Sheffield City Council Order CityFibre to Cease Noisy Night Work
The Sheffield City Council (SCC) has ordered CityFibre to cease its roll-out of a new 10Gbps capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP network in part of the South Yorkshire (England) City, which occurred after its contractor breached a permit and allowed night works to continue on well past the 11pm limit.
CityFibre began their £115m roll-out of a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across Sheffield in early 2021 (here) – supported by local civil engineering partner O’Connor Utilities. The 5-year build forms part of the operator’s ambition to cover up to 8 million premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). The work is also being supported by various UK ISPs, such as Vodafone, TalkTalk, Giganet and Zen Internet etc.
However, the operator’s works in the dense urban Abbeydale Road area recently ran into problems, which occurred after residents complained that the local contractor’s noisy works had continued into the early hours of the morning (past the permitted 11pm cut-off). Much of this work involved heavy drilling, with contractors often shouting loudly through the night to communicate with each other over that noise.
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According to the BBC, the council has told CityFibre to cease work in the area for the “foreseeable future” and they’ll have to re-apply for the permits.
A CityFibre spokesperson said:
Night working on Abbeydale Road is currently paused while we work with the local council on the best way forward.
We would like to thank residents and commuters for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience caused to date.”
On ISPreview we often like to say that tolerance of some brief noisy and disruptive works is a necessary part of delivering the prize that is full fibre broadband. But limits exist for a reason and breaching those was always bound to cause problems, particularly in a dense urban area like this, where the noise and vibrations are going on right outside multiple homes. We all tend to get cranky with a lack of sleep.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Shocking… How not to get end users on your side.
I guarntee these same residents will be saying “I want fibre broadband now, hurry up!”
@Andrew Everyone wants full fibre and as soon as possible. But everyone also wants to be able to sleep at 3 am. We can have both. You pillock.
@Andrew, Zzoomm annoyed a few people here with the mess they made, and some of these people say they will not touch zzoomm with a bargepole now. One of my brothers is one, not that he will bother with FTTP anyway. My other brother is using FTTP, but flipping BT.
At the rate bad news stories seem to come out about CityFibre soon Mark will need to do start a website just dedicated to them.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve read numerous reports about Cityfibre upsetting residents in various areas, poor quality of work, safety issues, leaving places in a mess, etc.
Of course Cityfibre will always blame their contractors, but why don’t they wake up and take ownership of the problem?
Why don’t they employ their own area managers to keep an eye on what’s happening on the ground, make regular site visits to inspect the work? Resolving issues with the contractor in a timely manner.
I’m sure that would be a better solution, rather than just waiting for problems like this, then get bad press in the news and on social media, damaging their reputation, then dumping the contractor.
A storm in a teacup. I mean reading this article you’d think **EVERY** single Cityfibre contractor has fallen foul of local regs, right?
I thought every contractor already had!?
Not a valid excuse by City Fibre. They are their contractors so are legally responsible. They should be supervising their sub contractors
We’re lucky. Talk to anyone from Poland or Romania about their rollouts. Horror stories about being unable to access their residential blocks because the pavement is gone, replaced by a large hole with no warning.
I don’t know about Romania but in Poland there are hefty fines for that and local councils are very quick in pursuing them. Also in these days operators rent existing ducts rather than building infrastructure from scratch, except new estates – but this works exactly in the same way like in the UK (OFNL,MS3). You’ve never been abroad, don’t you?
CF have decided to move into my area, already occupied by Openreach FTTP and another altnet.
Their contractor seems to have decided that the best way to do this is to dig a trench right in the middle of every pavement and then do a poor job of filling it back up – both on looks and unevenness
Then there are these little knee-height green boxes that presumably contain their splitters, some are right next to junctions and perfectly ripe for a car to run over them. The other altnet seems to use these too. This does not seem resilient.
OR meanwhile are entirely underground in this area.
Mind you in fairness it’s not just CityFibre that are guilty of bad street works. In Banbury Swish Fibre and their contractor S F Stefan trenched our road and ran a duct up it then filled it in then last week they decided they hadn’t filled it in properly and dug it up and refilled it and made a worse job second time round!
