T-Mobile Polska buys the fiber it used to rent: DT pays Macquarie EUR 1bn for Fiberhost and INEA

Macquarie Asset Management is selling its stakes in Polish FTTH operator Fiberhost and telecoms provider INEA to Deutsche Telekom for EUR 1 billion, or $1.16 billion ^[1]. Both businesses will be absorbed into T-Mobile Polska ^[2], which means the wholesale layer that competing ISPs buy access on will sit inside a retail operator they compete with.

The asset itself is the reason to pay attention. Fiberhost runs a last-mile network connecting 3,000 schools and up to 1.4 million homes across eight Polish regions ^[8]. INEA, which Macquarie bought in 2018 when it was based in western Poland, now claims more than 300,000 individual customers ^[6]. Macquarie spun the FTTH arm out as Fiberhost three years after the INEA purchase ^[7], which puts the separation in 2021 ^[10]. Cord von Lewinski, a managing director at Macquarie, said the eight-year partnership expanded network coverage and "increased wholesale access" for communities and businesses ^[4]. That is the part that changes hands.

The price, spread across Fiberhost's stated maximum footprint, works out to roughly EUR 714 per home passed ^[11]. That is a ceiling rather than a real unit cost, because the same EUR 1 billion also buys INEA's retail base ^[1][6], and because Macquarie is described as selling its stakes rather than a stated percentage of either company ^[1].

Deutsche Telekom's framing is convergence, not wholesale. T-Mobile Polska CEO Andreas Maierhofer said the company's mobile network, nationwide backbone, data centers and fiber infrastructure "will now be complemented by our own fiber-to-the-home network", supporting its portfolio of convergent products ^[9]. Read that as an input strategy: the FTTH footprint becomes a component of T-Mobile's own bundles first, and a product sold to rivals second. Nothing in the announcement says otherwise, and nothing in it sets out terms for existing wholesale customers ^[4][9].

The timing is the other operational fact worth holding on to. The transaction is expected to conclude at the end of 2026 ^[3], a long runway during which anyone reselling on Fiberhost is contracting with a counterparty whose owner is already known and whose commercial incentives will differ. Datacenter Dynamics said it approached Macquarie for comment ^[12]; the published material does not describe any regulatory conditions attached to the deal.

For Macquarie this is one exit among several moves. The firm, headquartered in Sydney, recently set up data center operator Theseus Infrastructure with Anthropic and GIC, bought IHS Towers' Latin American wireless tower operations for $952 million, and committed KRW 600 billion, about $420 million, alongside South Korea's Gabia and its KINX subsidiary for a data center buildout there ^[5][13].

What to watch: whether any wholesale access commitments surface as a condition of closing, since the announcement carries none ^[3][4]; whether Fiberhost keeps a separate wholesale identity inside T-Mobile Polska or is merged into the retail brand ^[2]; and how INEA's 300,000-plus retail customers are migrated, because that is where the integration cost and churn risk sits ^[6]. Buyers with contracts running past 2026 should be asking now what renews and on whose terms ^[3].