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London ISP Community Fibre Cuts More Jobs, Outsources Support

Tuesday, Mar 19th, 2024 (4:04 pm) - Score 5,920
CommunityFibre-Engineer-Holding-ONT-2024

Network operator and UK broadband ISP CommunityFibre, which is building a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across London and some surrounding areas, has this afternoon confirmed to ISPreview that its making another round of redundancies and is outsourcing customer support to South Africa.

Just to recap. The operator, which also owns Box Broadband – a similar network that targets Surrey and West Sussex in England (here), has so far deployed their network to cover 1 million homes and 212,000 businesses in London (July 2023). CommunityFibre were originally aiming to reach 2.2m premises by the end of 2024, but that was dealt a blow at the end of last year after they announced a build pause and job cuts (here).

The bad news today is that there have been more redundancies announced this week. Some of those affected by the latest change promptly informed ISPreview that upwards of 100 UK staff had been notified of potential redundancy on Monday afternoon. One of those affected told us that staff morale was now “rock bottom“.

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According to our sources, the latest round of job cuts was said to have been at least partly triggered by the recent decision to “outsource” some customer service roles to South Africa.

A spokesperson for CommunityFibre told ISPreview:

“Community Fibre Ltd has grown to become the largest 100% full fibre network in London, covering 1.3 million properties across the capital. Hundreds of thousands of residents and businesses have chosen to join Community Fibre for lower prices, faster speeds, and a better service.

To continue to offer our market-leading products at the lowest prices to customers, Community Fibre must keep evolving by scaling our operations in an affordable and sustainable manner, to deliver and maintain our standards of customer service. This has included offshoring some but not all our service operation to a proven tried partner CCI in South Africa, with a significant part still based in the UK.

There will be some redundancies, but these will be phased over the next three months to ensure we maintain our high standard of service for our customers.”

As we’ve said before, UK network operators continue to be under a lot of strain, particularly from rising levels of competition (price and overbuild etc.), rising build and lease costs, high interest rates (i.e. making it hard to raise fresh investment) and the need to generate a good level of take-up in order to satisfy investors. Due to this we’ve seen a growing number of operators slowing their build and cutting jobs as they re-focus on growing take-up.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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39 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo Sam says:

    What lease costs do CF pay that makes a significant dent on finances?

    1. Avatar photo Matt says:

      I don’t know about active equipment but I know that there’s leasing of the ducts through PIA. I assume they’re paying for the ducting and pole access irrespective of whether they have customers signed up or not. They’re small costs but will accumulate and erode profits if unutilised.

    2. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      And of course offices which if they’re in the London area the rent will be costing a small fortune.

    3. Avatar photo SmileyBob says:

      They lease space on the Openreach network, that’s if they have registered the usage on the Openreach systems….

    4. Avatar photo Anonyme says:

      @Big Dave – the people who are being laid off don’t work in the London office. The majority of staff are work from home.

    5. Avatar photo Just another number says:

      They were spending £30million a week on build one of the worst redundancies I’ve been through

    6. Avatar photo anonoymus says:

      the redundiancie process was a complete shambles and the meetings they were having for the people been laid off to get more money was terrible and they refused to record any of the meetings as they think it could be used as a racial thing

  2. Avatar photo Jordan says:

    so which company is buying CFL?

    1. Avatar photo RightSaidFred says:

      Do any of City Fibre, VMO2/Nexfibre, OR have significant overlap with them?

    2. Avatar photo RightSaidFred says:

      They look perfect for VMO2.

    3. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      CityFibre would be the obvious choice as they have virtually no presence in London but I suspect it would be paid for in shares in the combined company. CityFibre have recently bought LIT Fibre and they only seem to be overbuilt with Community Fibre in the South Watford area. Virgin I suspect would be the only ones who could make a cash offer but they are massively overbuilt with Community Fibre so I doubt if they would be interested.

      It seems every week now we are getting the same story from some altnet or other. Too many networks chasing too few customers. I bet for most networks take up has fallen well short of expectations. The only ones that seem to be doing ok are the niche players like B4RN and the established players with a large customer base to organically shift across

    4. Avatar photo Jonny says:

      There’s no point in VM buying out a network that is majority deployed using PIA when they already own a duct network in the same footprint and can offer 1Gb on the copper co-ax that is already in the ground.

    5. Avatar photo anonoymus says:

      it most proberly will be talk talk as CFL had a contract with them at the end of 2021 for leasing or customer service

  3. Avatar photo j karna says:

    Just wait till you experience the incompetence of the South African customer
    services run by CCI Enterprises DMCC based in Dubai.
    I have two official complaints with Community Fibre.
    Trustpilot one star were < one %, and now rising to four %.

    1. Avatar photo anonoymus says:

      honestly every person should give them a 1 star review as CCI are not the level of knowledge to us who worked from home plus CCI are also the same company who deal with talk talk customer service

  4. Avatar photo TJ says:

    Altnets as a whole have somewhat created this perfect storm. In desperation to drive take up to satisfy investors, monthly charges has been turned into a race to the bottom.

    I’m not saying that the average cost of gigabit broadband should have remained high indefinitely, but all these Altnets scrambling for customers has driven the price through the floor and now the Altnets are finding that they aren’t generating sufficient revenue to operate the high quality service that Altnets generally became known for. They’re now no different from the quality of customer service that one might receive from VM especially with customer support being outsourced to a different country.

    There’s too many of these Altnets come along to make a quick buck rather than actually provide a decent service at a fair price.

