Swish Fibre Find Wayleave Solution for FTTP Rollout with Trenches Law

Broadband ISP Swish Fibre, which is building a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network for 250,000 premises across the Home Counties of England, has today agreed a new partnership with telecoms specialist Trenches Law to help tackle the pile of wayleave agreements that such work tends to attract.

Swish has already begun connecting their first customers in Marlow (Buckinghamshire) and many more locations are set to follow over the next few years (here). The operator is being supported by an investment of £250m from Fern Trading (they also own Jurassic Fibre in the South West of England).

However, after having grown from a team of only 15 people to 60 at the close of the year – with plans to grow the company ten-fold over the next 18 months – Swish has already identified the need to augment its wayleave knowledge as quickly as possible. And 12 months into the business, 4,000 wayleaves have already been encountered.

Wayleaves are notoriously slow, complicated and often costly legal agreements, which grant special access to land or buildings for the deployment and management of new infrastructure, such as running a new fibre optic cable through buildings or installing related infrastructure in fields. But these can be tricky because each land or building owner requires a separate approach and then the wayleave may need approval from tenants.

Nick Bratt, Swish Fibre, said:

“We’re an entirely new company with big plans. We knew we needed some real expert advice on how to structure our processes, the likely issues we’d face and where to go when we get stuck.”

Sharon McDermott, Co-Founder of Trenches Law, said:

“We’re big on collaboration at Trenches Law, which means the dynamic differs from one client to the next. Our work with Swish Fibre is all about intense knowledge transfer, so we can empower the team to manage the wayleave process effectively, compliantly and with a keen eye on the commercials too. We don’t want anything to slow them down.”

A few months ago we reported that the law firm had spent much of 2020 developing a new automated solution that could help to reduce some of the time and cost involved with securing wayleaves (here), which we imagine will be put to good use with Swish Fibre’s work.