The Common Wholesale Platform and Fibre Cafe Join Forces

The Common Wholesale Platform (CWP), which is a non-profit member-owned organisation that helps alternative broadband networks to provide wholesale services to the UK ISP market, has agreed a strategic partnership with Strategic Imperatives’ new Fibre Café connectivity aggregation platform.

Just to recap. Fibre Cafe’s platform is essentially designed to tackle the significant integration and automation challenges for broadband ISPs when onboarding new networks (e.g. common processes, a national availability checker, alternative network agnostic order journeys and a unified interface etc.), whilst enabling such operators to more easily bring their wholesale propositions to market.

The platform also crosses a bit into areas covered by the CWP, which originally started as a collaboration of six altnet fibre broadband companies, including Airband, County Broadband, Glide Business, ITS Technology, NGE Contracting and WightFibre.

Crucially, the CWP and its related Common Switching Platform (CSP) are currently in the process of integrating the industry-led One Touch Switching Company‘s (TOTSCo) platform, which reflects Ofcom’s significantly delayed One Touch Switch (OTS) migration system that is intended to make it easier for consumers to change broadband ISP. The new partnership means that Fibre Cafe’s members will also benefit from that work via a single unified gateway.

Marcel Horst, CEO of Common Wholesale Platform Ltd, said:

“Our members will now have a cost-effective way to add further gigabit services to their portfolio. Likewise, many Altnets are now seeking additional revenue streams from wholesaling their networks. Through our relationship with The Fibre Café, this now becomes a reality to reach scale retail providers.”

Wail Sabbagh, CEO of Strategic Imperatives, said:

“Delivering OTS interoperability as part of The Fibre Café proposition is something that many of our customers have asked for. This partnership is a great way to achieve this with a market leader in this space.”

In the future, those CWP AltNet members willing and ready to aggregate their services can also offer a unified wholesale proposition to The Fibre Café scale providers. Both companies are now said to be looking forward to the upcoming testing programme to integrate and validate these services. Additionally, they anticipate the near-term announcement of significant anchor customers for these services.