Openreach Hyper-Care Trial to Tackle Lengthy UK FTTP Orders

Network access provider Openreach has begun a new “hyper-care” trial that is designed to help improve the handling of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband orders that have been in the tail (waiting to be delivered) for more than 100 calendar days, which will essentially put those orders through a special review.

Most new orders for FTTP lines on Openreach’s network are usually delivered within a few short weeks, but sometimes a variety of problems – other than extreme weather or global pandemics – can cause service provision to take a lot longer than usual. For example, the need for complex dig work, tedious traffic management measures, wayleaves (neighbour disputes), permission to dig requests and confirmation of Excess Construction Charges (ECC) etc.

Naturally, such challenges can cause frustration among both ISPs and any impacted customers, which is one reason why Openreach appear to be exploring a new “temporary process” via the “hyper-care trial“. The goal of this is to give broadband providers some reassurance that their oldest tails are being hand-held – not neglected, and to give them a single point of contact for that case.

Orders in this basket will go into the DSO (Director’s Service Office) team, which handles escalations and complaints. The DSO team will then perform a review and respond back with a clear update on the situation and, if it is possible, it will case manage the entire order.

However, the trial currently only permits ISPs to have one FTTP provision job under review at any time, and the job must fit various understandable criteria (e.g. no pre-existing DSO case, tail is 100+ calendar days old and no outstanding wayleave / ECC / 3rd party delay issues etc.). The reality is that complex problems do sometimes crop up, and so this sort of process could help to tackle those tedious cases, which are otherwise fairly uncommon.