Openreach Trial Looks to Better Monitor Incidents on UK FTTP Broadband Lines

Openreach (BT) has launched a new trial on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP lines, which so far as we can tell appears to be based on an earlier Proof of Concept (PoC) that will make it easier for the operator to determine, in real-time, whether a network incident or Planned Engineering Work (PeW) is affecting a customer’s live service.

The network access provider’s public briefing on the FTTP trial for pre-emptive incidents and PeWs provides no useful information to help explain it (here), but we have managed to extract some details from a few of our sources. At present trying to identify whether a network incident or PeW activity has impacted a customer’s live service usually relies on assumptions based on the network elements involved.

The new approach aims to try and take those assumptions out of the equation and produce something much more accurate, which can operate in real-time and then proactively communicate with end customers directly using SMS. The original PoC for this is understood to have gone well, thus the new trial is an attempt to expand that in order to gather more data before a final decision on implementation.