A Quick Snapshot of BT’s Recent Broadband Provisioning Performance

The intense storms that ravaged much of the United Kingdom over winter clearly had an impact on BTOpenreach’s engineering crews (here) and some of the affected areas are only now getting back to normal. But what do the statistics say about the effect on new broadband provisions and missed appointments? Let’s take a look.

A series of violent storms, which ravaged many parts of the UK between November 2013 and late February 2014, created a brutal combination of protracted torrential rain and hurricane force gusts that caused flooding and damaged property. Some areas, such as the flood ridden parts of Sussex and Dorset in England, were hit worse than others.

As a result of all this BTOpenreach, which has the task of maintaining BT’s national telecoms infrastructure, needed to redirect many of its engineering crews to focus upon repairing damage instead of installing new services. Unfortunately we can’t see what impact this had at a regional level but we do get to view the national situation.

The figures for BTOpenreach reveal that missed appointment volumes have reduced for most services since a spike in late February 2014 caused by bad weather, although they’re still 1% higher than levels earlier in the year.

Similarly FTTC CP (ISP) missed appointments have increased in recent week but remain significantly improved on previous levels of performance. Sadly the graph does a poor job of separating general Copper SFI’s (Special Fault Investigations) and FTTC CP related missed appointments.

Unsurprisingly there has been a noticeable dip in on time deliveries and a mild rise in failures for all but BT’s older 20th Century Network (20CN) platform, which is typically still used in the last 5-10% of the country’s predominantly rural areas. In general FTTC performance has worsened due to higher missed appointment volumes but it’s not a huge change.

Overall the Average Time to Install has lengthened as a result of the increased work volume in BTOpenreach and WLR3 lead times for March were around 7.5 days up from 5.4 days in February 2014. However FTTC lead times for March were about 6 days down from 10 days in February.