Fibreray's rural rollout campaign received a boost following its August acquisition of RunFibre in a deal that also accelerates the Cornwall-based altnet's wholesale ambitions, according to CEO Daniel Herbert. Here, he explains how Fibreray’s design-then-build approach will increase RunFibre's rollout efficiency and help it leverage the “almost unlimited” opportunities present in this space.
Mon, 23/09/2024 - 16:59
Freedom Fibre's goal of becoming a top five altnet is gaining momentum, propelled by its March merger with VXFibre and two Project Gigabit contract wins. Here, Delivery Operations Director Adele Cihlar shares how the altnet plans to continue climbing the industry ranks by utilising further debt funding and M&A.
“It is safe to say that the last 12 months have seen some of the biggest leaps towards our vision,” she said. “We have hit 20,000 connections and counting and have in turn increased our revenues by 114% year or year.”
Freedom Fibre’s merger with XVFibre created a unit with a combined footprint of 285,000. The deal was borne from the companies’ complementary geographic proximities and similarities in quality of network build and go-to-market strategies, says Cihlar.
“We then had to seamlessly become one team and align our processes, a task that goes far beyond a merger of minds and comes down to the technical consolidation of our network, ensuring it is future-proof, ready for connections and readily available using XGS-PON,” she said.
The Group now comprises two distinct business units: the wholesale business comprised of VX UK and Freedom Fibre’s networks and a retail business under the LilaConnect brand.
Cihlar said: “Wholesale remains crucial to our plans to support consumers' freedom of choice and to maintain the affordability and quality of services, whilst we create the future of connectivity. Our ambitions in this area are to maximise the utilisation of our network with multiple ISPs.
“Retail is of equal importance. Having a single ISP across a footprint limits the end user's ability with just one choice of provider, with smaller ISPs offering financially beneficial, human 1-2-1 interaction and quicker customer service responses. The results show how the smaller networks really make a difference. Not only do they help the end user, but our understanding as a business of this emerging sector from a product, service, and economics perspective.”
“Our two business areas are important, albeit using different operating models, so synchronising our organisational and operational processes has taken careful consideration,” said Cihlar.
Undergoing the merger, Freedom Fibre took an approach that put people and communication first to ensure that the merger did not slow momentum. Cihlar added: “Effective communication has been crucial for ensuring a smooth transition for employees.”
The altnet leveraged its existing employee engagement frameworks to adopt a feedback-driven approach to addressing colleague concerns. Examples include immediately eliminating any ‘us’ and ‘them’ language and continuing to keep lines of communication with senior leadership open and visible throughout.
Cihlar said: “While we always strive to improve, our post-merger employee survey results have been overwhelmingly positive for engagement, culture and for being a business our colleagues would recommend working for.
“Buoyed by the success of our merger we continue to assess other strategic mergers towards our ambition of becoming a top five altnet.”
Key to this goal is ensuring that Freedom Fibre continues to build at pace through its recent Project Gigabit wins and separate commercial builds. This year the company has been awarded £24m to upgrade North Shropshire’s connectivity and £43m for its work to bring full fibre to parts of Cheshire starting from early 2025.
Freedom Fibre is also actively engaging with the Gigabit Voucher scheme to roll out its services in hard-to-reach areas.
Cihlar added: “Increasing full-fibre coverage across these areas aligns perfectly with our company values of pushing boundaries, we always strive to improve; to challenge how things are done; to fail fast and learn quickly.
“For our business, further strengthening our relationship with Building Digital UK and local authorities across the country is imperative to help us deliver at pace, utilising feedback from communities during the process.”
Freedom Fibre must balance this continued build with steadily increasing subscribers on its network. Education will be key part of this according to Cihlar. She said: “Consumer education on full-fibre and the upcoming copper switch-off can affect revenue.
“The cost of FTTP is a long-term infrastructure investment which requires a high volume of customers to achieve the required investor returns, therefore, we work closely with our RSPs to leverage our strengths and reach our end users with messages that matter to them.”
By firing on these three cylinders; network growth, customer addition and M&A engagement, Freedom Fibre hopes it can achieve its goal of being a top five altnet.
