- Brightspeed's liquidity is dwindling and it's struggling to obtain fresh capital
- An executive from AlixPartners said it is likely that Brightspeed is not getting the fiber penetrations that it expected
- New Street Research believes the company needs to raise $3 billion in additional capital
Brightspeed is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing as soon as December, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal’s Pro subscription service.
The broadband provider’s liquidity is dwindling, and it’s struggling to obtain fresh capital from existing lenders, according to WSJ sources.
Brightspeed is backed by Apollo Global Management. But apparently the behemoth private equity firm isn’t willing to front any more capital for the company. And Brightspeed has struggled to raise capital from new investors through an asset-backed financing facility secured by subscription cash-flows from its new fiber network.
In early October, Bloomberg reported that advisers to a creditor group of Brightspeed have signed non-disclosure agreements to discuss ways to address the company’s more than $10 billion in debt. This followed a September, Bloomberg report that Brightspeed warned investors about doubts it would be able to continue as a going concern.
New Street Research analyst David Barden said on October 19, “We believe the company needs to raise about $3 billion to fund itself through 2027 (while also addressing the ‘going concern’ issue).”
Although Brightspeed is a private company, New Street has some access to its financials. Barden said Brightspeed ended its second quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, down from $1.8 billion in the first quarter and $2.4 billion in Q4 2025. This compares to outstanding gross debt of $11.6 billion.
It’s unclear how Brightspeed got in this pickle as the company has not answered questions from Fierce. And former Brightspeed employees are staying mum as well.
Andrej Danis, Americas Head of Digital Infrastructure & Telecommunication at AlixPartners, told Fierce it is likely that Brightspeed is not getting the fiber penetrations that it expected. “They are overbuilding underprivileged groups where the median income is below the average income of the U.S.,” said Danis. He added that hopes of getting average revenue per user (ARPU) of $60 or more is not coming to fruition, “because people just don't have the money to pay so much for fiber, even though they like fiber.”
He also noted that as Brightfield overbuilds its copper network with fiber, it loses the revenues it was receiving from DSL. “So, you could say very simply, their revenue decline from voice is faster than they expected, and the pickup rate [from fiber] is not coming.”
Fierce asked why a rich private-equity firm like Apollo wouldn’t just bail Brightspeed out. Danis said, “Apollo is generally a financial engineer and…. they’d be putting in equity versus credit and debt and that's never a good thing to do. For Apollo, the question is: Am I willing to put in all of this equity, or am I willing to pull out? Do I believe that I will actually recoup money?”
Brightspeed seemed to be doing ok
Brightspeed was created in 2022 from assets it acquired from Lumen Technologies.
It had been aggressively overbuilding Lumen’s old copper network with fiber, which is very expensive to do. And it hasn’t helped matters that fixed wireless access (FWA) and Starlink broadband have added to the competitive pressure facing Brightspeed.
But as recently as April 2026, Brightspeed was bragging that it was the third largest fiber builder in the U.S., following behind AT&T and Verizon.
Also in April, Brightspeed said 2026 would mark the company’s second consecutive year of building more than one million fiber passings, putting it on track to reach four million homes by the end of this year. Ultimately, it wanted to pass more than five million homes and businesses across its 20-state footprint.
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