Telecommunications Adjudicator update for April 2024

An update on the principle areas of project activity being led by OTA2 in April 2024.

See the latest charts

At the end of April 2024, the number of unbundled lines stands at 6.15 million. There are 2.09 million WLR lines and the number of telephone numbers using CPS is 0.81 million.  *

The following is an update on the principal areas of project activity being led by OTA2.

Passive Infrastructure Access

Operational performance remains good.

Whereabouts compliance: Openreach have shared their revised measurement proposals with industry. There will be a period of soft launch where the CP performance can be assessed with them and any anomalies in the process can be ironed out.

Incident & Planned Works Management: This is now in an ongoing state for deployment and review, further analysis will be undertaken after any serious incidents.

Workshop was held to review the emerging challenges of Pole top congestion and technical solutions around equipment rearrangement and good engineering practice. This format will be repeated to address other areas of technical challenge:

Areas of interest

• Health & Safety and good working practices
• NA Evidence and quality documentation for CPs to able to instruct their field resources.
• Connecting Customers
• Whereabouts compliance

Ethernet

Performance remains steady.

The order profile remains very much the same as we have reported in recent months EAD has continued to grow whilst the other order types have dropped back, overall the order profile is c1500 per week.

Completion rate of c1100 orders per week has continued through April. The workstack continues to remain stable at around 20k.

Areas of interest

EAD2: Openreach have shared the development timeline with CPs and discussions have continued to shape the product.

Exchange Exit: Openreach have begun their detailed engagement with the Ethernet and Optical CPs looking at the impact of exiting key exchanges and looking at building a plan assess the technical challenges associated with the programme. This will enable a greater understanding of impacts and resource demands.

Copper and Fibre

Industry engagement to review FTTP metrics is continuing and will run through to late summer. The expectation is that the metric set will include some of the existing measures and also metrics currently shared by the service managers with CPs. The aim is to define a set of Key Performance Indicators which are appropriately supported, relevant and recognised by Openreach and Industry and which will effectively track the end customer experience.

Good progress has been made regarding reviewing the KCI2 Assure process and a trial of a new ‘hybrid’, which it is hoped will improve the number of single visit completions, is showing good initial results but has been extended to gather additional data.

Discussions have commenced on an SLG for FTTP cancellations following Openreach delay. This is being run under the 6-month WFTMR process, which puts an end date of mid-July on the negotiations, however these are currently progressing slowly.

All-IP Steering Group

Ofcom wrote to some CPs at the end of 2023 regarding their responsibilities towards vulnerable customers with telecare alarms and made the statement that no telecare device must be left in a non-working state post migration. In view of this CPs have stopped provision orders where a telecare alarm is present and Openreach is returning any that slip through the order process. CPs and Openreach developed a set of exemptions regarding which provision orders can proceed. A potential approach has now been identified which will allow CPs to progress these without significant systems development.

The Prove Telecare development which was rescoped to allow for a full reversion of the line, remains on track for release and trial later this year.

Openreach has now published its Phase 2 response to the Exchange Exit consultation and briefed industry on its approach to progressing discussions.

Customer Switching

The previously announced a ‘go-live’ date of 12 September 2024 for OTS remains the target for all CPs with residential end customers. A number of CPs are already testing their solutions through the TOTSCo Hub and successfully passing messages between each other as part of the OTS Process, as part of the planned, ‘ramp-up’ of testing and ‘live’ trials ahead of the 12 September date - more information can be found at the TOTSCo website. OTA2 will remain heavily involved with TOTSCo, CPs and Ofcom in helping industry meet the ‘go-live’ date.,

The GPLB-SG (Gaining Provider Led Business – Steering Group) maintains its focus on providing business customers and their CPs with a robust switching solution, that will work alongside OTS and deliver improvements over the pre-existing ‘NoT+’ and Number Porting processes.

The GPLB-SG have also recorded the first in a series of informative ‘webinar’ type events, which will provide an introduction to the Business Switching Process, its principles and operation. This webinar is in post-production editing and is planned to be released before the end of this month.

Number Porting

The remaining work around OTS Porting continues being centred on recognising the potential impacts of ‘manual porting’ activities (as opposed to the fully automated solutions that dominated the original ‘Express Porting’ proposals) and how these should be reflected in setting and agreeing the SLAs.

The wider Porting groups continue to work through both the ‘day-to-day’ operational challenges of our industry.

Service Levels

Copper and Fibre provision

Openreach FAD (First Available Appointment Date) performance nationally, over the 5-day period ending 3 April 2024 was as follows:

Notes:

1. MI and SI are Managed-Install and Self-Install orders
2. FTTC is Fibre to the cabinet
3. FTTP is Fibre to the premises
4. SOGEA is Single Order Generic Ethernet Access
5. GFAST is Fibre-base Ultrafast Broadband

Copper repair

LLU and WLR ‘on time repair’ performance has seen an steady trend for LLU and downward trend for WLR, achieving a 4-week rolling average of 86% and 80.7% respectively, by week ending 26 April 2024

*The figures quoted exclude BT downstream connections

Signed David Halliday