Zen Internet reiterated its ambition to become the altnet aggregator of choice in the channel at its official launch for The Fibre Hub (7th May, The Gherkin, London).
Thu, 8/05/2025 - 15:04
Access is critical to empowering service provider success, according to Donal Hanrahan, Director of Strategy at Strategic Imperatives. Here he discusses his plans and priorities to ensure The Fibre Café, its cloud based, API-driven integration platform, continues to catalyse competition and drive positive outcomes.
Where is value moving in the UK service provider market and how are you helping service providers position themselves to capitalise on this?
Service providers are battling for market share by rolling out initiatives like bundled services, promotions and competitive pricing. We are seeing smaller, more agile providers gaining significant ground by offering faster speeds and better customer service, challenging market incumbents.
Competition is only a good thing for the market. Right now, Fibre Café gives these service providers access to over 18 million premises across the UK via wholesale networks as they look to increase market share.
Our focus is on helping service providers expand their reach and provide their customers with access to the best possible networks so they can offer an exceptional service. Facilitating as many connections as possible for service providers remains our ultimate objective.
Where is the Fibre Café on its journey?
Since entering the market in 2022, Fibre Café has become enabled service providers automate their interface into the wholesale service provider ecosystem, helping those looking to expand or automate their current supplier base. Today, we work closely with BT Wholesale, PXC, Virgin Media Business, Sky Business, Netomnia, Community Fibre, Trooli and more.
The simplicity of Fibre Café is that service providers only need to connect to our platform once to unlock access to the entire UK fibre ecosystem - speeding up time to market, enabling revenue growth, and removing the integration complexities and high development costs that have plagued the industry for decades.
In a broad context please summarise your aims and objectives for 2025? Why are they significant?
In 2025, we will continue to streamline and accelerate how service providers access the UK wholesale ecosystem, at a time of significant competition.
Last year we launched Trouble-to-Resolve (T2R) support functionality which enables a unified approach to diagnostics and trouble ticketing. We created this functionality working closely with our service provider customers to address their specific needs.
In 2025, we're continuing to invest in customer-centric innovations including:
- Expanding the services that can be accessed across the platform with customer-led developments including Ethernet, VoIP and Mobile
- the development of enhanced analytics and reporting capabilities within the platform.
Why are these significant?
These solutions reflect the desire of our service provider customers to automate their interface into the wholesale service provider ecosystem across a broad range of products and services. In doing so, they reflect the dynamic nature of the market and Fibre Café’s significant role as a facilitator of this dynamism.
What are your current priorities and what are the main challenges and opportunities associated with your priorities?
Our number one priority remains solving the most pressing challenges that service providers face, namely the long-standing pain points that have for too-long restricted network expansion and integration with wholesale networks.
One of the most significant challenges for service providers is the complexity associated with integration, because each network provider uses different technologies, APIs, and processes. Through Fibre Café, we enable a new reality of ‘Connect Once, Connect to Many’, meaning that service providers need only connect to Fibre Café once to unlock access to 18+ million premises across multiple UK wholesale networks. This standardised approach using uniform APIs and processes across different network providers removes the technical barriers to empower service providers to expand their coverage.
Service providers have historically had to deal with high development costs when onboarding new providers, because of the resource required, while maintaining multiple integrations drains resources and increases costs too. We’ve listened to this and eliminated the expense of developing and maintaining multiple integrations, thanks to our standardised approach to connecting service providers with wholesale networks. This allows our customers to redirect valuable development resources to more strategic initiatives.
Slow time-to-market, and the ability to serve new markets, has also been a long-standing barrier to growth for service providers, caused mainly by lengthy onboarding timescales that put them at a competitive disadvantage in a fast-moving market. By leveraging existing integrations, Fibre Café reduces onboarding timescales by months at a time, unlocking growth opportunities for service providers who want to stay ahead, not play catch up.
For us, it’s about empowering service providers with a launchpad for growth, through a platform that helps them expand their network reach at an unprecedented rate, while gaining cost and resource efficiencies to drive better business outcomes.
