A guide to multi-premise connectivity for Private Equity

Deal activity is back in UK retail. For multi-site operators, that puts every line of the cost base under scrutiny, and connectivity is one of the easiest places to find savings that buyers will notice.

Private equity is heading for the exit

The Financial Times reported this week that private equity owners are preparing to sell a string of well-known UK high street names. According to the FT, the owners of PizzaExpress, Morrisons, Itsu, and Third Space are among those seeking exits, with bankers expecting the higher level of activity to continue into 2027. 

The FT, citing Dealogic data, reports that UK retail dealmaking has topped $10.1bn this year across 54 transactions, up from nearly $5bn across the whole of last year. Many of the businesses now on the market were bought around the Covid-19 pandemic, and their owners need to return capital to investors. 

The FT also notes that buyers are being selective. They want to know how sustainable profits are and where growth will come from. That question lands squarely on the cost base, and in a business with hundreds of sites, the network is a bigger line than most people expect. 

Why connectivity matters when a business changes hands

For a multi-site operator, the wide area network (WAN) connects every till, every booking system, every clinical record, and every CCTV feed. It's a recurring cost that multiplies with each new location, and it's often the one nobody has looked at properly since the estate was first built out. 

Whether you're preparing for a sale, integrating an acquisition, or simply under pressure to protect margin, a leaner and better-designed network does three things:

• Reduces recurring operating costs, which flows straight into EBITDA.
• Removes risk that a buyer's technical due diligence would otherwise flag.
• Gives the next owner a platform they can grow on and harness the cloud, rather than a legacy estate they need to fix.

What we see across multi-site estates

Claranet works with a large number of multi-premise operators, particularly in retail and healthcare. In our experience, many of them are not running an optimal WAN configuration. The same patterns come up time and again:

• Every site gets the same circuit, regardless of what it does. A small convenience store or satellite clinic is connected the same way as a flagship store or a hospital site.
• Traditional Ethernet circuits are renewed by default, at prices set years ago, when newer, more economical and efficient options now exist at the same address.
• Resilience is either over-engineered (a second identical circuit at every site) or missing altogether.
• Contracts are spread across multiple suppliers with different end dates, which makes it hard to see the true cost of the estate.

None of this is unusual. Estates grow through openings and acquisitions, and connectivity decisions get made one site at a time. The result is a network that works, but costs more than it should. 

Ethernet over FTTP: the option many operators are missing

The UK's full fibre rollout has changed what's available at the shop front and the clinic door. Ethernet over fibre to the premises (EoFTTP) delivers a business Ethernet service over the same full fibre infrastructure now reaching millions of UK premises. 

For a large share of retail and healthcare sites, EoFTTP is a fit-for-purpose alternative to a traditional dedicated Ethernet leased line. In most cases it's cheaper to buy, quicker to install, and still comes with a business-grade service wrap. Traditional dedicated Ethernet still has its place for high-demand locations such as distribution centres, head offices, and larger clinical sites. The point is to match the technology to the site, not to apply one answer across the whole estate. 

Resilience designed per site, not per estate

The way you protect a site against an outage has also moved on. Rather than paying for a second, identical circuit everywhere, operators can now choose from newer and more reliable mechanisms, including:

• 4G and 5G mobile backup that takes over automatically if the primary line fails.
• Guaranteed diverse solutions capable of offering a 100% availability SLA through to dual connections over diverse full fibre networks, where more than one provider serves the location.
• Satellite back up solutions
• Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), which steers traffic intelligently across the available links and keeps priority services, such as card payments or clinical systems, running.

The right answer depends on what an outage would cost at that specific site. A store that takes most of its revenue on a Saturday has different needs to a back-office location. A clinic that can't access patient records has different needs again. 

Our recommendation: assess the whole estate

For every retailer, including those in private equity ownership, Claranet recommends an assessment of connectivity across the estate. It's a practical exercise, and it follows three steps:

1. Understand and prioritise the estate based on site criticality or revenue generation
2. Review the technology options per site. We check what's available at each address, including EoFTTP and full fibre, and compare it with what you're paying for today.
3. Review the resilience requirements. We work with you to determine the resilience based on the criticality of each site and the level of protection it needs.
4. Run a tabletop exercise. We model the redesigned estate against your current contracts, costs, and renewal dates, so you can see the savings and the risks side by side before anything changes.

After the tabletop exercise, we commonly find savings of 20% to 40% across the annual connectivity bill. For a business preparing for a sale, that's a measurable improvement in the cost base, and demonstrates to the potential investor that the business is operationally geared up for growth. For any multi-site operator, it's budget that can go back into stores, patients, and growth. 

The same opportunity applies in healthcare

Multi-site healthcare providers, from clinic groups and diagnostics networks to care home operators and pharmacy chains, face the same pattern. Many are also owned or backed by private equity, and many are carrying networks designed for a different era. The assessment works in exactly the same way, with resilience requirements shaped around clinical risk. 

Talk to us

If you run a multi-site retail or healthcare estate and want to know what your network should cost, get in touch with Claranet. We'll help you understand where you stand today, what the options are at each site, and what a better-designed network could save you. 

Source: Jason Ma and Ivan Levingston, 'Private equity puts string of UK high street names up for sale', Financial Times, 12 October 2026.