Contributed Article
By Anouk Sajot, Sales Manager – Enterprise, Field Services – EMEA at Deepomatic
The United Kingdom has seen a significant increase in FTTx deployment, rapidly expanding from 28% full fibre coverage in 2021 to 52% in 2023, with projections reaching 91% by 2026. The establishment of the Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) framework has played a pivotal role, enabling multiple alternative network providers (Altnets) to utilize Openreach’s existing infrastructure, saving them the effort of building from scratch. However, the overall progress of FTTx deployment is greatly slowed down by manual quality control processes.
As an Altnet, you engage build partners to assist in deploying your network infrastructure. To maintain accountability and ensure that build partners adhere to the project’s specifications, they must submit comprehensive build completion reports to Altnets. These reports include visual documentation through photographs of the work carried out in the field. However, there are instances when build partners encounter damages to Openreach’s infrastructure, and they are obligated to report these incidents following PIA regulations. Here, the QC process takes up to 5 weeks due to manual photo verification and lack of standardized formats. This delay in quality control highlights a significant bottleneck in FTTx deployment.
Information gathered in the fiber UK market reveals that approximately 80% of reports submitted by build partners regarding damages to Openreach’s infrastructure are initially rejected by Altnets, with 40% still not accepted upon a second submission. Additionally, Openreach rejects 20% of these reports. These rejections result in project delays, affecting time to revenue, not mentioning penalties from Openreach to AltNets for each non-compliant documentation. These costs are incurred because contractors’ field engineers do not have the proper tools to capture photos that meet compliance standards.
Quality audits encompass tasks like manual remote checks to validate the conformity of photos and verify that the work done is correct. This asynchronous process creates delays as it detects photo quality or job conformity problems when the field engineers are long gone from their job sites, leading to on-site revisits. This issue arises because field engineers lack the tools to complete their tasks during the initial visit effectively.
Additionally, build partners ask to get paid quickly as they pay their field workers upon the reception of operation documentation. However, given that this documentation is verified post-work, payment is not based on tangible proof that the job was done correctly. This leads to cash flow issues affecting financial stability and slowing project progression.
Embracing visual AI to solve the compliance issue
As an Altnet, implementing a visual AI technology at the heart of your FTTx operations, from build to roll-out, can help address the compliance challenges and unlock substantial economic benefits:
Allow field engineers to benefit from direct feedback on the quality of the photos they take (brightness, contrast level, framing, angle, etc.) contributing to a higher acceptance rate of PIA reports, which leads to higher revenues and fewer penalties.
Increase field operations’ First Time Right rate by giving field engineers the means to do their job right on the first visit.
Reduce the QC feedback loop from weeks to minutes and stay on track with deployment agenda. Thanks to quality control automation, invoicing and payment can also be indexed on the analysis results and carried out without requiring costly admin processes.
Finally, scale up the number of operations performed without increasing quality control resources, as AI automatically oversees each operation.
Given the UK’s goal of maintaining a rapid deployment pace to connect more of their citizens, it becomes crucial for Altnets and build partners to embark on a revolution by leveraging AI to automate their build acceptance process.
Find out more about how visual AI can help you.
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