Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis said that CityFibre securing new funding was “absolutely central” to the future of the altnet sector.
She added it would give the company “the horsepower that they need to drive consolidation by acquiring smaller players in the sector and continue expanding their footprint”.
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Claire Enders, founder of media and telecommunications research company Enders Analysis, said Rose "epitomizes the reasons women have increasingly succeeded to these roles."
"She's a peacemaker, she's very non-confrontational, very thoughtful, and she works very well in very large organizations," Enders added.
Moreover, Enders Analysis’ senior research analyst Claire Holubowskyj said she still believes Google’s promise of a new reporting line showing the impact of AI Max is little better than other black box reporting.
“While useful to identify an impact, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ have always been the more interesting (and difficult to identify) insights,” she said.
In Holubowskyj’s view, Google is providing the base level of visibility necessary in AI Max to build trust in the system among marketers. “But part of widespread AI adoption will be trusting the outputs and ceding limited control in some areas — the key questions are which areas, and how much oversight is required?,” she continued.
Ligue 1 goes direct-to-consumer: Partners needed
9 July 2025After four failed broadcast licence deals over five years, France’s top football league will launch its own subscription service in August.
In the short-term, consumer take up will critically depend on bundling arrangements with third-party platforms.
Longer-term, the league will need to establish lasting partnerships. Outdated competition rules are an obstacle, but the Dutch model is worth considering.
Sky has officially launched on CityFibre’s network, offering up to 5Gbps speeds, which may have more of a halo effect for Sky than driving direct adoption of these very high end packages.
Sky is critical to CityFibre’s wholesale model given its size, and it is a good sign that Sky is proving an enthusiastic wholesale customer, while it is likely to be wary of others.
CityFibre still needs to complete its planned financing round to kick off a wholesale-focused consolidation wave, which would ultimately be beneficial to all incumbents in ending irrational price competition from retail altnets.
Fixing an allocation quirk at BT pushed UK broadband revenue back into growth in Q1, albeit a very modest 0.8%, thanks to continued altnet growth and a very weak underlying market.
Broadband pricing is dipping down overall, but there is not yet evidence of pricing cuts targeted in altnet areas, a massive missed opportunity in our view.
The market will remain under pressure in the short term, but in the longer term altnet pressure will fall under all realistic consolidation scenarios.
Karen Egan was quoted in the Financial Times on "The surprising success story of British fibre broadband"
8 July 2025“Consistency is incredibly important to investors and Ofcom has largely been consistent,” says Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis.
Openreach hosted internet service providers including Sky, TalkTalk and BT’s own retail units on its network, which comprised about 80 per cent of the market by 2016, according to Enders Analysis.
Others see it differently. Although the altnet drive had been crucial, the UK’s meteoric rollout is largely owed to Ofcom’s decision to guarantee Openreach its fair bet, argues Egan.
“I just don’t think that you can [say] to your board and to your shareholders, ‘We’re rolling this out because the government’s kind of really leaning on us to do so,’” Egan says. “I think it was more about the fair bet from Ofcom.”
Defined roles within the advertising ecosystem are a thing of the past: everyone is adapting by building out functionality to claim share as the constants underpinning advertising—attribution, discoverability, and regulation—change.
There is a new wave of M&A, partnerships and developments from agencies, adtech, and big tech in data and AI, as all sides position themselves to reshape the terms of online advertising at a time of maximum uncertainty.
Big tech platforms are leveraging their scale and AI investments in attempts to reset broad swathes of the market. Publishers are exposed; their way forward relies on asserting their value through direct audiences and collaboration on sector-wide innovations
Tom Harrington, a broadcast expert at the research firm Enders Analysis, says of YouTubing: “You’re completely at the whims of a platform, an algorithm that can change any time. If you do well, you do very, very well. And if you do badly, you do very, very badly, and no one ever sees your content. There’s incredible risk being on that platform and having your entire existence on that platform.”
Harrington thinks that many presenters would prefer the old, risk-free broadcast system, where they would accept payments upfront for commissions, rather than YouTube’s “performance-based” model. He adds: “It’s kind of precarious even for someone like him.”