APFN Sells Brillband’s Retail UK Broadband Customers to ISP Olilo
Network operator AllPoints Fibre Networks (APFN, Fern Trading) has today confirmed that they’ve sold the retail base of their last consumer broadband ISP, Brillband, to internet provider Olilo for an undisclosed sum. The move comes after APFN did the same with Cuckoo (sold to Onestream) earlier in the year (here).
Just to recap. The Glasgow-based full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP Brillband was originally acquired by APFN back in October 2024 (here) and sells packages to homes over APFN’s wholesale platform. But the previous sale of Cuckoo’s retail base to another ISP did strongly indicate that Brillband’s days were also numbered.
The new deal reflects the “final stage” of APFN’s ongoing strategic move away from retail services, which follows the successful introduction of their aquila wholesale platform – this aggregates connectivity from several alternative broadband networks (including APFN’s own full fibre network) and makes them available to retail internet service providers.
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Existing Brillband customer contracts, pricing and broadband services will “continue to be honoured by Olilo“, with customers not required to take any action as part of the transfer. But over time this may change as those contracts reach their end and re-contracting deals can change.
Duncan Di Biase, Brillband, said:
“What this team built goes far beyond a network. They showed up every day for our customers with a level of care you rarely see in this industry, and I’m enormously proud of them. That’s the real legacy of Brillband.”
Liam Mulryan, CEO of Olilo, said:
“Brillband has built something really special, and we’re not coming in to rip everything up. The product, pricing, and contracts stay the same.
We’ve always tried to do broadband a bit differently. Clear costs, honest answers, proper support and no hiding behind jargon or small print. Broadband without the B.S. And yes, I was told to tone that down.
This is a massive moment for Olilo, but the most important thing is making sure Brillband members feel looked after from day one. We’re excited to build on what’s already there and give the community a proper long-term home.”
The most recent accounts for Brillband noted that the company made a total loss for the year ended 30th June 2025 of -£892.7k (2024: -£729.9k), which might have helped to drive APFN’s decision to get out of the retail business. Sadly, it’s unclear how many customers are impacted by this agreement, although Brillband was a fair bit smaller than Cuckoo (the latter is estimated to have had c.75k customers).
The base that has been sold to Olilo mostly reflects customers on Openreach and CityFibre’s national full fibre broadband networks.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Well, that’s hilarious.
Brillband were advertising heavily on Facebook that they were about to launch 900Mbps symmetric in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset – the belief being that was the much-delayed resurrection of the former Jurassic Fibre network for new sales.
Presumably that’s not happening either. Former JFL addresses always showed “waitlist” when the Brillband wbsite was still accepting orders, even after the alleged 1st July launch.
Why Fern Fibre had kept a retail ISP in the otherwise-wholesale bit of the operation was always a mystery. Like so much of what they do, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, for some reason.
APFN have to be one of the most confusing players in this space. Does this mean Olilo can sell on the APFN network footprint now?
Yes it does – https://consumer.olilo.co.uk/apfn
It seems to be only to new customers, if you’re on APFN already via their legacy network then it says not:
From their website:
‘APFN is available for new line installations only. We can’t currently switch or take over an existing APFN line.’
Perhaps that will change in future.
Lucky Brillband customers – they get moved to a highly rated ISP on their current contracts. I hope the Olilo team can deal with the sudden growth as they are very hands on with a personal touch. Best of luck to them.
Agreed, I’m with Olilo and they’ve been superb.
At least olilo has ended the farce that is/was apfn.
Will this be available in the prosumer side as well? Asking for a friend.
APFN aren’t currently available via Layer 2 – so won’t be available on our Prosumer service just yet.
They are building a Layer 2 hand-off as part of their wholesale focus so it will be available soon
They’ve ditched all their retail customers then so does that mean they’re shaping up to offload the APFN network as well? A wholesale only network that only passes 300K premises doesn’t seem very viable to me.
APFN is focussing all their energies on the Aquila platform. As far as anyone knows, that still doesn’t support the JFL, Swish or Gigabit network builds.
If or when it does…..
Perhaps Olilo can pipe up and say how they are consuming the APFN fibre network but it is presumably via Aquila and the APFN core based on earlier comments
Also don’t forget that APFN have been busy building out to reach Openreach and Cityfibre locally so the wholesale reach is beyond their own network
Hey Mouse!
I can confirm it is via Aquila 🙂
Alnet bails. Loses confidence in it’s ability to sell it’s services.
And the award for worst run, most rudderless Broadband company goes to…..
£1 Billion invested, seemingly no working FTTP network build, a wholesale network that is late to the party and keep selling off the customer base (because who wants to generate revenue!).
“The uber of broadband” but how do you do that if you sell to retail customers via other companies’ networks? With no differentiation from any other ISP that buys/sells wholesale services and being nowhere near as good as ISPs like AAISP.
Then sell off all of the customers, again. At what point do does a good reputation start being built?
Anyone looking for an incredibly funny read, should look up this company’s latest set of published accounts.
And anyone looking to avoid/minimise IHT should seriously consider their IFA’s advice if it includes the Octopus Inheritance Tax Planning Service -the source of the funds behind Fern.
If I was planning on living more than 10 years, dropping the return on my funds to a paltry 2% pa to avoid paying 40% tax at the point of death would be a classic case of cutting off nose to spite face. End up with less money, you p***ed more into a worthless altnet than you ended up paying the taxman….