European alternative fibre network providers (altnets) — once darlings of the infrastructure investment boom — are entering a more unforgiving phase of their life cycle. After years of debt-fuelled expansion, rising interest costs, slower-than-expected customer take-up, and intensifying competition have pushed parts of the sector into outright distress.

The start of the year has already shown how the UK has emerged as one of the clearest pressure points, with recent headlines involving Gigaclear and G.Network underscoring the strain. What was sold as a land-grab for Britain’s digital future is now, in several cases, a restructuring story — with creditors, not founders or growth investors, increasingly in control. That reflects the sheer speed and scale of the country’s fibre build.

At the heart of the crisis is a mismatch between financial assumptions made in the era of cheap capital and the operating reality of a crowded fibre market.

Higher rates have transformed fibre from a long-dated infrastructure play into a leveraged balance-sheet problem. Interest costs now absorb cash that was meant to fund further build, while competitive overbuild has capped pricing power just as refinancing looms.

“Most of these models assumed financing was effectively free and that take-up would be linear,” said an investor. “Neither of those things turned out to be true.”