aquila a new wholesale platform from All Points Fibre Networks

AllPoints Fibre Networks (APFN) originally was known as many as the combination of Giganet, Swish Fibre and Jurassic Fibre but these have been merged under the umbrella of APFN and a bigger retail presence in the form of Cuckoo. 

In an attempt to transform the wholesale market APFN has now launched aquila with the aim of making wholesale access to multiple networks simpler. At launch the aquila platform covers around 19 million premises with a combination of Openreach, BT Wholesale, CityFibre and APFN own networks. For retail providers this means rather than developing interfaces to multiple platforms they just need to connect to aquila.

aquila is built to transform wholesale fibre connectivity, making national full-fibre access simple, scalable, and efficient. By consolidating the UK’s largest full-fibre networks into one seamless platform, we’re enabling CSPs to grow faster and serve more customers—without the traditional complexity.

Wholesale fibre access has needed a modern, transparent, and scalable alternative for a long time. With aquila and APFN’s robust network architecture, CSPs gain total control over their services, ensuring a faster, smarter, and more flexible approach to full-fibre delivery.

Ronan Kelly, APFN Managing Director.

Over aquila there is wholesale FTTP, Ethernet services, static IP solutions, advanced network telemetry, and customer-premises equipment (CPE) logistics. Backed by a national backbone configured in a figure of eight eliminating single points of failure. The network element highlighting that this is not just an interface to ordering systems, but a whole network.

We asked about when Cuckoo would finally start to retail services on the APFN network (i.e. Giganet, Swish Fibre and Jurassic Fibre footprints) and was told later in the summer, for now Cuckoo remains an Openreach and CityFibre combination. This seems slightly at odds with the launch of aquila where a big part of the launch is seamless access to multiple full fibre networks, since surely the new platform would mean Cuckoo who are owned by Fern Trading who own APFN would have been on board at the launch.

There has been several wholesale platforms launched in the last year, the other most recent one being Zen Internet who have a long list of partners. The key to the success will be how many different networks can be added to each platform and how well any network operates. Full fibre services actually expose the reliability of the various networks that platforms operate to a greater extent than old part fibre services.

On the 19 million premises footprint as Cuckoo sells over a subset of the Openreach full fibre footprint and similar on the CityFibre footprint they have according to our tracking a potential retail footprint of 19.2 million premises compared to others like Vodafone at 19.96 million and Zen Internet at 19.87 million. 

The lack of visibility on where APFN is happy to install FTTP on the Giganet, Swish Fibre and Jurassic Fibre footprints means while we see indicators suggesting people may be using a service in different areas we cannot verify and therefore the footprints are static currently.