# Introduction

The Fibre Cafe connects disparate network providers, AltNets and communication service providers via a single unified
gateway into the UK fibre ecosystem.

Communication Service Providers, Managed Service Providers and Wholesalers are referred to as "tenants" on the Fibre Cafe -
they are ordering services from suppliers. AltNets, Wholesalers and Connectivity Providers are referred to as "suppliers"
on the gateway - they provide the services that can be ordered by tenants.

![Fibre Cafe Overview](/assets/connectivity.ff5adaa25ee30081e883cccd19c420a2410bffb1256b5cd79f5416ef6276018a.9c1bb791.png)

The Fibre Cafe offers secure RESTful APIs for all parties. Tenants access the Tenant API to check service availability for
any given location, find and reserve appointments and to place orders. These requests are validated, mapped and forwarded
as appropriate to the relevant suppliers with responses from the suppliers received via the Supplier API. The response
from the supplier(s) will then be mapped as required and passed to the tenant via the Tenant API.
During order fulfilment, order updates (KCIs) are sent from the supplier to the tenant automatically.

Speak to our team to get access to the Fibre Cafe demo environment or to be onboarded to the CVT test platform.

Refer to the [Tenants](/pages/tenants/tenants) and [Suppliers](/pages/suppliers/suppliers) sections as appropriate to get started.