2024's Fibre Challenges
Emapsite’s Natalie Stevens considers fibre’s hottest topics – and offers her expert take on each.
What does the UK’s connected future look like? One thing’s for sure, it will be built on fibre – and there’s plenty of work still to be done. According to online comparison site, Uswitch, 61% of UK premises have access to full fibre broadband. But that number drops to just 46% of residential premises in rural areas.
Here are six challenges affecting fibre rollout today, and some ways we might help solve them.
1. Consolidation
The market is going through a period of consolidation, as businesses sell their network or merge with existing companies that are actively building or managing the fibre infrastructure. Merging and aligning geospatial assets to create a single point of truth is challenging. What does the new footprint look like? What is duplicated? What is missing?
As an Ordnance Survey Strategic Partner, we have supported many businesses through their M&A journey, ensuring they have the right data solutions and insights to meet the needs of the newly shaped organisation, as well as working through the licensing implications to ensure business continuity.
2. Increasing demand
In recent weeks, the UK Government has identified 300,000 new homes to be built across 200 sites in England alone. Fibre companies are expecting a significant increase in demand, which means an equally significant need to get fibre to the door in the most efficient way.
That demands up-to-the minute location data to understand as much about the area, and the property, as possible. Who owns the land? Are there wayleave restrictions?
And as much about each premise as possible. How many boundaries do you cross accessing the property? How many floors does it have? How many entry points? Is it single- or multi-dwelling, owner-occupier or property management company or social housing organisation?
If you’re trying to get fibre to the door efficiently, knowing these things is critical. Property attributes help to provide a comprehensive picture. And our customers can access all this data as a service that connects directly to their management software or their geographical information software.
3. Customer retention
If you’re a fibre provider, uptime and connectivity are vital. When your network goes down, so do your Trustpilot and Net Promoter scores. And you lose customers, fast.
A key factor is monitoring where risk – such as from flooding in basements, or other businesses digging and hitting your cables – can affect the fibre experience. One of the biggest things we help fibre companies with is future-proofing their assets to prevent these issues from ever happening.
4. Identifying new customers
Our customers’ aim is to keep their existing customers, to grow their customer base, and generate more broadband sales.
Uncovering hidden insight through location intelligence sharpens up your sales and marketing activities. Where can you access the maximum number of most valuable customers? For multi-occupancy residential areas: how many individual addresses are there, is it social housing? For commercial buildings: who owns the building, which type of businesses trade there, with how many employees? This type of data will help your commercial teams make better informed, more intelligent decisions, a lot faster.

5. Creating infrastructure resilience
They call the Internet the fourth utility. We now know that people would rather sit under a blanket and watch Netflix in the winter, than pay their heating bill. That’s how important it is for them.
The major building of fibre networks that we have seen until recently has slowed considerably. The challenge now is to maintain and improve the existing infrastructure. The industry is focused on avoiding some of the issues faced by other utilities as they deal with aging, legacy infrastructure. The fibre sector has the opportunity to create resilience and minimise network disruption.
We’re helping companies to repurpose the information they used for network design and planning to help them maintain and improve their infrastructure. Layering incredibly useful data onto existing records, all linked through UPRN, underpins maintenance schedules, whilst providing the most up to date information to support unscheduled repairs.
6. Environment and sustainability
We can expect fibre to become even more important as it becomes ever more prevalent. That means fibre companies are going to be under increased scrutiny. And, as we know from other utilities, that will include their carbon footprint and their preparation for environmental factors, such as weather events like storms and flooding, which are becoming more common.
Emapsite location data can help with all these things. And, as a carbon neutral company, we’re very happy to share our hard-won insights on that journey as well.
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For more information, or to discuss any of these points further, connect with Natalie Stevens on LinkedIn or email her at natalie.stevens@idoxgroup.com to book a meeting.
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