Survey Claims UK Fibre Providers Struggle to Meet Rising Demands
A new survey from service management firm Totalmobile has claimed that alternative UK providers of fibre broadband networks (altnets) are “facing significant operational challenges,” with 53% said to be reporting a lack of day-to-day control over their field operations.
The study, which surveyed 100 senior telecom managers, claims to highlight how rising customer demands, operational blind spots, and insufficient technology are “creating major hurdles” for fibre providers across the country. But the short report doesn’t appear to categorise the results by splitting network builders from retail ISPs or vertically integrated providers, which have different challenges to consider (the results seem to be shaped by Totalmobile’s own vested interests in this field).
- Unrealistic SLAs Threaten Service Delivery: Over 60% of respondents identified unrealistic Service Level Agreements and workforce strain as top concerns. The growing demand for high-speed fibre services is overwhelming providers, making it difficult to ensure first-time fixes and meet customer expectations
- Operational Blind Spots: More than half (53%) of senior operators feel they lack day-to-day control over field operations. Without real-time visibility into their workflows, many providers risk missing deadlines and underdelivering on customer promises.
- Need for Immediate Technological Investment: Nearly 60% of fibre providers acknowledged that their current technology is insufficient to handle the complexity of modern operations. Investment in areas such as automated workforce scheduling, mobile access to real-time data, and predictive maintenance is seen as critical to staying competitive.
- Sustainability as a Business Imperative: As the emphasis on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) targets intensifies, executives face growing pressure to minimise unnecessary site visits and reduce carbon emissions. Notably, 38% of respondents indicate that achieving ESG targets is a primary objective for senior leadership. Providers that fail to innovate face not only operational risks but potential fines and reputational damage.
The press release also confusingly talks about the “government’s push to reach 92% FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) coverage by 2030,” except that no such target exists. The primary goal of both the past and present UK governments, under their £5bn Project Gigabit programme, is to reach “nationwide gigabit connectivity by 2030” (here) or c.99% of premises – this largely reflects the use of both FTTP and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technologies.
Advertisement
Rob Gilbert, MD of Commercial and Infrastructure at Totalmobile, said:
“The research makes it clear—Altnets are facing unprecedented pressures. Whether it’s managing workforce demand, delivering customer satisfaction, or hitting sustainability goals, the only way forward is through digital transformation. Fibre providers need to invest in technology now or risk being left behind as the market continues to evolve.”
The full report can be downloaded here, although it seems to overlook some of the other major challenges facing altnets, such as from high interest rates, rising build costs and an extremely competitive market that makes it difficult to build take-up.
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.
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your comment content, display name, IP, email and / or website details in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
NOTE 1: Sometimes your comment might not appear immediately due to site cache (this is cleared every few hours) or it may be caught by automated moderation / anti-spam.
NOTE 2: Comments that break our rules, spam, troll or post via known fake IP/proxy servers may be blocked or removed.
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (6034)
- BT (3642)
- Politics (2722)
- Business (2442)
- Openreach (2407)
- Building Digital UK (2331)
- Mobile Broadband (2150)
- FTTC (2084)
- Statistics (1905)
- 4G (1822)
- Virgin Media (1768)
- Ofcom Regulation (1585)
- Fibre Optic (1470)
- Wireless Internet (1463)
- 5G (1411)
Some also seem to be struggling with poor customer service. If you take a look at Quickline’s social media, there’s a trend of many unhappy customers venting on posts about poor customer service which isn’t bad considering they’ve won £250 million in government contracts
I suspect that Quickline have a rather more ethical approach to reviews than most other ISP companies.
The ones that I am familiar with, routinely get unfavourable reviews removed and get multiple positive fake reviews posted!!!
The rate at which the fake reviews are posted is phenomenal!
Oh yes. I’ve stuck with FTTC after an altnet arrived offering high speed/low price simply because they don’t pick up the phone or respond to voicemail or email. That’s my personal experience. If that’s the service when I’m trying to book an installation I don’t like to think what it will be like if I encounter a problem. There are many Trustpilot reviews of the same altnet echoing my experience. Oh, and they largely use mobile numbers. Is that normal these days? Doesn’t seem very professional.
Zzoomm’s customer service could be better, the problem is a lot of these smaller companies have their customer services being done at employees homes. They don’t have a dedicated call centre. I am not making an excuse, just saying. I think customer service is very important, and they need to improve on it. Saying that, when I got in touch with zzoomm, they were fine for me.
I have been with larger providers with far worse customer service, BT and AOL are two of them. I left BT because of their customer service, telling them to shove the service where the sun don’t shine.
I have also had to deal with Talk Tall and sky for other people and their customer services is pathetic. Vodafone is another large provider that customer service is awful.
Yes, alt networks need to sort customer service out.
My partner is with gigaclear and when she had a problem, they were great, got it sorted quckly.
Consolidation should be the answer to poor customer service. If you have 100 altnets each replicating what Openreach or VM do at a national level then it is inherently more inefficient to provide customer service and make it cos effective.
News at Ten: “A new survey from [firm that sells service X] claims that many companies need to buy [service X]”
Oh yeah, zzoomm service here have been faultless for the majority of time I have been with them. They had a problem a month after I was with them, someone cutting a trunk fibre, but since then, faultless.
Believe me, if I had a problem, I would say. they just need to get decent routers 🙂
Some of the problem too is that in a lot of cases, Alt Nets are growing so fast that a lot of their transit and public peering links are not expanding at the same rate as their customer base, often creating many bottlenecks.
Another common approach is that Alt Nets will host their own SpeedTest.net server, which will often be served (as Speedtest.net favours servers with lowest ping) which can often skew results making consumers think they have better speeds that their ISP is actually capable of. Full gig speeds back to an Alt Nets core is practically useless if their peering is not up to the job.
Is congested transit and peering really that common? Letting transit congest breaches contracts and attracts additional charges, LINX and others charge if public peering congests. LINX charge double the cost of the congested port to incentivise upgrades. Transit providers charge by the Mbps per month and contracts are pretty punitive on this.
I know there’s been the odd case of it from very small ISPs that don’t own their own access networks and the odd case of low customer altnets but if this is a regular thing it’s insane.
If you’re going by PeeringDB it’s not reliable for this. ISPs hit a certain size they start to qualify for CDN cache nodes on-net and private peering. Using more transit may also make sense in the short-medium term, and there may not be any choice due to peering policies. Public peering capacity or lack of it doesn’t mean a network edge is congested.
The first ISP I had an account with, Pavilion in Brighton, had a single 2Mbps Megastream as their backhaul to Demon when they started. I was a customer of theirs from 1994.