Breaking Barriers: SIRO’s Vision for Fibre Broadband Excellence

Your Professional Journey

Q: Your work at SIRO has achieved impressive metrics, including a first-time installation rate consistently above 90% and an early life fault rate below 1%. What aspects of leading operations in the fibre broadband sector do you find most rewarding, and what challenges keep you motivated?

Every year we find new challenges to overcome, and the team I have worked with are really engaged in trying to problem solve as a collective. That means my direct reports, our key suppliers, peer stakeholders, other internal teams, contractors, and even shareholders. We have to identify issues using data, draft policy to outline the plan, execute it and manage the change curve through to an outcome. And it’s never easy. So doing it as a group keeps me motivated, and findings ways that we can improve our outputs to the benefit of the end consumer is rewarding. It’s important to take the time to review the customer feedback, whether we’ve helped a vulnerable member of the community or delivered a connection to a school, how we go about this is the rewarding part for us. But what we achieve at the end of it is great to review and help motivate us towards the next obstacle.

Q: SIRO represents a joint venture between Vodafone and ESB. How has working within this partnership structure influenced your management approach, and what lessons have you learned about effective collaboration between utility and telecom companies?

I’ve worked for organisations with private ownership and with boards, and the goals are always the same from an Operations perspective. We are always trying to find ways to improve, highlight new patterns in data, and draft policy to achieve buy-in. The SIRO board have been a fantastic support to us over the years, offering support on key initiatives which have helped us improve the experience of customers above and beyond what we felt might have been an industry norm. The investment we undertook in fusion splicing is a key example of that. Industry standard is hard to quantify, but anecdotally it can be around 5%. Our SLA was 2%, which we felt was competitive. And when we noticed cost of equipment declined and turnover of our engineers was low, we pitched to move from FIC to Fusion, and that’s had a dramatic improvement on our early life fault stat. That saves us money through reduced truck rolls, but the difference in the early stage of customer experience is immeasurable. If we took 5% as a norm, we can’t imagine one in 20 cars breaking down within 28 days after leaving the dealership. FTTH should be no different, so we’re really proud of our <1% performance, and are always trying to find more ways to further reduce that value.

Industry Insights

Q: SIRO uses ESB's existing electricity network to deliver fibre broadband. How has this unique infrastructure approach shaped your operational strategies compared to traditional telecom deployments, and what advantages has it provided in the Irish market?

The deployment of Fibre over an exiting utility brings challenges and opportunities. The engineering standards of electrical distribution assets is considerably higher than that of traditional telco, but the end result is a far more resilient network.

Q: The pre-enablement concept for new home builds seems to be a focus area for you. How do you see the relationship between property developers and broadband providers evolving, and what innovations are emerging in this space?

It is a really key focus area for us, and we feel that the use of existing infrastructure on development sites is a very obvious path to take. We see Regulation coming in from the EU stipulating that developers need to build stand alone networks which are then shared by multiple operators, but from field visits in other countries we can see the operational challenges with this approach which ultimately affect customer experience and cost. Our model would be to offer SIRO as effectively a dark fibre product, traversing the electricity distribution system, with a patch-panel at the entrance of each estate. Therefore access is controlled, M&R is clear, and customer experience is better maintained over the life of the property.

Q: With fibre deployment accelerating across Europe, what do you believe are the most significant operational bottlenecks the industry faces today, and how might these challenges be addressed through technological or process innovations?

Bottlenecks are just challenges waiting to be solved, and are consistent in all industries. The challenges we face in Ireland are going to be similar but unique to those in other European markets, as our building codes differ, our methods of deployment differ, our choice of equipment differs, our licencing with Local Councils differ. Conferences like Network X where we get to come together and work as a group allows the ‘people element’ of our efforts to blend, for new ideas to proliferate.

Event Participation

Q: At Network X, you'll be participating in the panel discussion "Fibre Installation & Activation – Fixing a $ Billion Problem." Could you preview some of the key points you hope to address regarding installation efficiency and cost management while maintaining quality?

Having a good team is key. Making decisions based on data, and with courage. Reviewing technological advances, drafting policy, gaining buy-in, raising capital and executing a plan with key deliverables has helped us set new standards in the Irish telco space.