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Tewkesbury-based network operator Netomnia (Brsk, Youfibre), which has so far rolled out their full fibre broadband (FTTP) lines to cover 2.56 million UK premises (341,000 customers), has today significantly expanded the wholesale availability of their infrastructure by making it available via new internet providers (ISPs). Starting with business (B2B) packages.
Until now Netomnia (Substantial Group), which recently became the first alternative network to start adopting 50Gbps (50G -PON) broadband technology (here), has primarily only sold packages to businesses and homes via ISPs that are a part of the same group – Youfibre and Brsk. For example, customers of Youfibre pay from £23.99 per month for symmetric speeds of 150Mbps and that goes up to £99.99 if you want 8Gbps (7,000Mbps average).
However, much as we hinted at the end of last month (here), the company has been working to expand the availability of their wholesale platform and thus increasing the number of retail ISPs able to offer packages over their network. The big news today is that they’ve announced the launch of their B2B Wholesale Platform for other ISPs to harness – available to over 100,000 business locations and growing.
The catch is that those partners can initially only offer business broadband packages via Netomnia’s network, although there’s no reason why regular consumers can’t simply purchase the same service (except for the fact that business products tend to cost more).
Key Wholesale Network Highlights
• Ethernet over FTTP: Delivered over XGS-PON with symmetrical speeds and 5-hour SLAs — an ideal alternative to traditional Ethernet, with superior economics and consistent performance.
• Business and Consumer FTTP: Up to 8 Gbps across the UK’s second-largest Alt-Net footprint — built for both volume and quality.
• Ethernet Point-to-Point: Dedicated, uncontended fibre with bandwidths from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps — ideal for enterprise-grade connectivity.
• Dark Fibre: Passive infrastructure offering partners full control to build and manage their network.
The initial launch is being supported by a “focused group of trusted partners“, which reflects the onboarding of over ten ISPs to their network. Netomnia said this would allow them to “fine-tune onboarding and tooling before wider market availability“.
Jeremy Chelot, Group CEO, said:
“We didn’t set out to be just another wholesale provider. We’ve engineered a platform that outperforms — built for scale, flexibility, and a seamless partner experience. We’re giving providers faster, simpler access to high-quality infrastructure, without the usual barriers.”
The operator’s rapidly growing network coverage and blistering speeds will naturally be very attractive to a lot of internet providers. Except some retail ISPs may still be wary of the fact that Netomnia is not a pure wholesale-only network and continues to operate their own vertically integrated retail ISPs (i.e. effectively competing with its own partners).
As for home users, Netomnia hasn’t revealed precisely when their wholesale offerings will be expanded to cater for the consumer market, but apparently it will occur “later this year“. ISPreview understands that residential products are likely to launch via larger ISPs first, so there’s an element of prioritisation involved with how their wholesale expansion is being handled.
Some of our eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that broadband ISP Aquiss did briefly announce (before retracting) that they had gone live on this service last week. The partners list below doesn’t mention them directly, but they’re covered by one of those listed (some of the partners are associated to more than one other ISP).
Netomnia’s B2B Partners
• Baltic Broadband
• Exa Networks
• FibreNova
• Flexgrid
• Giant
• Go Momentum
• ID Net
• IP River
• TalkStraight
• Triangle Networks
• Velox Serv