Whether you spend your days on back-to-back video calls, monitor your security and heating with connected cameras and devices, or smart-manage your energy consumption to reduce your cost of living, a broadband connection that just works and keeps on working, is now vital. But this also means that if something goes awry, the frustration of reporting a fault and waiting days for a repair also needs to become a distant memory.

All of this and more, is why CityFibre is on a mission to eradicate all but the rarest need for anyone to contact their broadband provider about a fault or performance issue on its network.

When things go wrong

A broadband connection can fail for all sorts of reasons. It could be the result of accidental damage when laying or repairing other infrastructure, or even overzealous gardening that sees a spade smash a wall box. What happens next though, is where we’re working to stand out from the crowd.

Typically, when something isn’t working, an impacted customer notifies their broadband provider. They then spend time triaging the issue to see if there is a simple fix. This stage can take 35-40 minutes, and if things can’t be resolved, a trouble report gets raised to the network operator who often despatches an engineer.

While this reactive approach finds and fixes the problem eventually, it is inefficient, labour-intensive and the polar-opposite of customer-friendly. It puts the onus on the customer to report the fault, describe everything they are experiencing and even try a bunch of suggestions. Handling issues in this way is part of the reason UK customers who experience a broadband fault, can be without service for three to five days – or sometimes more. This is despite the majority of ‘trouble reports’ that we see typically only take an hour of engineering time to fix.

None of us would accept this without complaint if it was our water or gas supply pipe that failed, and we shouldn’t be expecting people to accept this as standard for their broadband service either.

From ‘waiting in’ to ‘getting on’

Thanks to our modern built systems and diagnostics, we have always had the ability to proactively monitor our fibre network and see faults as they happen. What’s new is that we’ve developed an innovative new platform to enable proactive fault repair.

The platform is designed to ensure that as soon as a service outage happens on our network, ‘Auto Create’ and ‘Auto Resolve’ incident responses are activated. This allows us to begin investigating and resolving the issue almost immediately, while notifying our customers in parallel that something’s up and we’re already on the case.

At the heart of our mission are customers who need and deserve the most reliable and robust network we can deliver. Benefits are felt by all though. The more improvements we can deliver through smart automation, the more power we and our partners have to help keep consumer prices low.