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Are the small Openreach fibre providers just reselling BT?

jadevision

Member
Hi all,

I was just reading this thread on what the behind the scenes look like for full fibre altnets like Community Fibre: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/th...unity-fibre-or-altnet-actually-involve.41147/

I was curious about the other side of this equation - what do operations look like for the companies reselling Openreach full fibre?

Is it just a case of them contacting BT Wholesale, choosing what parts of the equation they want to handle (like customer service), and going to market?

I remember we used to use the term "virtual ISP" or VISP, but haven't heard it for a while. Is that basically what's going on here - they're just interfacing for BT?

I looked at Earth Broadband as they're the first example that came to mind. They have a bit of funding and about 15 employees on LinkedIn. They only have one or two operations managers, so I'm 99% sure they're not running a data centre.

Would they even need to rent/manage servers or would this be handled by whoever the wholesaler is?
 
They'll all use Openreach's network, and then either set up their own LLU Infrastructure, or go wholesale and piggyback on another, whether that's BT's own, or others like TalkTalk/Vodafone's own wholesale setup.

Other than BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, pretty much everyone else piggybacks on one of these big names.

I don't believe they do it anymore, but previously companies like Entanet (before being bought out by CityFibre) let you apply to Ofcom to get a reseller license and then you could set up your own ISP with very little time, money or preparation and they would provide a white label service on your behalf for the vast majority of the operations.
 
I think there is confusion here between Openreach and BT Wholesale.

Back in the day. Talking ADSL being the prime technology. I was a Sky TV customer and decided I wanted to get my broadband from them as well. There was two types offered but to the general customer they looked the same. 1 was Sky using Sky backbone and Internet access, with last mile access over the Openreach network (how to connect your house to the nearest exchange where there was a Sky point of presence [pop] / edge of the sky backbone network). The other was for addresses where the local exchange did not have Sky equipment in. This was the virtual I guess. It was through BT wholesale, it was branded sky but in reality. it was Openreach and BT Broadband. The only time you'd know is if you had a technical issue / fault and you'd have to deal with different departments.

Openreach is "the last mile" the network connecting your house to the local exchange. Where you are then patched into the equipment of your ISP. You could go on a website like samknows.com and see which ISPs were in your local exchange. There probably are still virtual ISPs. Like Shell? Or the post office but they run on another ISP? So yep, probably still BT Wholesale offering, maybe virtual operators run on Sky, or other ISPs with their own network.

I am a bit out of touch these days, so feel free to correct me where things have change or I have made a mistake. Be good to understand.

Myself I am on a plusnet 300Mbps FTTP offering, connected via Openreach.
 
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There probably are still virtual ISPs. Like Shell? Or the post office but they run on another ISP?
Post Office turned into Shell, and they are TalkTalk Wholesale rather than BT Wholesale.
But to confuse things a little more, Shell broadband has been bought by TalkTalk and is about to merge into the main TalkTalk brand shortly.
 
There's very little wrong with a provider using BT Wholesale - it's a solid network so you're unlikely to have capacity issues etc. but it's just quite expensive when compared to the alternatives.

I'd rather that than someone being more ambitious than they have the ability to deliver on and doing things like putting a load of single points of failure into their network and pushing all their traffic out over Cogent.
 
There's very little wrong with a provider using BT Wholesale - it's a solid network so you're unlikely to have capacity issues etc. but it's just quite expensive when compared to the alternatives.

I'd rather that than someone being more ambitious than they have the ability to deliver on and doing things like putting a load of single points of failure into their network and pushing all their traffic out over Cogent.
I know, just interested to learn what their operations actually look like. I know Earth for example manages their own customer service because they have five reps on LinkedIn. But I assume basically everything else is managed by the wholesaler.
 
I think with BT Wholesale you would still have to do first line support yourself, as well as managing sending out routers to customers and things like that. Though obviously there are companies that offer to do these parts for you.

My understanding of how Cuckoo worked at the start was a limited product offering and a lot of platform automation to use APIs to send orders to TalkTalk Wholesale, router provisioning orders over whoever was building those for them etc. Very little capital costs there but also nothing that's really worth much other than a customer base and maybe your software.
 
