Openreach Test Crystal Ball AI Process to Tackle Complex UK Full Fibre Installs
Network access provider Openreach (BT) appears to be testing a new “Crystal Ball Process“, which is described as being an AI-driven customer service innovation that seems intended to help tackle complex installations of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP lines.
The process, which uses notes from engineers, delay codes, survey outputs, network topology and other information to help inform its model, is designed to monitor and predict when Openreach will be able to get these complex installations into service (normal installs won’t use this process), which is then fed back to broadband ISPs. The goal seems to be to better manage expectations and improve communication.
At present the details around this are fairly limited and Openreach seemed reluctant to furnish us with any details, although we understand that they’re aiming to be in a better position to release more information on it sometime in the New Year. The information we do have has thus come from various other industry sources.
Advertisement
What’s less clear is why any of this really needs Artificial Intelligence (AI), since we’d assume a bit of competent programming and normal machine learning algorithms would be able to achieve a similar sort of system and output. But it’s possible that an AI driven solution might be quicker to implement, since such software already exists for managing large data sets with lots of different inputs and contexts to consider.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Malicious Fibre Break Disrupts Virgin Media Broadband Near Manchester
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
“AI” is the latest buzzword which must be crow-barred into every announcement whether AI is present or not not. It supersedes “Blockchain”.
I’m old enough to remember “Information Superhighway”.
If it relies on engineering notes from engineers then that will be a point of failure as they are constantly very poor or non existent.
If what I’ve seen is true the Nvidia chips that power these AI data centres are supposed to last 5 years but are burning out in 2.They seem to be burning through investor cash at a rate of knots but earning very little revenue, now where have I heard that before???
When they get smart enough AI that can install a fiber line to my flat, there might be something to talk about.
Otherwise it’s just used as a buzzword by the marketing people.
When this AI bubble bursts, it’s going to be bad. Really bad.
This will be the automated equivalent of explaining in detail to a manager as to why a job cannot be done, the reasons why, the alternatives you have considered and what is needed to resolve the problem. All to have the manager ignore everything you have said and ask if you can do something you just explained that could not be done. Now AI will take all the information experienced engineers have provided and spit out a solution that cannot be done and was previously tried.
They are using the AI as the people that used to do this work were all given a redundancy package and their jobs no longer existed.
A.I taking over a lot of roles within BT and Openreach which from an insiders point of you has told me that things are not running any smoother and still regularly require human intervention