{"id":993670,"date":"2026-02-19T08:36:44","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T03:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=993670"},"modified":"2026-02-19T08:54:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T03:24:23","slug":"virgin-media-o2-owners-to-buy-british-fibre-firm-substantial-for-2-7-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/02\/19\/virgin-media-o2-owners-to-buy-british-fibre-firm-substantial-for-2-7-billion\/","title":{"rendered":"Virgin Media O2 owners to buy British fibre firm Substantial for $2.7 billion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A consortium including Liberty Global agreed on Wednesday to buy British alternative fibre provider Substantial Group for 2 billion pounds ($2.72 billion) in a bid to take on BT Openreach.<\/p>\n<p>The \u200cacquisition will \u2060be made \u2060through an existing three-way joint venture between Virgin Media O2 co-owners &#8211; Liberty and Spain&#8217;s Telefonica &#8211; and private equity firm InfraVia.<\/p>\n<p>It is expected to unlock 3.5 billion pounds in investment in the UK as they bet on consolidation in Britain&#8217;s fibre broadband market, the three companies said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A consortium including Liberty Global agreed on Wednesday to buy British alternative fibre provider Substantial Group for 2 billion pounds ($2.72 billion) in a bid to take on BT Openreach. The \u200cacquisition will \u2060be made \u2060through an existing three-way joint venture between Virgin Media O2 co-owners &#8211; Liberty and Spain&#8217;s Telefonica &#8211; and private equity firm InfraVia. It is expected to unlock 3.5 billion pounds in investment in the UK as they bet on consolidation in Britain&#8217;s fibre broadband market, the three companies said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,60,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-993670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=993670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=993670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=993670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=993670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}