On October 1, two Brazilian ISP acquisitions closed. Claro took control of Desktop, and Alares completed its purchase of Oquei, in the northwest of São Paulo state. Around the same time, Grupo Mais absorbed RT NET in Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil. An owner with 600 or 2,000 subscribers in a small town reads that news and wonders how much an ISP of that size is worth.
There is no price list, and anyone offering a fixed amount per subscriber without opening your books is guessing. A serious buyer spends weeks in due diligence going through subscribers, revenue, network, paperwork and operations, and the price comes out of that review. Almost everything that weighs in that math, though, can be understood and fixed well in advance, long before anyone knocks on the door.
How much is an ISP with 500 or 1,000 subscribers worth?
According to the Anatel access dashboard (Anatel is Brazil's telecom regulator), in August 2026 there were 9,857 providers reporting fixed broadband subscribers, in a market of 57.9 million connections that grew 5.66% in 12 months. Of those, 2,883 had up to 200 connections, 1,962 had between 200 and 500, and 3,450 had between 500 and 2,500. Only 42 had more than 100,000. The count is by company registration number, and one group can hold several, but that still leaves more than 8,000 companies with up to 2,500 connections.
That long tail helps explain why there is no price list, because a 300-subscriber ISP and a 3,000-subscriber ISP are different businesses in almost every way. At the small one, the owner usually covers on-call tech duty and sales and is the only person who knows where every cable runs, so the buyer assumes part of the value walks out the door with him. Often the buyer only wants the subscriber portfolio, without inheriting the legal entity or its liabilities. Grupo Mais, according to TeleSíntese, had been combining its own network expansion with purchases of smaller subscriber portfolios before closing the RT NET deal.
At 3,000 subscribers there is usually a team and some written processes, and the business starts being valued as a company, for the earnings it generates and the risk it carries.
What recent acquisitions show, and what they don't
In ISP mergers and acquisitions, the temptation is to take the latest announced deal, divide by subscribers and apply the result to your own business. Alares paid R$ 189 million for Oquei (amounts in Brazilian reais), and Oquei has about 68,000 subscribers, which works out to roughly R$ 2,800 per subscriber. But only R$ 75.6 million was paid at closing. The rest comes in ten semiannual installments, and the price can still be adjusted up or down based on assumptions in the contract. That per-subscriber figure is arithmetic on a single deal and says little about an ISP with a thousand subscribers.
Claro's purchase of Desktop shows how risk gets priced in. The deal was R$ 1.747 billion for 72.83% of the shares, with R$ 127.5 million held in escrow for indemnities, and the final amount still depending on the net debt calculation. Small deals tend to follow similar logic. Debt comes off the price, and the risk of labor, tax or consumer lawsuits turns into a holdback or an installment the seller only receives if nothing surfaces.
What goes into ISP due diligence
The review almost always starts with the subscriber base. Accounts suspended for three months, complimentary contracts, duplicate records and customers who only remain in the ERP because nobody removed them all come out of the count. Then come monthly churn and delinquency, and the age of the base, because a four-year subscriber is worth more than one who signed up during last month's promotion.
On the revenue side, buyers look at what recurs: ARPU, plan mix, the weight of business customers and any single large contract that carries the cash flow on its own. The network review covers route kilometers, homes passed, how much is fiber and how much is still fixed wireless, and the situation on utility poles. When it approved the Desktop sale, Anatel required attachments to be consolidated into one point per pole within 24 months, a project that lands on the buyer's tab.
Regulatory compliance is what scares small ISP owners most, and with good reason. Licenses, filings with Anatel, and tax and labor obligations all go on the list. In Brazil, buyers should also ask about the certificate of regularity (Atesto de Regularidade) required by article 43 of the RGST, Anatel Resolution 777/2025. According to Abrint, the Brazilian ISP association, it costs between R$ 2,394 and R$ 11,754 per two-year cycle depending on company size, and the association asked Brazil's Supreme Court to suspend the requirement in case ADI 8020, which has not been ruled on yet.
The CPE fleet counts too
In an FTTH network, the ONU and the router in the subscriber's home almost always belong to the ISP and are on loan to the customer. Together they are worth real money, and the buyer asks for an inventory with quantity, vendor, model and firmware version, plus how many respond remotely. A spreadsheet assembled by hand the month of the sale isn't very convincing, because it doesn't show what is actually in the field or when each device last talked to the server.
A well-deployed ACS answers much of this. In IXC ACS, the vendor, model, hardware and firmware filters in the bulk firmware update tool list the devices in each combination, and in the device list, the arrival date and last connection filters show what came in and what reported during any period. With the IXC Provedor integration (IXC Soft's ERP for ISPs), each device is linked to the subscriber's login in the ERP. Whatever is left unlinked anticipates an awkward question from the buyer about loaned equipment that nobody seems to have.
Support cost per subscriber hits margin directly. When the agent can see optical power and connected devices and run a speed test from the CPE itself, many truck rolls (technician visits to the home) stop being necessary. In the comparison published in the IXC ACS ROI calculator, based on tens of thousands of support interactions at a Brazilian ISP over six months (2025 to 2026), subscribers with CPEs on the ACS had 62% fewer truck rolls, and capacity per agent rose 43%. It is one analyzed case, not a market average, but it gives a sense of scale. An ISP that still sends a technician to change a Wi-Fi password will show that cost in the support spreadsheet the buyer requests. We cover this in more detail in how to spend less on field service.
After signing: integrating the base without visiting every home
Almost nobody asks during negotiations where the acquired base's devices are pointed, and that drives much of the integration cost. If the CPEs reach the ACS through a domain name, and the domain is included in the sale, the migration can be planned in DNS and on the server, within a maintenance window, as long as the port and URL path are compatible with the new ACS. If they were pointed by IP address, the IXC ACS help center warns that a fleet pointed by IP does not survive an IP change, and that re-pointing has to be done on the device, on the OLT or in provisioning. And there is always part of the base that was never pointed to any ACS at all.
Once the fleet is reporting to the buyer's ACS, standardizing gets much cheaper. Device pre-configuration pushes parameters such as DNS, NTP and web access to every new device the ACS detects, when the model is compatible, so the acquired base moves to the house standard as it gets re-pointed. A seller whose base is in that shape comes to the table with the inventory in hand and a lower integration cost to offer.
Checklist to raise your ISP's value before selling
- Active base reconciled in the ERP, with no ghost accounts, and monthly churn and delinquency for the last 24 months.
- Contracts with subscribers, transit providers and pole owners organized and signed.
- License and Anatel obligations up to date, with your tax and labor situation documented by your accountant.
- Network mapped, with route kilometers, homes passed and the split between fiber and fixed wireless.
- CPE fleet inventoried by model and firmware, pointed to the ACS through a domain the company controls, and linked to the subscriber in the ERP.
- Support metrics tracked: tickets per subscriber, truck rolls per month, time to resolution.
- Written processes that keep working while the owner is on vacation.
Before talking to a buyer
If you are thinking about selling, or just want to know what your ISP is worth today, bring in an M&A advisory firm, along with your accountant and lawyer, before the first conversation with an interested party. They are the ones who turn your numbers into a defensible value range and negotiate installments, guarantees and adjustments like those in the deals above.
The operation is the part that depends only on you. Most of the checklist takes months, because the buyer will ask for history, and a clean base, a standardized CPE fleet and support that resolves issues without a truck roll improve margins even for owners with no plans to sell. To see how IXC ACS can help organize the CPE fleet in your operation, click the button below and talk to our team.