TalkTalk Wholesale Services Rebrands to PlatformX Communications

As expected, the wholesale division of UK ISP TalkTalk has today officially rebranded itself from ‘Wholesale Services’ to ‘PlatformX Communications‘ (PXC). The move forms part of the group’s ongoing demerger process, which began last year and is currently ongoing.

Just to recap. The TalkTalk Group has spent much of the past year wrestling with the pressure from its existing c.£1bn debt pile and as part of that they announced a plan to demerge the group into three separate businesses (TalkTalk Consumer for home broadband, TalkTalk Business Direct and the wholesale centric PlatformX Communications – here), while also cutting costs and monetising some assets (e.g. selling IP addresses).

The demerger could, in theory, also make it easier to sell off individual parts of the business (selling the entire group has thus far proven tricky) and indeed Virgin Media (VMO2) has recently been linked with a possible acquisition of TalkTalk’s Consumer business (here). Speaking of which, the first piece to go was technically TT Business Direct, which ended up being sold to the company’s own shareholders for £95m after struggling to attract other fish (here).

However, today’s focus is on the group’s wholesale division, which has today officially launched and re-branded itself under the name of PlatformX Communications. The newly demerged operator has thus proclaimed itself to be the UK’s “largest independent wholesale telecoms platform for connectivity, cloud, voice and ICT services” – not to be confused with Openreach’s wholesale products at the physical layer.

The new company is purely wholesale, meaning, they say, “no competition with customers” and a “holistic product portfolio” accessible via its software platform, 1Portal, and other technologies including APIs and Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities from core to edge. “PXC offers customers access to its Tier 1 national network covering 98% of UK premises, and is the only scale aggregator of Alternative Networks,” said the operator’s statement (AltNets include Freedom Fibre, CityFibre, CommunityFibre and more).

Tom O’Hagan, CEO of PXC, said:

“I am delighted to be unveiling PXC to the channel and to the wider wholesale market. The launch of our new company and our new brand underlines our ambition to offer genuine choice to the wholesale market, and builds on more than 20 years of dedicated investment and expertise developed through TalkTalk and Virtual1.

“We firmly believe that competition and innovation are essential to market growth, and that doing things differently requires players like us, with an appetite for developing new approaches and challenging the status quo.

Thanks to our heritage, PXC is a core part of a vibrant, competitive wholesale market, which should serve as the foundation for innovation for business and wider society.”

Just to be clear, PXC has been operating as an independent company within TalkTalk Group since 1st March 2024, thus today is really all about the wider re-branding and official name change.