For Ronan Kelly, managing director of AllPoints Fibre, the logic behind Aquila is straightforward: take the complexity out of wholesale access and give partners the tools they need to grow.
Aggregation at unprecedented scale
Aquila now consolidates access to more than 20 million premises, drawing from Openreach, BT Wholesale, CityFibre, APFN’s own footprint and a growing roster of altnets that meet stringent operational standards.
Kelly says the significance is clear: “This best-in-industry aggregation means that our partner ISPs can, with minimal effort, access the largest addressable full fibre footprint in the UK. Thanks to our use of the robust and stable APIs from the TM Forum, our partners do not have to concern themselves about expensive changes in API structure or functionality.”
The model is designed for seamless expansion. “As APFN adds more network providers onto Aquila, the locations they serve will seamlessly become available via Aquila. No changes are required by our partners. This ensures they can focus less on technical matters and instead they can focus all their efforts on subscriber acquisition and building their brand across the UK’s largest full fibre footprints.”
Removing legacy friction
Kelly is candid about the shortcomings of legacy systems, particularly those built on copper or FTTC foundations.
“Quite simply, with Aquila we have eliminated the multiple overlapping systems that have been built or patched together over many years,” he explains. “Purpose built from the ground up as a wholesale platform, we have removed all of the technical debt that plagues so many competing platforms.”
The platform delivers access via a single set of industry-standard APIs, scaling automatically as network partners expand. Underpinning this is new core and edge infrastructure built with Juniper carrier-grade routing equipment, offering 100Gbps and 400Gbps NNIs.
“Our partners can connect and forget for years to come while their end customers experience the superior connectivity available across the UK’s lowest latency wholesale network.”
Resilience and risk mitigation
Resilience has been engineered into Aquila from the outset. Its figure-of-eight backbone design integrates directly with multiple wholesale partners and connects to major content providers such as Netflix, Amazon and Google.
“With the Aquila NNI connection speeds at 100Gbps and 400Gbps we can easily accommodate any traffic surges across the network,” says Kelly. “We duplicate critical interconnects, giving us full resilience inside and between data centres. CSPs can be reassured that we automatically reroute traffic if there is fibre path loss, equipment failure, or even the complete loss of a hosting facility.”
All traffic traversing the Aquila core and edge networks is encrypted. “Thanks to the modernity of our routing equipment, the application of this encryption does not compromise Aquila’s industry leading latency,” Kelly notes.
Service uptake and roadmap
So far, Consumer and Business FTTP products are leading adoption. “As the fibre rollout reaches its concluding phases, CSP partners want to ensure that as many of their customers as possible are moved over to the new technology,” says Kelly.
Other services are also attracting strong interest, particularly Pulse, Aquila’s telemetry platform. “Pulse will give our partners real-time data on how the network is performing, and whether there are any problems. Our partners will get to see what our Platform Operations team sees, and they will be able to ingest this via a dashboard or direct API.”
Kelly highlights growing requests for bulk migration of customer back books. “We want to make that as straightforward as possible. Beyond that, the sky is the limit. There are obvious avenues to explore, like VoIP and Unified Comms, but we also are focused on agentic AI and how it can further streamline operations.”
Backing and scale
With backing from Octopus Investments through Fern Trading, AllPoints Fibre benefits from patient capital and a long-term vision.
“It’s a significant benefit. We learned lots of lessons as part of the merger of our companies and the pivot to wholesale, which we are now putting to good use as we roll out Aquila,” Kelly reflects. “Octopus Investments… are here for the long haul. Aquila having no technical debt and no financial debt resonates strongly with those partners who are seeking a wholesale solution that will set them apart in the long term in this new full fibre era.”
Market response
The response from ISPs has been immediate. “On launch day, one partner said, ‘Can we sign an agreement today?’ Another told us that they would have not put money into their own systems had Aquila existed a few years ago.”
Although adoption numbers remain under wraps, Kelly confirms Daisy and Onecom are already onboard, alongside “expressions of interest from dozens more”.
He concludes: “CSPs and altnets are concluding that they don’t need to ‘own’ a lot of the functions that they previously thought they did. Instead, they can outsource those functions, likely at a lower cost… freeing them up to focus on differentiating from the competition, while improving the margin contribution of each service they sell. We believe that, for CSPs and altnets, the future lies in strong, durable partnerships, underscored with the latest technology.”
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