Technology Reseller v33

01732 759725 30 Business Basics: CityFibre ...continued TR: How do you measure your success? AW: The business KPIs and metrics are very much hinged on numbers of businesses passed and numbers of consumers passed. It is all about ready for service (RFS) data, because that is the segue into commercialising your network. If you have very small numbers of RFS businesses and consumers, you won’t sell a lot, so all of our efforts and our finances are hinged on building network, getting businesses and consumers ready for service and the IT stack. It’s all about spend, spend, spend at the moment. TR: How much do you collaborate with your competitors? There must be times when the industry presents a united front. Where does cooperation end and competition begin? AW: Greg often sits alongside other senior heads from Openreach, Virgin, TalkTalk and other larger providers when we are lobbying Government. One challenge for the entire industry is wayleave. Wayleave is an obstacle to us getting as much fibre in the ground as possible because you have third parties in the middle making decisions on whether you can or can’t dig up that street or go into that building and how much it is going to cost. For me, the right thing for the Government to do is make access more of an easement, a legal requirement, like we do for water, gas and electricity, because full fibre is so vital to the UK’s economic recovery. My peers and competitors are all on the same page and we do work collaboratively on those big ticket issues. Where the competition begins is in things like overbuild. None of us wants to be putting all this investment in the same place. For example, if we all chased Derby, it could risk serving customers in other towns and cities across the UK. We have been very open about where we are going, and it doesn’t do anybody any good if a competitor decides to follow us or try to get there quicker. That said, you will always get an element of competition because people want to monetise things quickly and most of the areas we go into are lucrative for obvious reasons. TR: Does DCMS control who has rights to a particular area? AW: No, they don’t currently dictate that, but there are conversations and recommendations and I am sure they advise and coordinate to support bills and programmes like the DCMS rural programme, looking at how to enhance coverage in the countryside and village locations. With Covid, we have all become more regionalised. My small village is becoming more like a bustling town, and the town I live near is becoming a lot quieter because everyone is staying locally and shopping at the local farm shop or butcher. Village communities and small town communities are bustling and that is putting more demand on infrastructure in those rural areas. So, it makes sense for us have a rural programme. We have just announced a trial in the villages of Hollins Green and Rixton off the back of Gigabit Broadband vouchers under the Government’s Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme. We are doing that through the physical infrastructure access (PIA) route, using Openreach’s existing cable ducts to deliver it. In the cities, in the main, our infrastructure build is based upon digging our own channels, but in some areas it makes sense to use existing cable ducts so that we don’t have to dig up the road. Our build programme evolves all the time to be as efficient as possible. If using third party infrastructure is the right thing to do in a particular location, we will do it. The game plan is not about the civils, but about ready for service. So, it’s a question of looking at the most efficient way of doing it. TR: Is 5G a threat or an opportunity? AW: We are fully supportive of the 5G roll- out in terms of the mobile infrastructure – we recently announced a big deal with 3. We don’t see it as a replacement service for fibre to the premises. It will just form part of how we use connectivity. If we were going to switch over fully to 5G, demand would be too big for the infrastructure. The important thing for someone like CityFibre is that the 5G roll-out needs a higher density deployment of small cells in a town or city. The fact that CityFibre has a full city approach allows us to enable so many more of those small sites in households, lamp posts, traffic lights, buildings. That’s a key reason for the relationship with 3. The other thing is backhaul. To be able to run a 5G network at such high capacity and higher speeds, you need the backhaul infrastructure to be in place. That is exactly what full fibre gives them. TR: Is there anything that could make your working life easier? AW: We‘re following a really clear plan and are building at a rapid pace. Ideally, I’d have a completely built network to offer our channel partners because the demand is there, but our progress is excellent and we’re meeting that need. The timing is so good for the channel, with the copper switch-off by BT and new fibre infrastructure going into the ground. There is so much opportunity - every time we release a new city, it means more opportunity for ourselves and more opportunity for our channel. During Covid, we actually launched a new city to the channel, Plymouth, so we could send messages to our partners saying ‘Great news guys; here’s more opportunity and more people for you to talk to in this area with new connectivity and new infrastructure’. I felt really good about that. It’s the gift that keeps giving in that sense.