Openreach Test Crystal Ball AI Process to Tackle Complex UK Full Fibre Installs
Network access provider Openreach (BT) appears to be testing a new “Crystal Ball Process“, which is described as being an AI-driven customer service innovation that seems intended to help tackle complex installations of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP lines.
The process, which uses notes from engineers, delay codes, survey outputs, network topology and other information to help inform its model, is designed to monitor and predict when Openreach will be able to get these complex installations into service (normal installs won’t use this process), which is then fed back to broadband ISPs. The goal seems to be to better manage expectations and improve communication.
At present the details around this are fairly limited and Openreach seemed reluctant to furnish us with any details, although we understand that they’re aiming to be in a better position to release more information on it sometime in the New Year. The information we do have has thus come from various other industry sources.
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What’s less clear is why any of this really needs Artificial Intelligence (AI), since we’d assume a bit of competent programming and normal machine learning algorithms would be able to achieve a similar sort of system and output. But it’s possible that an AI driven solution might be quicker to implement, since such software already exists for managing large data sets with lots of different inputs and contexts to consider.
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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