In recent years, the UK fibre market has become very crowded, as start-ups have taken advantage of the government’s desire to increase competition to BT’s wholesale arm, Openreach, and to accelerate the UK’s slow pace of roll-out of fibre to the home or premises. Consolidation between the smaller players looms, and the changes in market structure will not just affect home broadband services, but the availability of backhaul for MNOs and for others deploying dense cellular or WiFi 6 networks, especially in outdoor environments such as smart cities. The first in what is likely to be a wave of transactions sees the most prominent of the new players, CityFibre, buying FibreNation, a unit of Internet service provider (ISP) TalkTalk. The…