scte PRESENTS
More testing, he argued, delivers simple operational outcomes: fewer staff required, better first-time install rates and fewer due diligence red flags. MS3, he said, reduced engineering headcount while growing and hit “first-time installations in Hull to 92%,” a figure he claimed rises further once no-access visits are excluded. The point, he argued, is that boards respond to clear financial outcomes. “Unfortunately, the board aren’t always as interested technically in some decibel levels as they are in the financials,” he said.
Virgin Media O2’s Sean Pillans shifted the focus upstream, to component assurance and what happens before field testing even begins. “If I wanted you to buy five million sausage rolls, you might start thinking about this a bit differently, right?” Fibre components may be
“relatively low-cost items,” he warned, but at scale “it’s very expensive” when something goes wrong. His prescription: clear specifications, scrutiny of vendor datasheets, formal test plans, factory visits and meaningful field trials. “Don’t just rely on the paperwork,” he said.
Lightning Fibre’s Douglas Hall described arriving in 2023 as the market began to tighten – and having to shift the organisation from “build fast mode” to “build right mode”. He set out what he found: “Proper testing and documentation was sometimes skipped… Materials were
specified loosely… We had test results, but we didn’t trust them. We had records, but they weren’t reproducible.” And there was more to come: “We ended up retesting significant sections of the network after they were already live… We paid twice, once to build, again to prove what we’d built.”
On the contractor side, SCCI’s Shaun Richards agreed that quality failures often trace back to competence and supervision. “There are a lot of people out there that proclaim to be fibre engineers… and they don’t really know what they’re doing,” he said. His message
was end-to-end discipline: “Quality isn’t something we only inspect at the end — it’s something we build from the first flight to the last test.” Allwright closed with an operator’s confession about oversight. Even when contractors look capable on paper, he said, “you kind of have to stand over them all of the time to make sure you’ve got that consistent quality and quality of the work.”
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MARCH 2026 Volume 48 No.1
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