Planning and Design for a Full Fiber Gigabit Network for a UK-Based ISP

Business Challenge

The goal of the UK government to “deliver a nationwide full-fiber to the premises network” by 2033 inspired the customer to acquire a major share in the UK market. They had aggressive plans to roll out their network by maximizing utilization of existing infrastructure from other ISPs.

The challenge in the government’s stated goal is to connect eight million homes and businesses with open-access full fiber infrastructure by 2025.

The customer was therefore looking for a partner with knowledge of end-to-end FTTx design solutions—to support both network design and field survey—as well as experience in understanding available infrastructure in the UK. Knowledge associated with PIA (physical infrastructure access), the civil network owned by Openreach, is a key driver in this engagement. They also expected the partner to deploy a large team for quick turn-around-time, which Cyient was able to deliver on.

The Cyient Solution

Cyient offered the customer FTTh (Fiber to the home) plan and design services with survey to build a network with gigabit speed across the UK.

Our customer was at the early stages of developing the design tool for P&D activity over a flexible platform when this project was initiated. This was necessary to ensure consistency in design from its vendors. Few productivity and validation tools were developed until the customer’s design tool was released. A few of the internal productivity and validation tools are still being used, which are not available in the toolkit provided by our customer. Cyient helped the customer to fine-tune the design tool by providing suggestions and different scenarios.

Cyient adopted a five-step plan and design solution to address the key requirement to enable efficient planning, design, and field survey:

1. Planning: Initial planning is done at the city level, locating the PoP (point of presence) and backbone connections.

2. Desktop Design: High-level planning of the network is based on existing infrastructure data and desktop survey.

3. Field Survey: To enhance the high-level design (HLD), the field survey validates actual field conditions, with photographs of the infrastructure indicating the vacant ducts, and reporting of potential hazards.

4. Detailed Designs (Low-Level): Once the high level design is approved with/without changes, detail designing is done based on the HLD and survey information.

5. Field Walkout: A field walkout with LLD (low level design) ensures the design aligns with field conditions.

In addition to this, Cyient delivered the following:

• Rapid team deployment to supply 50+ primary node (PN) designs in 45 days
• Deployment of surveyors with Openreach expertise
• Three-week turn-around-time to design a PN
• Automation of 60% of customer’s quality requirements
• Part-automation of 25% of quality checks

The Results

Cyient deployed its top resources to ensure quick turn-around-time to meet the primary requirement of 50+ PNs in 45 days. The core team was highly trained and led the entire project team at a brisk pace. Cyient deployed 150+ design engineers offshore and 20 surveyors onsite to cope with the aggressive milestones set by the customer for delivery of quality designs for almost 11 cities, with 450,000 homes passed in less than 24 months. With our on-time delivery and high number of designs the customer recognized Cyient as a “Best-in-Class” design partner.

The customer benefitted from the following value-adds:

Designing Tomorrow Together

Partnering with Cyient, the customer was able to achieve their aggressive milestones of 450,000 HPs across 11 cities as part of UK’s nationwide full fiber to the premises program. Cyient’s expertise in P&D services across the globe and knowledge in telecom technologies and software enabled our customer to rapidly add more cities and expand their network footprint. Together with the customer, Cyient is helping design networks for tomorrow.