cheaper, and better broadband for millions. And we’re only just getting started.”

As we’ve pointed out before, there seems no shortage of investment money circling around the fibre market and all this is driving a lot of activity in the UK by a lot of players. More players than the market might be able to support long term in fact. Cuckoo has only been around for a couple of years, having launched in 2020 to ‘disrupt the broken telecoms sector.’ Which even compared to the start up culture of Silicon Valley, where the goal appears to be to be acquired by one of the big tech firms as quickly as possible, isn’t a very long time.

In a recent interview, Strategy Director at CityFibre Clayton Nash told us: “in 2027, I think most of the build that we’re talking about is done. Everybody’s done the majority of what they’re doing, there’s still some activity around that, but we’re really in the process of monetizing the networks at that point. It’ll have settled down, clearly there’ll be some consolidation. I think we’re tracking maybe 80 altnets at the moment that are building things. Some of those are going to find themselves as part of bigger groups, or are going to get together and do something separately. So we’ll start to sort of see a more rational set of players out of that.”

Some reports put the number of altnets operating in the UK at more like 100 – which is a lot of firms to be selling something like broadband, a product which while increasingly vital, in reality is pretty hard to distinguish from rival offerings.

Others have also pointed out that we could be on the cusp of a wave of consolidation as some of these smaller players are bought out or converge into one larger entity – which if true could mean we are about to see many more stories like this one.

Get the latest news straight to your inbox. Register for the Telecoms.com newsletter here.