Opportunity at a Glance
Community Fibre, Gigacomm Group’s wholesale business, sought to accelerate its entry into the wholesale broadband market by launching a secure and scalable API platform that would streamline customer onboarding and improve operational efficiency. However, the company’s legacy systems, limited automation and lack of Azure expertise presented a significant barrier to growth. Arinco was engaged to design and implement a cloud-native API integration platform on Microsoft Azure. This enabled Community Fibre to modernise its infrastructure, fast-track onboarding for new wholesale customers and strengthen its position with investors ahead of a major business expansion.
About Gigacomm
Community Fibre, Gigacomm Group’s wholesale business, is an Australian internet service provider specialising in high-speed fibre broadband for multi-dwelling units such as apartment buildings and commercial properties. By building and managing its own infrastructure, Community Fibre delivers reliable, high-performance connectivity to dense urban developments. With a strong focus on quality service and innovation, the company is expanding into wholesale, enabling retail service providers to access its growing network footprint across Australia.
Business challenge
The Gigacomm Group’s existing systems relied on manual processes that slowed down customer onboarding and partner integrations. To expand into the fast-moving wholesale market, where automation, security and scalability are critical, the company needed a modern platform purpose-built for wholesale operations.
While Gigacomm’s technology team was highly capable, building a secure, cloud-native API platform from scratch required specialist Azure expertise and telco-standard API development experience. This wasn’t about replacing skills but complementing them to accelerate delivery and get the foundations right from the start.
All of this needed to happen alongside ambitious business goals: expanding the wholesale network to 300,000 premises within three years and securing significant private investment. Success meant moving quickly to modernise, enable partner integration and deliver the reliability that customers expect.
Solution
Arinco was engaged in February 2025 to deliver a secure, modern API platform on Microsoft Azure to support Community Fibre’s wholesale operations. Building on an existing cloud foundation laid through Arinco’s Azure Done Right™ approach, the team designed, built and deployed APIs to automate wholesale processes and streamline retail partner onboarding.
Two-phase approach
The project began with a test run, uplifting Community Fibre’s existing Azure API Management (APIM) tier to Standard V2, migrating an existing API, and adding new functionality. This established core Azure services, security controls, firewalls and routing while delivering immediate business value. That early success paved the way for the second phase: building new wholesale APIs from scratch.
Platform foundations
Arinco then implemented enterprise-grade APIM, global load balancing and high availability across multiple zones to ensure scalability and resilience. The team also deployed a dedicated developer portal to provide retail partners with access to API documentation and self-service capabilities, improving visibility and experimentation.
API development and integration
Arinco worked with Community Fibre to develop five critical APIs aligned to wholesale business needs using reusable patterns for scalability and standardisation. To support location-based service offerings, a geo database was integrated within the address API. The APIs handled functions such as service availability, quoting, provisioning, static IP configuration and order management, all built to telco-standard Mplify specifications.
Security and networking
To protect Community Fibre’s cloud infrastructure and internal systems, Arinco implemented Azure Front Door to provide global load balancing, DDoS protection and secure API exposure. Azure Virtual Network (VNET) integration ensured secure connectivity between the cloud-hosted APIs and Community Fibre’s on-premises systems, without exposing sensitive internal services.
Environment design and onboarding enhancements
Isolated development, staging and production environments supported iterative development, testing and deployment. To improve the onboarding experience for retail partners (RSPs), Arinco recommended using Azure External Identities (formerly Azure AD B2C), enabling secure and streamlined partner access to Community Fibre’s systems.
Knowledge transfer and enablement
To ensure sustainability beyond the engagement, Arinco ran structured handover and knowledge transfer sessions. These included walkthroughs of the deployed APIs, CI/CD pipelines, code repositories and architecture documentation. Community Fibre’s newly hired solution designer and developers were brought up to speed and enabled to maintain and evolve the platform independently within weeks.
Outcomes
The API platform delivery marked a key milestone in Community Fibre’s digital transformation, enabling it to scale operations and pursue growth with confidence.
Key outcomes included:
- Faster time to market: The wholesale expansion and launch was brought forward, exceeding initial adoption targets by 50%.
- Integration and automation: Delivered five secure, production-ready APIs to telco-standard specifications, reducing manual effort and provisioning delays.
- Customer confidence: APIs gave wholesale partners the assurance needed to sign agreements, directly enabling the growth of the wholesale business.
- Faster partner onboarding: The self-service developer portal streamlines onboarding for retail service providers and reduces manual support.
- Security and resilience: Azure Front Door and VNET integration deliver secure, multi-zone and highly available services, while Managed Identity and OAuth flows protect communication between API Management and backend APIs.
- Team enablement: Equipped internal developers and solution designers with the skills, tools and documentation to maintain and expand the platform.
