The following summary has been condensed for length and readability. To listen to the full discussion, click here. This episode is sponsored by ETI Software and VETRO FiberMap.
The UK fiber market has undergone radical transformation over the past decade—massive investment, rapid alt-net expansion, unprecedented consolidation, and now a decisive shift toward automation and AI-driven operations. In this episode of The Broadband Bunch, host Pete Pizzutillo speaks with Ronan Kelly, Managing Director of AllPoints Fibre, to discuss the forces shaping this evolution and the launch of the company’s breakthrough wholesale platform, Aquila.
Ronan’s career began in the early days of internet access at US Robotics, where he supported the modem and access concentrator technologies that powered the first dial-up networks across Europe. From there, he moved into ATM core networks at FORE Systems and ultimately into carrier infrastructure roles supporting ISPs and backbone providers across the continent.
A pivotal chapter came with the Irish national research and education network, HEAnet, where Ronan worked on IPv6 rollouts and multicast architecture more than 20 years ago—long before those concepts became mainstream.
Later, during his 14-year tenure at Adtran, Ronan helped the company expand into the UK and European markets, eventually becoming a key supplier to Openreach and more than half of the UK’s emerging alt-net operators. That experience—balancing technology strategy, product leadership, and large-scale deployments—would directly lead him to AllPoints Fibre.
Ronan describes the UK market of six years ago as a “perfect storm” for fiber growth:
Incumbents lagged in building full fiber, leaving much of the country on aging copper networks.
Consumer demand surged, driven by streaming, cloud apps, and remote work.
Interest rates hit historic lows, triggering a wave of private investment.
Government policies pushed toward gigabit-capable infrastructure.
Open-access fiber became increasingly attractive to investors seeking stability.
This led to the explosive rise of challenger alt-nets like Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre, Giganet, and others—each selecting their own vendors, architectures, systems, and operational models.
But as Ronan notes, the industry soon encountered a harsh reality:
fiber construction scales faster than fiber operations.
Multiple alt-nets were suddenly burdened by:
Duplicated roles across organizations
Fragmented systems and IT toolkits
Architectural decisions optimized for speed, not longevity
The rising cost of tech debt
Difficulty attracting investment without scale
This environment set the stage for consolidation—and the formation of AllPoints Fibre.
The group that eventually became AllPoints Fibre combined:
Jurassic Fibre
Swish Fibre
Giganet
AllPoints Fibre Networks Ltd.
Cuckoo (which was later spun out as a standalone ISP)
The strategy behind consolidation was clear:
Finance, HR, People & Culture, marketing, operations, and network engineering were unified to reduce overhead and align business objectives.
To attract large ISPs, APFN needed to avoid channel conflict. Spinning off Cuckoo solved that.
Collectively, the merged networks accounted for over 500,000 homes passed—significant, but still only 2% of the UK market. This reinforced the need to connect with other major networks.
By connecting with Openreach, BT Wholesale, and CityFibre via Aquila, APFN could offer ISPs access to nearly 20 million premises—a critical threshold for commercial viability.
This consolidation was not simply an organizational exercise—it was a strategic repositioning of the company for long-term success in the wholesale market.
The most transformative decision APFN made was to build its own standards-based wholesale marketplace from scratch—Aquila.
Ronan explains that when they inventoried the systems from the five merged companies, the total was staggering:
350+ vendor systems across the business.
Many of these systems were custom-built by engineering-led organizations trying to stretch limited budgets—a situation Ronan describes as the “free puppy problem.”
“It looks cute and affordable at first, until you realize you’re feeding it, maintaining it, and cleaning up after it for the next 15 years.”
Rather than stitch together incompatible systems, APFN made the bold decision to start fresh.
Built entirely on TM Forum Open APIs, ensuring stability and security
Designed as API-first with an intuitive customer portal
Supports rapid onboarding, including sub-1-week timelines for portal-based ISPs
Offers a scalable Layer 3 wholesale service across multiple access networks
Enables operators to offload routing, DHCP, RADIUS, DNS, and monitoring infrastructure
Serves as a future marketplace for voice, unified comms, and digital services
The result is an operational model that lowers cost-to-serve, improves service consistency, and gives ISPs access to the largest unified fiber footprint in the UK.
One of Ronan’s strongest themes is the critical importance of automation. With gigabit broadband increasingly commoditized and margins tightening, efficiency is now the primary competitive advantage.
He puts it plainly:
“If a customer has to call me, I lose two months of profitability.”
Ronan emphasizes that operators too often automate only the “happy path”—the smooth workflows that rarely fail.
By giving ISPs clear, upstream visibility, APFN ensures that many issues are resolved before they ever escalate.
Ronan offers one of the most compelling perspectives on AI in telecom heard on the show:
“If you’re thinking AI is a 3–5 year strategy, you’re already dead.”
He describes AI as the fastest-evolving technology in his 30 years in the industry, with weekly breakthroughs that transform what’s possible in operations.
However, Ronan warns that technical debt is the biggest barrier to AI success.
Organizations with dozens or hundreds of unstructured, siloed systems will struggle to harness AI’s power—a reality he believes will separate future winners from losers.
When asked about managing cultural transformation, Ronan points to a core principle he set with his team:
“Every decision made in the past was right at the time. It just may not be right for where we’re going.”
By removing blame and territorial thinking, APFN aligned teams around the future state, not the past. This mindset enabled tough decisions, including retiring legacy systems and standardizing architectures.
Ronan also reflects on what he’d tell his younger self:
Imposter syndrome slows down careers and stalls transformation.
In a market where technology—and AI especially—is evolving at unprecedented speed, decisive leadership is now mission-critical.
AllPoints Fibre is positioned to play a defining role in the future of UK wholesale broadband. Through Aquila, the company is creating a national marketplace that unifies networks, simplifies operations, and accelerates innovation for ISPs.
Ronan expects the next major leap to be in agentic AI, where automation, intent-driven networks, and self-healing systems become standard industry expectations.
For operators navigating the same challenges—system sprawl, tight margins, complex migrations, and pressure to scale—Ronan’s message is clear:
Clean up data.
Standardize interfaces.
Tackle tech debt head-on.
Automate everything.
Move boldly and move now.
Because the future of fiber isn’t just fast—it’s automated, integrated, and intelligent.
© 2025 Enhanced Telecommunications.
