Fern Trading Fuels Vitrifi’s Wholesale Platform for Full Fibre AltNets

Fern Trading, which is part of Octopus Investments’ portfolio and backs a number of UK full fibre broadband projects from Giganet, Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre, AllPoints Fibre and Vorboss, is also supporting another company called Vitrifi that has just launched a new technology to help AltNets offer wholesale products.

The new system being introduced by Vitrifi, which has been in development for two years, appears to be a cloud-based software platform for fibre networks and alternative network providers. This is intended to be an ecosystem that will provide the UK’s fibre networks with the option of transitioning over to a wholesale open access approach (many operators see this as a way) to maximise the opportunity that’s available (i.e. enabling other ISPs to sell access over their networks).

Sadly, the technical details of this are a bit vague, with Vitrifi merely saying that it enables them to virtually join fibre network providers together within one secure ecosystem. Fibre providers might thus find they can use this to benefit from new economies of scale, as well as an expanded market presence and delivering new market leverage against incumbents like Openreach etc.

The announcement makes the point that, ultimately, “institutional investors cannot sustain hundreds of regional fibre providers, as they lack the economies of scale that incumbent broadband providers possess.” At present, there are over a hundred full fibre AltNets in the UK and many of them run their own proprietary systems, which only allow consumers to buy directly from them.

Richard Jeffares, CEO at Vitrifi, said:

“The current scenario in UK fibre is not unlike the situation we witnessed in the UK energy sector a few years ago. Hundreds of small inexperienced energy firms were set up using legacy off-the-shelf platforms to sell direct to consumers. As we have seen, a simple change in energy wholesale prices suddenly tipped the balance and made most of them loss-making, which inevitably led to mass insolvency and regulator intervention.

In the nascent UK fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) market, entrepreneurs have leveraged cheap financing and tapped into government funds to help deploy much-needed fibre infrastructure. Many need a decade or more to recoup this capital cost and become profit-making, but they underestimate the cost of servicing customers and building scalable reliable software. They are at risk of overbuilding in profitable areas. The most viable long-term solution for extracting value from fibre in the ground is to offer it wholesale to complement a consumer offering.”

We’re not sure about that comparison with the energy market, since broadband is a very different beast, but certainly there are already some AltNets with wholesale solutions today and others may launch one. Indeed, some of those being backed by Fern Trading seem likely to be prime targets for all this.

For example, Giganet has already signalled that they intend to open their own FTTP network up to wholesale this year (here), and we’d thus be very surprised if they didn’t end up using the Fern backed platform from Vitrifi. We could imagine that this may then extend to some or all of the other providers where Fern has a stake, as well as beyond.