AllPoints Fibre eyes UK national wholesale network

AllPoints Fibre is one of the many altnets wishing to carve out a piece of the UK's emerging fiber market for itself. Its CEO, Richard Jeffares, reckons it can stand out from the crowd and build a national network that eventually even Tier 1 companies like Virgin and BT will want to sell over.

Equipped with backing from Octopus Investment – delivered via its Fern Trading subsidiary – AllPoints has recently emerged from stealth. It was founded three years ago and initially operated under the brand of the software platform Vitrifi, which is AllPoints Fibre’s sister company. Four different players, all owned by Fern, have now consolidated into one unit around AllPoints. The ISPs Giganet, Jurassic Fibre and Swish Fibre – and their brands – will operate on top of the AllPoints network.

Figure 1: AllPoints is one of many altnets active in UK's fiber market.
(Source: gualtiero boffi / Alamy Stock Photo)

Jeffares says no decision has yet been made as to what the individual brands' fate will be ultimately, but currently the plan is for them to continue operating separately.

He notes the COVID-19 lockdowns gave AllPoints a boost when broadband was declared an essential service and the lack of traffic meant digging up the streets became much easier, even in otherwise busy areas. The company took advantage of lower traffic levels and a more straightforward administrative environment, offering daily testing to staff to ensure safety.

Small, medium or large

AllPoints chose the Midlands for its first rollouts, with a small, a medium-size and two larger municipalities to show retailers. The small location was Pershore with 5,000 homes, where narrow streets and bad poles made for a challenging environment, according to Jeffares. Evesham was selected as a middle-grade town, while Redditch and Banbury with around 28,000 properties were picked as larger municipalities to showcase to retailers.

Since then, AllPoints has grown and now counts roughly 490,000 premises passed, Jeffares notes, although he says this is not an official figure. The company had not answered Light Reading's subsequent queries about the official number at the time of writing. AllPoints is aiming to reach 1 million premises passed by 2024, although this target could double amid what Jeffares calls a slow rollout by other companies. AllPoints wants to build a national network and is eyeing partnerships with the heavy hitters.

Jeffares argues that if the network is big enough, well-built, English-owned and security-cleared, Tier 1 firms will want to sell over it. He envisions it is even possible BT will go on to partner with AllPoints. He argues that it might not make sense for Openreach, BT's network unit, to build where AllPoints is present.

Asked if it's possible BT could retain its broadband dominance in the fiber era, Jeffares is adamant there is "no chance" of that happening. "They are in real trouble and they know it. They know our team, they know what we have done overseas. Market share is going to disappear for them." He goes on to say that neither Virgin Media O2 nor CityFibre has been able to hurt BT, insisting "we have the potential to go in and just railroad them."

Connection conundrum

Much like its competitors, however, AllPoints is facing the challenge of increasing connection numbers. Jeffares admits these have been low for group members, saying people haven't been focusing on this enough. "But they will now," he adds.

To reach viability, Jeffares says a company needs a connection rate of between 20% and 23%, depending on how challenging the building environment is. Despite admitting this is an issue for AllPoints, too, he is highly critical of his competition's failure to ramp up connections.

Speaking about altnets, he says "they've all over-spent, under-connected, over-resourced ... Every single one of them. And they will fall and as they fall, we will acquire them and integrate them." Pointing to the example of CityFibre, he says "if you're in single figures, you're in real trouble," adding the company has around 4,000 employees.

In an emailed statement to Light Reading, CityFibre said it now counts 2.7 million homes passed, with more than 2.3 million ready for service (RFS), of which there are over 200,000 connected homes.

This would translate into a single-figure take-up rate, although CityFibre argues that calculating penetration this way "would be an inaccurate method due to the speed of rollout and phasing of homes moving into RFS." The altnet says it has a greater-than-25% penetration in "mature cities."

AllPoints is much smaller by comparison, with around 97 employees. It will, however, take on around 1,000 more staff who work at other Fern-owned companies as part of the merger.

Asked about AllPoints's structure, Jeffares says the firm is Octopus-managed. "My chairman is the group chairman of Octopus, he sits on my board for the fibre companies and the software companies and the security companies." He says the fund is "made up strongly" of business property release institutions and that investment comes from the UK.

Octopus also owns another fiber company, Vorboss, which was left out of the consolidation. It is building a dedicated network for businesses in London, with Jeffares noting it has become the largest network in the city in pure fiber terms, bigger than Openreach's.

Update: The story has been updated after feedback from AllPoints representatives to indicate that Vitrifi is a sister company to AllPoints Fibre and that one of the initial rollouts took place in Pershore, which has 5,000 homes, not the village of Pershall.

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— Tereza Krásová, Associate Editor, Light Reading