A CityFibre spokesperson said: “Night working on Abbeydale Road is currently paused…”
It seems Cityfibre haven’t got a clue what’s going on. It’s not only ‘night working’ that’s been paused, they’ve been ordered to cease all work in the area completely.
don’t think i’d be best pleased with digging works going on even at 11pm. They surely must realise some people have kids that go to bed at 7/8/9pm ? It’s unacceptable to have works going on past those hours, people need sleep. One of our neighbours has a team of east euros doing work on their house cutting pavement slabs and hammering and chiseling away at 11pm at night, every day of the week and there have been multiple complaints about it and the council do absolutely nothing so good on you sheffield city council for doing something.
Abbeydale road is actually quiet long! And some of the houses very large!! So I’m not surprised they have complained!
From my experience and observations, Cityfibre care very little about anyone.
All they care about is getting the millions of pounds from their investors.
By the way, the general public need to be made aware that one of Cityfibre’s main owners is the UAE government, who are assisting Russia with their invasion of Ukraine by supplying electronic components needed for their military equipment.
That’s the kind of people you’re dealing with.
Yep, Cityfibre execs funding their swollen salaries with dirty money.
The UAE also has many issues with human rights, but when money’s involved some people are more than happy to look the other way.
It’s extremely sad.
Honestly?! A few nights of disruption at best?
I bet the same people complain about roadworks taking weeks on end disrupting traffic at busy times.
11pm is late for non emergency residential roadworks and that is the permitted time, going beyond that is very late.
Meanwhile Openreach successfully deployed FTTP using the existing poles and ducts.
I’m only against new poles, the ones here are existing from the copper infrastructure. While I’d like to see more converted to underground the direction isn’t worth it to some residents.
I’m not a fan of Cityfibre’s microduct DIG deployment either.
*disruption not direction
And Sheffield council strikes again …
It’s a strange story … as the residents and council stopped two Alt-nets erecting new poles who wanted to minimise the “digging” disruption, and were told/forced in to digging the streets up instead – enforced by the same lynch mob who are suing the council for replacing the dying/decaying trees.
Now the council / residents are saying they don’t want digging?
It’s a shambles.
The council are petrified of the residents and the residents don’t understand broadband roll out requirements.
Use existing PIA ducts with the occasional new pole (due to the poor BTOR network) to avoid thousands of metres of new digging and minimise the network disruption for the local community or dig everything up, causing months of lengthy traffic jams and disruption to everybody …
It’s embarrassing.
I think its clear, they want PIA used where possible and underground where not, no new poles.
They aren’t getting PIA everywhere. CityFibre build their own feeder duct netowrk using PIA only when there are no other options due to the high fibre count cables.
To be fair when they use PIA they shove tons of microduct in there and use up all the space anyway so probably good if they use their own as much as possible.
In Newcastle, doesn’t matter if its CityFibre, Openreach, Grain, British Gas, Northumbrian Water. As soon as 3pm comes they drop everything where it stands and all go home. Getting workers willing to work past 11pm I think is incredible.
Noise past 23:00 should be late in anyone’s book. 21:00 is probably more socially acceptable. If you started mowing at that time there’d soon be a fuss.
If all operators laying ducts had to put in decent sizes ( along pavements, and only microducts to individual properties) as part of their permit conditions. Then let them charge PIA to any other operator (in preference to another permit being granted, it would be a lot less digging in these overbuild areas in the first place.
And another complaint ….. Terrible company , terrible contractors . When will this fiasco end with companies carving up neighbour hoods and simply pissing residents off
BT could have installed fibre optic nationally 30 years ago. You can not begin to calculate the detrimental effect this has had on UK GDP. Let’s not loose sight of this fact. Cityfibre were only allowed to flourish because the government lost faith in BTs ability to deploy fibre outside the M25. Why anyone would want a phone line with BT is beyond me.
Because people dont care like you do and will
go with who they want
In 1993? Two years before Windows95? When about a half of all telephone exchanges were still analogue? When only a tiny handful of ISPs existed offering dial up access? You’re deluded.
Why didn’t the cable tv companies who were mid rollout then install FTTP? Nothing was stopping them other than it being a barking mad idea and the technology required not actually existing.
This should make for interesting reading for some folks:
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/the_wiring_of_britain_must_telecom_get_tv_licence_to_justify_fibre_in_local_loop
The government never blocked BT deploying FTTP, they just didn’t grant a TV licence due to competition concerns. People like to talk about this story from the 90s rather the 25+ years it took for BT to finally start deploying FTTP properly.
