Hyperoptic Fined £50k in London for Unsafe Fibre Broadband Build UPDATE
Gigabit broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has built a full fibre broadband (FTTP / B) network to cover “more than” 1.73 million UK homes in parts of 64 towns and cities (mostly MDUs), has been fined £50,000 by the Westminster Magistrates Court in London after they were found to have carried out unsafe street works.
The successful prosecution was actually pursued by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which occurred after the Council’s Street Works Compliance Inspector witnessed (Jan 2024) operatives working in a manhole in the carriageway on Old Brompton Road (South Kensington) and found several safety issues including “inadequate barriers, no advance warning signs for motorists, no temporary traffic management and leaving manhole exposed to public“.
In addition, it was later discovered that the provider had not even applied for a permit to carry out the work. Following a hearing at the Westminster Magistrates Court, which took place on Wednesday 4th December 2024, Hyperoptic was fined £50,000 and were ordered to pay a £2,000 victim surcharge and £2,500 towards the Council’s legal costs.
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The council prosecuted Hyperoptic after having issued them with 7 cautions for previous offences relating to site safety, but the local authority didn’t provide any more detail than that.
Councillor Cem Kemahli, Lead Member Planning and Public Realm, said:
“Keeping our streets clear and safe for residents is our top priority and we will continue to crackdown on companies who don’t take safety seriously.
This is our first successful prosecution of Hyperoptic, which not only put public safety at risk but caused disruption to motorists by ignoring safety measures.
Our network management team are working hard to ensure street works are coordinated to minimise disruption and carried out in the safest possible way. We will not hesitate to take legal action against companies who continue to put members of public at risk.”
Sadly we do occasionally see broadband operators being fined for safety failings, as well as some generally sloppy street works, with some other recent examples this year including nexfibre (here), Openreach (here), Truespeed (here) and Airband (here). But it should be said that these issues often hail from mistakes made by third-party contractors, albeit with the network operator as the responsible party.
We’ve asked Hyperoptic for a comment and will report back when they respond.
UPDATE 10:26am
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We’ve had a response from Hyperoptic.
A spokesperson for Hyperoptic said:
“In January this year, we were distressed to learn one of our third-party contractors did not put the necessary barrier protection in place when working on a street. Hyperoptic wishes to make it clear no-one was harmed. But we acknowledge this was a breach of our standards that put safety at risk and for which we are sorry. We are taking the necessary steps with the contractor involved.
At Hyperoptic, we take safety extremely seriously and expect our business partners to do the same. We are proud to say no accidents were reported to HSE in 2024. This reflects our strenuous efforts to protect and preserve health and safety at every level of our full fibre broadband operations.”
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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Unfortunately, telecoms contractors are the worse when it comes to safety while operating in the highway.
A lot of it comes down to the transient nature of their works where they are lifting multiple chambers to pull cables through and the amount of times I have seen them do this without bothering to have any sort of guarding/barriers around these open chambers while they leave them unattended.
It really doesn’t matter that the work is ‘short duration’ in terms of not requiring civil works, it only takes a second for someone to fall through one and injure themselves.
It’s not just hypertrophic, it’s the entire industry. They just don’t police their contractors adequately as they deliver fibre at pace.
As an aside, hypertrophic may describe what they have as fibre ‘network’, but with the exception of a few hyper zones, most of what they have is mare just individual MDU’s which they get Openreach, colt, etc to provide a connection to.
I wouldn’t class it as a ‘network’ like city fibre or community fibre have built.
50k well spent if they got away with it 7 times already?
Are you part of the telecommunications industry or one of the errant subcontractors ? This is the attitude and poor work ethic that the telecommunications industry should eradicate and continues to give it the bad name
The Openreach incident, whilst tragic and resulting in complete change of approach when working near water, was not a streetworks offence so I’m not sure why it’s been linked to in the article.
From what residents saw and had to inform streetworks of ,whilst MS3 and their sub contractors were working in Hedon this doesn’t surprise me . From what we have heard in other villages, towns , cities in our region and from other areas in the UK ,these breaches of health and safety regulations regarding signage of works , guarding and traffic management are rife . Also proven from foi requests . Yet not many councils go down the route through the courts. The fines are paltry, and repeated offences do not seem to gain more serious consequences for either the code operator or their contractors. Many operators of the telecommunications industry seem highly unregulated and unchecked. This statement by this firm ,passing the blame to the subcontractor is a regular occurrence, they should take full responsibility for not ensuring subcontractor’s compliance.They seem to regularly get away with poor health and safety practises. Possibly assisted by the fact many streetworks teams across the UK are probably overstretched by the sheer volume of telecommunications installations
Sounds like “Car Industry disease” . . . . . . How long has the Health and Safety at work act been with us . . . . 1974 ?
South Kensington, as we all know, is a ghost town, famed for its bushels of tumbleweed.
Incidentally, when are providers going to start hazard marking all the new telegraph poles they have installed, as a preventative measure against the possibilities of class actions arising from the legions of Mr Bean impersonators:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9km3-fWJ7sg
A lot of these problems stem from the mentality of quants over quality and compliance. You would think that Hyperoptic would have learnt from this experience, but unfortunately not. Over the last 12 months, they have been through a process of onboarding new ‘partners’ based on a squeeze of rates. This will only amplify their current reputation problem. They have 3 principal partners who then sub out the works having taken their 40%. These tier 3/4 subbies when have to make a margin and cover management and supervision costs leaving next to nothing for the actual workers. To make a living they have to cut corners.
This is not exclusive to Hyperoptic. In fact is a very well documented problem. But they are becoming one of the worst. Huge internal ‘corporate structures’ have meant their CPPP has to be kept as low as possible, so becomes a vicious circle of declining quality, compliance and controls.