CityFibre Praises Improvement in Fault Repairs from UK Trial

Network builder CityFibre has given themselves a pat on the back after trials of an enhanced platform “capable of true proactive fault repair“, which involved several broadband ISPs on their UK full fibre (FTTP) infrastructure, delivered an impressive improvement.

At present CityFibre aims to cover up to 8 million UK premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) with their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). Various ISPs, such as Vodafone and TalkTalk, access this via wholesale and then sell packages on to consumers.

The operator has always had the ability to proactively monitor their fibre network and see faults as they happen, but the new platform they’re integrating is said to enhance that. The platform is designed to ensure that as soon as a service outage ‘red flag incident’ happens on their network, ‘Auto Create’ and ‘Auto Resolve’ incident responses are activated. This allows them to begin investigating and resolving the issue almost immediately, while notifying their ISP partners and end-customers in parallel.

The results of early trials, underway since February 2023, are said to be “nothing short of impressive“. More than half of the proactively managed faults identified during the trial have been fixed on the same day, meaning service loss is only a few hours, rather than the alleged “three-to-five-day industry average” (in reality this can vary a lot between ISPs and networks, often depending upon a chosen service level).

“The ISP partners who started trialling this with us in one city immediately saw the benefits of this for their customers and agreed to extend to eight locations within a matter of months,” said Matt Walker, CF’s Director of Customer Delivery and Assurance. The operator is also working to deliver predictive maintenance, which may help to reduce the risk of faults occurring in the future.

Matt Walker said:

“It’s not just about end customer experience benefits though. Operationally, ISPs have a been able to redirect human time spent on triaging connectivity issues to other important areas. And because we look for the source of the issue, we can often identify when problems are related to ISPs own equipment too, for example their Wi-Fi router.

The combination of commonly defined datasets, accurate real time diagnostic information and high levels of process automation is delivering something that operators of legacy networks cannot currently match. The automation element enables us to react quickly and appropriately, but it also improves accuracy and reduces the potential for human error caused by lack of knowledge or experience.”

CityFibre now intend to scale up their Proof of Concept (PoC) trial and expand its availability, although they have yet to reveal how long it will take before this becomes available across their entire network.