Rewiring the market: How Sonalake helped APFN launch a national fibre wholesale aggregation service

Nine Months. One Vision. A Market Transformed.

When AllPoints Fibre Networks (APFN) set out to redefine wholesale fibre access in the UK, the stakes were high and the timelines short. Just over nine months from engaging Sonalake, they launched aquila, a transformative digital platform.

At the heart of this platform lies SwitchedOn Fibre™ - a new generation configurable BSS product developed by Sonalake for the unique automation challenges of the fibre customer journey.

“It is rare one gets to make no-regret decisions of this scale, but this is one myself and the team are so glad we made.”
– Ronan Kelly, Managing Director, AllPoints Fibre Networks

What was broken and how does aquila fix it

Accessing national wholesale and Altnet fibre networks has long been complex and fragmented, with ISP retailers facing  multiple integrations, contracts, delays and complications to gain scale.

APFN’s vision with aquila was to create a platform marketplace where ISPs could access the single largest quantity of fibre addressable premises across the UK’s leading network infrastructures through a single harmonised TM Forum-compliant interface.

The solution needed to deliver simplicity for ISPs via one technical interface; one contract; one excellent customer experience, automated end-to-end.

SwitchedOn Fibre: The product behind the aquila

The aquila vision required a major business and technology transformation, replacing multiple existing platforms from the four consolidated Altnets. APFN thus needed more than software, they needed a technology partner that could adapt and integrate at speed.

Sonalake’s SwitchedOn Fibre™ was selected as the foundational platform for aquila. Built to automate the unique customer journeys of FTTP and Ethernet, it shatters the limitations of legacy systems - slashing integration effort, accelerating time to market, and enabling bold commercial models. It’s everything traditional BSS isn’t: agile, extensible and ready for scale from day one.

Built around an event-driven cloud architecture, SwitchedOn Fibre delivered the following capabilities to the aquila platform:

• **Maximum automation of the customer journey **From address lookup to quotation, order orchestration, billing and care, the platform fully automates the Lead-to-Cash and Trouble-to-Resolve customer journey,  wrapped in a compelling customer experience

  

• Standards alignment
  Composable and fully aligned with TM Forum frameworks and APIs to enable interoperability and simplify onboarding

• Configurability for business agility
  With an extensible low/no-code configuration & integration layer, the platform empowers non-developers to configure and orchestrate complex workflows and integrations

• Data rich & AI-enabled by design
  Built on a scalable architecture that captures granular, real-time data from every single transaction and interaction, the platform powers advanced observability, analytics and AI automation. AI innovations include service agent copilots and agentic workflow automation

• Open Access marketplace ready
  The platform natively supports multi-network, multi-product business models - including on-net, off-net, passive, active, and white-labelled services - making it ideal for wholesale aggregation marketplaces and operators with M&A ambitions

Solution architecture 

Having immediately stood up the SwitchedOn Fibre product on APFNs AWS cloud infrastructure, the Sonalake team engaged with APFN in an iterative process of analysis and design sprints, surfacing the processes, features, interfaces and technical imperatives. User journeys, workflows, UX, security, configurability and extensibility were among the list of essentials to be nailed down during an intense agile engagement.

The diagram below illustrates the primary functions of the aquila platform, together with the multiple integrations to fibre networks and third party IT systems. The northbound system interface to retail ISPs is also depicted, via portal and/or API interface:

“The no-code / low-code capabilities of SwitchedOn Fibre allowed us to iterate and deliver faster than we thought possible.”
– Nigel Suddel, COO, AllPoints Fibre Networks

AWS Hosted

As an AWS partner, Sonalake was delighted to deliver SwitchedOn Fibre upon an extensive AWS infrastructure, giving APFN the flexibility and confidence of a secure, scalable cloud foundation. By using AWS, the platform can grow seamlessly as more networks and ISPs are added, while maintaining strong resilience and meeting stringent data protection and security requirements. Automated deployment and built-in observability mean that updates and improvements can be rolled out quickly and issues detected early. For APFN and its partners, this translates into a reliable service that can scale to millions of connections, backed by the performance and security of AWS.

The Partnership

One of the standout achievements of this project has been the speed of execution. aquila was taken from early design discussions to market launch in just over nine months - an exceptional pace for a platform of this complexity and number of multi-party integrations.

This was enabled by a ‘’one team’’ partnership and collaborative no-blame culture, led by APFN as the customer and embraced by Sonalake.

“The truly agile mode of engagement has been an exceptional experience.
– Tarren Kelly, Programme Director, AllPoints Fibre Networks

The aquila project didn’t just meet expectations - it reset them. The ability to deliver at this pace, without compromise, is a clear signal: with the right architecture and mindset, fibre can be fast - in every sense of the word.

The Result

Already covering 20m premises when launched in June’25, aquila is creating an open competitive market to accelerate the consumer and business take-up of fibre broadband services.

By removing layers of technical and commercial complexity, this connectivity marketplace enables ISPs and wholesale networks to focus on what they do best - managing customer experiences and building excellent network services respectively. This ultimately leads to a superior service for the British consumer as the power of full fibre is realised.

With exciting early market traction, the plans for aquila are reaching beyond initial ambitions. APFN’s product roadmap and expansion schedule includes launching new services, integrating additional wholesale network partners and onboarding large cohorts of ISPs, as it strives to grow the transformative aquila platform into the UK’s primary national full fibre service.

At the core of aquila, Sonalake’s SwitchedOn Fibre BSS product and integration services will continue to be tested for speed, agility, scalability and stability, and we look forward to a continued successful partnership with such an innovative and collaborative client in APFN.