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.
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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.
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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FTTP is a complete joke! Our houses are just over a decade old. We are in a town – not rural and Open Reach didn’t even know that the local distribution box was empty! Now it isn’t they still can’t connect to our property. Promise to sort it in 24 hours have passed. A new housing scheme down the road has FTTP. When I asked why I was told the builder asked for it! As far as I can see the whole set up is nearly as disastrous as HS2!
@Les Schneider
FTTP is not a joke as you’re trying to say.
Back when your property was built FTTP was not being installed so there is no surprise that you may not have it yet. The fact you seem to think you can demand it is a joke, FTTP is great but you will have to wait until they are ready to install it.
I was recently offered an upgrade to FTTP which I applied for but was told by openreach that ducting doesn’t exist in the close and the job would have to go back to planning.
Probably DIG so will be costly unless poles are used, planning will decide.
Same with flats in a multi property development. I was told my exchange is Full Fibre enabled. A few numbers down the street have Fttp. But then got an email from OR saying they can’t bring Fttp to my property. Reason: flat in a building. OR’s MDU needs agreement from all owners. I passed the property manager’s details who never heard from them. Go figure…
Meanwhile Nexfibre (Virgin Media) is rolling out, ducting Fttp in the very same street, you actually see engineers in the whereabouts (EH26)
MDU are a nightmare, property managers often lie to flat owners because behind the scenes they are trying to push Openreach for a fee for the wayleave agreement.
I recently had to use the DSO mentioned here, and it’s was great.
The service until that point was awful from OR, 1 year +. After DSO got involved, it was sorted in a week.
Go figure.
I recently had to use the DSO mentioned here, and it’s was great.
The service until that point was awful from OR, 1 year +. After DSO got involved, it was sorted in a week.
Go figure.