Broadband ISP TalkTalk Boosts UK AltNet Onboarding Plans

Budget broadband ISP TalkTalk, which in recent years has expanded beyond Openreach’s UK network and now offers services via several other alternative full fibre (FTTP) networks, has given a strong indication of further AltNet aggregation to come by adopting Strategic Imperatives’ Fibre Café aggregation platform.

At the time of writing, TalkTalk are known to support several AltNets on their service, including CityFibre, Freedom Fibre and CommunityFibre. But according to Strategic Imperatives, the ISP is gearing up to “fast-track its AltNet [integration and] aggregation strategy“, not least by adopting the company’s new Fibre Café platform.

The network aggregation platform is essentially designed to tackle the significant integration and automation challenges for broadband ISPs when onboarding new AltNets (e.g. common processes, a national availability checker, AltNet agnostic order journeys and a unified interface etc.), whilst enabling AltNets to more easily bring their wholesale propositions to market.

Phill Magill, Chief Engineer at TalkTalk, said:

“It was an easy decision for us to work with them on a solution to address the challenge of streamlining and automating AltNets’ access to the wholesale market and enabling us to rapidly and cost-effectively onboard new AltNets.

This is a game changer for us, the cost and timescales for onboarding an AltNet are now significantly lower, our OSS stack is simpler, and we now have the ability to work with smaller AltNets that may not have been commercially viable before”

Solutions like Fibre Café are likely to grow in importance over the coming years, not least because it’s traditionally been quite a costly and time-consuming process to add an additional physical network platform at the retail ISP level. Such issues tend to represent quite a big problem, particularly in a market that is now bursting with more than a hundred AltNets building full fibre infrastructure across the UK.

A number of AltNets, beyond those mentioned above, already support the new platform, and this could thus be a reasonable indication of which networks TalkTalk might be adding next. So far as we can tell, the platform is also being used by MS3 Networks (they’re deploying FTTP across a good chunk of Lincolnshire) and xln (Daisy Group), although the latter is more of an ISP and very business centric. But we understand more AltNets will be added.