AltNet Aggregation Firm Strategic Imperatives UK Merges with X3T

Software as a service provider Strategic Imperatives, which among other things operates the Fibre Café connectivity aggregation platform to help UK alternative broadband networks to grow, has today announced a deal to merge with technology firm X3T in order to harness its wholesale networks solution.

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.

By comparison, X3T’s platform is described as being purpose built for wholesale networks to facilitate a simple, seamless integration for ISPs, resulting in networks achieving high (+90) Net Promotor Scores (NPS) for customer on-boarding, provisioning, and service activation.

The platform, which is being backed by Granahan McCourt Capital, Asterion Industrial Partners, Oak Hill Advisors, Tetrad and Twin Point Capital, only launched last year to help support the National Broadband Ireland (NBI) fibre network.

The two companies will now commence a merger of their operations this month, with a vision toward making Strategic Imperatives’ Fibre Café platform the dominant solution in the market for ISPs to access wholesale fibre networks.

Wail Sabbagh, MD at Strategic Imperatives, said:

“Combining forces with X3T provides us with a unique opportunity to bring together some of the industry’s most experienced talent and state-of-the-art technologies to deliver exceptional value to our customers. Supporting our vision to expand our ground-breaking monetisation, billing and subscriptions platform, Elevate, and make Fibre Café the leading unified interface to the UK’s fibre ecosystem and the gateway to a connected Britain, we’re excited to accelerate our continued investment and rollout with the financial backing and global expertise that this merger provides.”

David McCourt, Chairman of Granahan McCourt Capital and X3T, added:

“For over 30 years, we have been building and operating large-scale networks all over the world, and we intimately understand the needs of wholesale operators. A decade ago, we built one of the first open-access networks in the world at a company called enet and quickly grew it to serve over 70 ISPs. In our next venture, NBI, we continued to build the next generation of our technology platform and now, at X3T, we’ve used our inherent knowledge of operating high performance wholesale networks to export our capabilities.

“This merger with Strategic Imperatives means we can share this knowledge and accelerate our support for customers in the UK and beyond. As an investor, owner and operator, we know first-hand that the combined capabilities of X3T and Strategic Imperatives provides the blueprint for AltNets and ISPs to scale.”

The Fibre Café platform already integrates over three million connections.