    1. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      The altnets are following exactly the path of just about financial bubble in history, everyone piles in the hope of making a fast buck, then reality kicks in and nearly everyone loses a shed load of money.

    2. Avatar photo Ben dover says:

      For those that care. Community fibre started the dive to the bottom on price. Other alt nets that had overlap had to follow or they wouldn’t get any penetration.

    3. Avatar photo John says:

      CF had to lower prices because a huge chunk of the homes they built to are council homes, social housing and very deprived areas like Newham, Croydon and Tower Hamlets. And most of them have Virgin media

      They don’t have the privilege of charging high prices like Gigaclear and a few others both because of competition from Virgin and because of their demographics

      To other altnets it does not matter what CFs price is because they only overlap with HO and even then it is only in about 1/5 of their live homes. Whatever price Brsk or Barn want to put, it has nothing to do with CF

    4. Avatar photo TJ says:

      To be clear, this wasn’t a jab at CommunityFibre, more at the Altnet industry as a whole of which CommunityFibre have played their part.

      I would argue that demographics don’t play as much into pricing as you might think though – statically, market research that I’ve seen shows that council house estates are more likely to spend more on selecting higher speed packages than more affluent areas, granted that affordability of these packages is a consideration.

      At the end of the day once these companies have started spending their huge investments,they must find a way to acquire customers, at whatever price they can, to appease investors and survive, or they’ll face investors getting cold feet and pulling the plug. As a certain BT CEO was famously quoted as saying, it “will end in tears” is already happening for some Altnets with others barely holding it together.

    5. Avatar photo Ben says:

      I’d go a step further — consumer broadband is largely seen as a commodity which means that a race to the bottom (in terms of price and quality) is inevitable.

    6. Avatar photo greggles says:

      I think many of these alt nets have their end game as being brought out by a big player, so likely setup in a way to roll out quick as possible, get as many customers quick as possible and be brought out. Hence so many of them relying on CGNAT single stacked, not built to be sustainable as a long term company.

      However they are serving a purpose, they have allowed many areas of the country to get FTTP who otherwise wouldnt have it, I currently have gigabit FTTP now via cityfibre as an example with openreach having no interest on my street at all.

      The network wont go poof when they liquidate, just someone else will take over it.

  5. Avatar photo Kds says:

    They won’t stop knocking on the door to sell the cg NAT service. Business one is very expensive to get a static IP

    1. Avatar photo Risc says:

      The average consumer doesn’t need an individual IPv4 address. They are very expensive and it’s very hard for new operators to get allocated a good range.

      But alas, a big ISP is working on a form of v4 address sharing although it’s toggleable and will be rolling out soon.

    2. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      CGNAT might not be such a problem if IPV6 was implemented, but the altnets don’t seem interested in doing that either….

    3. Avatar photo Ivor says:

      the fact that any ISP will happily do the network engineering effort and expense to bodge in CGNAT but not work to enable IPv6 is just so incomprehensible to me.

      (while legacy dinosaurs like BT and Sky both give you a real IPv4 address and have had IPv6 enabled across their network for years, lol)

    4. Avatar photo Ben says:

      And even Vodafone are starting on the IPv6 journey.

    5. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      “They won’t stop knocking on the door to sell the cg NAT service”.

      The door to door fibre salesman are now becoming the 21st century double glazing salesman. I had to send a Swish rep packing yesterday. Total pain in the backside.

    6. Avatar photo anonoymus says:

      only way to get out of the CGNAT system is to go for the 1GB service or 3GB service as they don’t have CGNAT on them, your ip should start with a 45 if it doesn’t comaplain to them and tell them to message NOC to get it reversed as you purchased the 1GB plan

  6. Avatar photo Jimmy says:

    I guess they’re under pressure to control costs to keep prices low. To be honest I’m delighted with what I’ve got from them, especially as I no longer have to give VM – the only other option for decent broadband at my property – a penny of my money.

    1. Avatar photo ben dover says:

      now that is a valid point….

    2. Avatar photo anonoymus says:

      it wasn’t to cut costs it was to line the pockets of the higher ups in the ivory tower in london, they let go of over 80 staff from various depts and palmed them off to CCI who are cheap labor and i mean really cheap labor, one call handler get around 220 a month in local currency.

  7. Avatar photo Henry says:

    Guarantee the contractors have milked the Alt net alongside poor control, the build is poor quality which costs!

    1. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      Managing your contractors and making sure they’re doing what they’ve promised and keeping a check on costs is part of the job. If you don’t then that’s negligent on your part.

    2. Avatar photo SmileyBob says:

      Big Dave is right.
      CFL haven’t been doing their bit and leaving the contractors to run riot, questionable standards, questionable management, questionable strategy in deploying their network..

  8. Avatar photo Nick Roberts says:

    ” Ladies and Gentleman, take your partners for the supersonic bang” . . . . .as big capital wooshes in and snaps up the failing minnows at nominal prices . . . . same deal as what happened with the co-ax install in the 1990s.

    Remember an OFCOM isn’t just for Christmas, . . with their usual luck they’ll still be in their jobs at Easter, . . . whereas many of the regulated will be spending more time with their families.

    1. Avatar photo Ivor says:

      Ofcom wouldn’t get involved with takeover decisions – that would be the CMA – but what are you asking for here? That failing companies should be allowed to fail instead of moving to a business model where they might stand a chance?

  9. Avatar photo Dipak says:

    Community fibre choose to cherry pick where to extend their network.One day CF may go bust this way.

    1. Avatar photo Ben says:

      We get it, you’re sour that they haven’t passed your home…

Comments are closed

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