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They quoted us £75,000, so we did it ourselves: the Cuckoo brand story
After being told by top London agencies it would cost upwards of £75,000 to develop our brand; we decided to embrace the challenge and keep it in-house.
Dan McClure | VP Technology & Co-Founder
Our first customer is live on Cuckoo broadband today. That’s no mean feat in a lockdown. We’re building our broadband company on the principle of transparency, so here’s how we’re doing it.
We’re making broadband simple, for good
Before we dive into our 60-day tech adventure, I feel it’s important to give some explanation to how broadband actually works. Now, most people know that the Internet is a global network of billions of computers and other electronic devices. But how does your home actually get online ?
I’m not going to go into packets, protocols, IP addresses, socket layers, or routers in this article. There are many great write-ups in the wild, written by much more intelligent people than me. I highly recommend ‘ How Does The Internet Work’ by Stephen Li.
The Internet works through a packet routing network in accordance with theInternet Protocol (IP), theTransport Control Protocol(TCP) and other protocols.
As an Internet Service Provider or broadband company, we are the enablers. At Cuckoo, we have coined what we feel is the best analogy when it comes to explaining what we do: the ‘3 layered cake’
Top layer Here’s us. Switch customers. Fix issues. Bill them. Do good.
Middle layer Think kit at telephone exchanges and network centres. They route the data.
Bottom layer Lay and own the wires. Digs up roads. Think Openreach, Virgin Media and HyperOptic.
There are lots of different technologies to connect consumers at home. The best are Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and the latest capability Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). Cuckoo will sit on top of these technologies to provide the consumer experience. We don’t care whose cables they are, as long as it provides the best service for our customers.
“Cuckoo is network and infrastructure agnostic. We are the consumer layer for the internet that acquires, bills and services people”
The three wings of Cuckoo
We have a technology agnostic approach at Cuckoo, though we do have some principles when writing and deploying code.
We’ve built our stack so that it can scale. We’re building on top of AWS and as far as we know, we’re the first fully serverless ISP in the country. What this means is that when you click to join, we can carry out computing functions really, really fast. Even at scale, without having to rent racks of servers.
“Some ISPs still manually add each customer at the end of a working day”
People across the world suffer from rubbish broadband. We’re building our tech stack so that it is network, infrastructure and region agnostic. Watch out Australia.
We code fast but tight. We have a small integrated team that means we can move quickly. Sprint by sprint.
Our approach is to use the best technology for the job. For example, we wouldn’t build a bloated C# application to call a single endpoint that returns an address. Below is our customer-facing sitemap: each of these interactions connects to a different part of our tech-stack.
So we’ve now switched our first customer. And built our website, billing and service infrastructure to test with our first batch of users. Here’s what you can look forward to:
After being told by top London agencies it would cost upwards of £75,000 to develop our brand; we decided to embrace the challenge and keep it in-house.
Broadband is broken. Complex deals. High prices. Bad service. Join Cuckoo to make the internet more magical.
We’re making broadband simple, for good.