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There are various ways to do it. At one extreme you have (e.g.) Shell Broadband who were effectively just reselling a TalkTalk service. At the other extreme you have (e.g.) Vodafone who do pretty much everything except the "last mile" themselves. A number of altnets are also "vertically integrated" meaning that they do everything themselves -- and in the case of altnets this will probably include the "last mile" into the customer's home too.

In my mind there are a few aspects of a broadband connection which a provider may (or may not) do themselves:
  • The "last mile", often delivered by Openreach (or CityFibre, or Virgin Media, or...).
  • The connection from the exchange back to the core network -- the major players here are BT Wholesale, PlatformX Communications (FKA TalkTalk Wholesale), Sky, Vodafone, and Zen.
  • The core network -- most providers will run their own, but there are some who don't (e.g. Aquiss uses CityFibre FKA Entanet, Shell Broadband uses TalkTalk).
 
On the subject of how resellers setup. The very smallest players would be piggybacking on either CF or OR FTTP, Netomnia is also a wholesaler but seem to have no partners :(, then they would piggy back on either BTw, TTB or CF back haul to a handover point (typically London).

Bigger players might have their own back haul, in which case there is an option to handover much earlier, in OR's case a GEA handover point at the exchange.

--

@jpm I havent had the best experience with BTw.

Its poor routing from where I live, goes north before going south, and the last time I was on it, I had a weird low level packet loss that was almost continuous for many days, had horrific single threaded speeds and also packet loss would get quite heavy.

It never got resolved as it was then I moved to VM cable.

I have also used sky's (former easynet) network, talktalk business, and now cityfibre. All of them had better latency and no visible congestion. Although talktalk went through a spell of constant outages (which is how I ended up getting moved to BT wholesale).
But of course BT wholesale isnt this bad everywhere.
 
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They'll all use Openreach's network, and then either set up their own LLU Infrastructure, or go wholesale and piggyback on another, whether that's BT's own, or others like TalkTalk/Vodafone's own wholesale setup.

Other than BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, pretty much everyone else piggybacks on one of these big names.

I don't believe they do it anymore, but previously companies like Entanet (before being bought out by CityFibre) let you apply to Ofcom to get a reseller license and then you could set up your own ISP with very little time, money or preparation and they would provide a white label service on your behalf for the vast majority of the operations.
BT also piggy back - it's complex, but BT is not able to have access to things in a special way compared to any operator, so the method BT Retail/Consumer/Business access it is the same as anyone else can.
 
I know, just interested to learn what their operations actually look like. I know Earth for example manages their own customer service because they have five reps on LinkedIn. But I assume basically everything else is managed by the wholesaler.

The smallest isp I ever saw used be/O2 wholesale and had four members of staff operating out of the Docklands.

It wasn't their main business as they were also a hosted office with rented seats and server racks.

They offered bonded ADSL and other weird and random stuff that was very niche but for the people who needed it, it worked incredibly well.
 
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I don't believe they do it anymore, but previously companies like Entanet (before being bought out by CityFibre) let you apply to Ofcom to get a reseller license and then you could set up your own ISP with very little time, money or preparation and they would provide a white label service on your behalf for the vast majority of the operations.
Some 20 years ago I resold Entanet(I fixed computers, and setup broadband/networking for consumers and small businesses.

I don't recall any ofcom licence, but Entanet handled all the billing and support (if they wanted to phone them, don't recall my few customers having issues TBH)

I think maybe if you were a bigger reseller you could have taken on more. I mean I'm sure freeola for instance had different terms, but I had single digit accounts, not tens of thousands
 
I don't recall any ofcom licence
You had to apply for a Reseller ID, and go on a national database with Ofcom. My RID is still listed with them nearly 10 years later despite never investing the time needed to make things take off.

I remember it being one of the first things Entanet asked for. They wouldn’t entertain us until we gave proof of applying to Ofcom for this before we could set up an account with them.
 
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