Street Works Firm C-Plan Telecommunications Falls into Administration

Long-running Scottish civil engineering firm C-Plan Telecommunications, which has been helping to deploy gigabit broadband networks north of the border for a long list of clients (e.g. Openreach, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Gigaclear, and others), has fallen into administration after allegedly losing out on forecasted work.

C-Plan is currently one of the better-known contractors north of the border (there are others, like Diona and Comex) and, according to their website, the company is home to 160 staff and a fleet of 110 vehicles ready to help network operators deploy their new infrastructure.

However, according to ISPreview’s sources, around 120 staff are allegedly now said to be facing redundancy since the start of this year. The same sources suggest that this situation may have been made more difficult after the contractor allegedly lost out on forecasted work with Virgin Media, although Virgin denies this. C-Plan also works with other broadband operators that have recently been under strain.

The details of all this started to come in late last week, with multiple employees reporting via LinkedIn that they had lost their jobs “due to C-Plan going out of business” or “due to the immediate closure of C-Plan“. But it wasn’t until this morning that Companies House finally confirmed the appointment of an administrator (related documents have yet to be published online).

A Virgin Media spokesperson said:

“Alongside nexfibre, we regularly review our regional rollout plans to ensure that build is optimised. We have always been open and transparent with C-Plan, who also had other partnerships in the region, and fulfilled all our agreed activity together. We will continue to work constructively with C-Plan and their administrators.”

Network operators and, by extension, any civil engineering contractors they use, are currently under a lot of pressure from rising costs (build, leases etc.), competition from rivals (e.g. overbuild, take-up) and the challenge of raising fresh investment during a period of high interest rates. Quite a few operators have already restructured or scaled-back their build plans, which has fostered a rise in consolidation and redundancies.

Suffice to say that civil engineering firms end up feeling the impact from all of this too, and that may have contributed to C-Plan’s difficulties. Sadly, C-Plan aren’t the first contractor that we’ve seen facing challenges this year (here), and we fear they won’t be the last. We have also contacted C-Plan for a comment and await their reply.