Wholesale Fibre and Retail Are Two Different Operations
The biggest UK altnet deal this year agreed to put the network in one company and the retail brands in another.
That is not just deal structure. It is a statement about operations. Wholesale and full-service look almost identical on a network diagram. Same fibre, same OLTs, same aggregation. Operationally, they are two different companies.
A full-service operator owns the subscriber end to end. BNG and subscriber sessions, RADIUS, CGNAT and IPv6 delegation, DNS, CPE, transit and peering, and the support queue at the end of all of it. When something breaks, the household knows it is your problem.
A wholesale L2 operator stops earlier. Fibre, OLTs, aggregation, and a clean handoff to each ISP at the interconnect, often QinQ with an outer tag per ISP and an inner tag per subscriber. The ISP runs its own BNG. Your customer is not a household. It is another operator, with a contract, an SLA, and engineers who read your graphs as carefully as you do.
That changes what good operations looks like. Visibility per ISP and per VLAN, not just per port. Capacity planned per interconnect. Onboarding that does not take a quarter. Ordering and fault handling that follow a common standard, which is exactly what the INCA Wholesale Standards Initiative is working towards.
And you need to win the demarcation argument quickly. When subscribers on one ISP lose service at 3am, the first question is always the same: is it your layer 2 or their BNG? The operator who can show the answer in five minutes, with data, is the one ISPs keep buying from.
The hardest version is running both at once. Your own retail subscribers and wholesale ISPs on the same OLTs and the same aggregation. Whose incident goes first? How is capacity split? Which team owns the fault? And your wholesale customers will notice very quickly if your own retail traffic always seems to win.
Most altnets that opened their network to wholesale did it on top of an operations model built for retail. The business model changed. The NOC often did not.
So we are curious. Are you wholesale, retail, or both? And if both, did your operations change when you opened the network, or did wholesale get added on top of what was already there?
