RED Warning Given to Cityfibre’s FTTH Build in Milton Keynes

The Milton Keynes Council has issued a “red warning” against Cityfibre’s £40m roll-out of a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network – supported by ISP partner Vodafone UK, which is due to the level of complaints being made against the provider and inspectors identifying “poor practise” in their work.

According to the council’s Scrutiny Management Committee, a Red Warning means that: “All four key criteria cannot be delivered without further significant intervention (Consider whether the project should continue). Risks are being managed and do not require escalation.”

At present the operator is said to have 23 civil engineering teams working on their roll-out in the large Buckinghamshire town (they tend to aim for 85-90% coverage or more) – many of them belonging to the Granemore Group – and they aim to complete the deployment by the end of 2020. This will turn Milton Keynes into one of their first fully completed FTTH deployments in the UK.

All of this work forms part their wider £2.5bn investment plan, which aims to cover around 1 million homes across 12 UK cities and towns with Gigabit capable “full fibre” broadband by the end of 2021 (Phase One) and then 5 million premises by the end of 2025 (here). Unfortunately some of their deployments have attracted quite a few complaints and MK seems to be one of those.

Scrutiny Management Committee Statement

Inspections have shown that cables are not being laid deep enough in the footpath by CityFibre; voids appearing in the works recently completed. Increased public complaints and reputational damage for the Council. CityFibre have 23 teams on site, the works require significant MKC resource to respond to complaints, inspect complaints and provide adhoc supervision to ensure the scope, work quality and safety standards are being met.

Meetings have been held with CityFibre to manage issues, however inspections continue to highlight poor practise and increased complaints. The operational programme has recently been transferred from Growth and Economy to Environment and Property Service, an operational governance structure is being put in place to deal with installation issues.

Red – As well as a reputational risk there is a financial risk to MKC to fix poor quality workmanship issues in the future.

Deploying new infrastructure is a naturally very expensive business and will inevitably create periods of disruption for local residents, which is often true no matter who is doing the noisy civil engineering side of thing s (over the years we’ve seen similar gripes being levelled against Openreach, Virgin Media and others).

Sadly such work will attract complaints, some of which are unavoidable, although in this case it appears as if Cityfibre’s contractors may be making a few too many mistakes. In response the operator doesn’t appear to have apologised (MK Citizen) but they have reiterated their position.

A Spokesperson for Cityfibre said:

“The quality of the work we are carrying out is of paramount importance to us and for incidences where issues have arisen, processes are in place to help ensure they are resolved as quickly as possible. [We are] constantly monitoring the performance of our build partners helping to meet our stated target of completing the construction of the network in MK by the end of 2020.”

In the long run the ability to access affordable 1Gbps broadband speeds should make all of this disruption worthwhile and may even boost the value of local housing, as well as the economy. Nevertheless operators do still have a clear responsibility to finish the work properly and, for the most part, they do take action when problems are identified.

Cityfibre, which earlier this year opened a new office in city, has previously said that they intend to bring their “Engineering Centre of Excellence” to the city. Clearly it’s needed. We should point out that the operator has just awarded the Granemore Group a £39m contract to help deploy their full fibre network into a second urban location, Northampton (here). Hopefully it’s a case of lessons learned.