A lot of comments on this are in hindsight, in the early 90s broadband was a very future technology and video was still king.
@XGS Thanks for the great article, good to see some information from around the time and about early PON networks.
Nobody had a reason to care about fibre back then. VoIP didn’t exist & people wanted landlines. The World Wide Web was still to be invented. The internet was mostly for academic use. WAN’s existed but were walled gardens.
Even after the WWW came about I would say that the average person only really started to care after broadband was launched. Even then from my own experience it took until ‘superfast fibre’ became a thing before people would leave their home gateways online 24/7 – supplemented too only by the introduction of smartphones and boom in tablets.
Hindsight is 20/20. In the late 80’s very few people would have seen any benefit of a FTTP rollout. Which was a fairly new idea. I think it was BT in 1987 who proposed the PON. It would have been a immature product to launch and it would have meant running two networks at the same time (just like today) while waiting for technological advancements to begin. Again, I mention VoIP where it took until the 90’s to get going. Nobody cared about VoIP for an extremely long time even though it was available to get in the home. Most younger people don’t even really care about VoIP since mobile phones are everywhere now too. effectively skipping a generation leaving the technology largely for SoHo/business use
People also forgot that the strategic review by Ofcom that led to the creation of Openreach and the uncertainty around what level of independence it should have in the years after prevented any significant FTTP deployment. No business will borrow money to build an asset it might then be forced to give away.
In most cases there will be plenty of existing duct capacity once the old copper cables are recovered
And what do those customers do for service after the copper is removed but before the fibre is installed?
Cityfibre do not install their core network in PIA, hence the new dig.
The copper will not be removed until everyone is off of it
Indeed Bob. If everyone’s off the copper though why the need for duct space?
If there’s fibre already in those, congested, ducts I pity it when the copper filling up the rest is removed.
I was told off (by many) circa 15 years ago for my views on shared infra (and still am). This thread demonstrates the madness of current access network provision. I have an updated paper on this at https://shorturl.at/bxMOP if any one is interested.
John
Good read, The simplest model though is to do sub-loop unbundling with Openreach running fibre P2P to a PCP cabinet then a limited number (somewhere between 12 and 24) fibres between a handover exchange and the PCP. CPs can rent the fibres, and put their splitters in PCPs and customers just have to be patched at the PCP when they change suppliers once in a blue moon.
TDM PON is a nice idea but limits supplier flexibility with splitter configurations etc. Getting equipment manufacturers to make GPON/XGS PON equipment will attract a price premium.
Minor correction on the snapshots of the market, Trooli has existed for many years under Call Flow solutions and Glide similarly under WarwickNet. Both were mainly into sub-loop unbundling with VDSL or GFast cabinets before moving into PIA FTTH deployments.
Alex A,
Thank you for the feedback (positive, I am pleased to hear). I take your point re the market, but I deliberately kept the number of contenders low – it was only to demonstrate the number of players reducing. Our model, btw, is switching wavelengths.
Thanks again for taking the time to read and comment.
John
Fair enough on providers, CallFlow and WarwickNet were both fairly small at the time.
It might interest you to look at the TalkTalk responses to Openreach plans in 2009 (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/37792/talktalk-group.pdf). TalkTalk talked about Openreach maximising charges with the GEA product, like forcing them to buy VDSL modems through Openreach.
TalkTalk weren’t particularly happy with the proposed VoNGA product which would have been a VoIP version of WLR. Openreach would have included voice servers which would have been an extra cost which TalkTalk could have done themselves.
TalkTalk proposed a similar WDM layer with ISPs being able to run their own GPON networks on different frequencies, same as your proposals. IIRC they didn’t think the technology was mature enough for WDM at the time.
You’ve still got the issue of getting suppliers to make PON equipment with non standard frequencies, for Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone it increases prices slightly but for smaller local ISPs they wouldn’t have the scale to make it economical.
At least Sheffield CC took them to task.
Meanwhile in Leeds they ploughed on at midnight through Chapel Allerton and Meanwood..
I bet the works stop in the day as well.
My council is known for doing works in residential streets at night but letting the traffic flow in the day, which is backwards, there needs to be a national law to prevent noisy works at night, as sleep is so important to health.
Even 11pm is a way too late time to stop, should be something like 9am to 6pm.