ISP County Broadband Calls on UK Gov to Fuel More Engineers

The CEO of Rural ISP County Broadband, Lloyd Felton, has called on the UK Government to put more “resources and training opportunities into the engineering industry” in order to help tackle the shortage of skilled “full fibre” engineers, which are needed in order to keep the roll-out of gigabit-capable broadband moving.

At present a lot of network operators are in the process of building new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband networks (Summary of Full Fibre Progress), which has put an industry-wide strain on existing contractors (i.e. not enough skilled civil engineers to meet demand in a timely fashion).

Similarly, County Broadband – supported by a £46m investment from Aviva – plans to extend their own fibre network across 20,000 premises in the rural East of England (Essex, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire etc.) by the end of 2020. As part of that they’ve already grown their workforce by 500% in the last year alone and it’s a similar story at other operators.

The Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), which represents various alternative broadband ISPs and network builders, recently echoed these concerns by calling for “urgent investment” toward training and apprenticeships in the telecoms sector to help skill-up new engineers (here).

Lloyd Felton, CEO of County Broadband, said:

“Recent events have highlighted just how important next generation broadband access is going to be. The government has rightly placed a high priority on broadband provision, including awarding key-worker status to network engineers.

We are proud to have completed the delivery of our new Hyperfast networks in rural Essex benefiting thousands of residents and businesses during such a difficult and challenging time and have many more local networks in build and nearing completion.

Upgrading the region’s digital infrastructure will play a central role in boosting the economic recovery and this requires a shovel-ready pipeline of engineers, IT technicians and other skilled industry specialists.

Subsequently, we need a firm commitment from the government to direct enough resources and training opportunities into the engineering industry, and whilst we pledge to play our role to help identify and train future-ready local talent, we will continue to work with and support INCA in ensuring the rapidly-evolving industry gets the funding assurances we need.”

The comment comes after a new Opinium survey by County Broadband, which was conducted during May 2020 with 1,000 adults living in rural England and 1,000 in urban areas, found that nine in ten residents relied on broadband to work from home while 68% spent more than four hours a day online.