A rescue bid for a major network, which has collapsed into administration, was pulled over fears its fibre cables had been chewed to pieces and were being ripped up by rats
A major UK broadband provider has announced it has been placed into administration after hungry rats reportedly destroyed their fibre cables. The rescue bid that had been in place for G Network had to be abandoned after concerns were raised that the rats caused extensive damage.
Community Fibre were considering purchasing the firm’s assets, but decided against acquiring their competitor at the last minute as they feared the extent of the damage. Fitzwalter Capital who specialise in acquiring distressed assets before repackaging them for sale has submitted an application to appoint administrations at G Network.
G Network is a provider of high-speed internet services in London. This comes after FitzWalter Capital assumed control of G Network from its former owners, the USS pension fund and Cube Infrastructure Managers.
Community Fibre CEO Graeme Oxby confirmed that the rescue bid would not happen due to the hefty costs of repairing the cables, reported the Mirror.
“Rodents like ducts and they like fibres which are very tasty,” he explained. We’ve not shown much interest as we believe it has quite a lot of structural issues and would be quite an expensive fix.”
Residents and businesses in Doncaster also reported rat related broadband disruption last month. Local MP and Labour Party Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the issues were due to ‘rodent damage.’
Miliband added that he had “asked [Openreach] what they’re going to do to prevent widespread outages like this in future”.
Mr Oxby concluded: “Clearly there are going to be the distressed consolidations, maybe lender-led or specialist-led, but we don’t feel that consolidation is the only answer.
“Recently it’s seemed that alt-nets only exist to consolidate. We set up to be successful competitors to the incumbent and introduce some competition into the market… I think that’s got lost a bit.”
