Xantaro was established in Germany 20 years ago and entered the UK market five years after launch on a mission to help altnets and major carriers to understand the capabilities of their networks and reach their full potential. Today, the company employs more than 170 staff, over 70 of whom are certified network experts supporting more than 300 enterprise and channel customers, between them holding more than 700 certifications.
Mon, 20/06/2022 - 09:30
Brsk bosses Giorgio Iovino (CEO) and Ian Kock (COO) are leveraging the lessons they learnt from their time at Vumatel in South Africa to guide the altnet’s next phase of growth and triple its monthly run rate of homes passed in 2022.
The altnet has passed over 40,000 premises within the last 12 months and is now looking to change gears to serve around one million homes and businesses by 2025.
“The first twelve months of our journey has been focused on proving the fundamentals of our model, understanding and learning the market and setting up the business to scale its build, installations and operations,” said Iovino.
After being founded in early 2021, Brsk invested heavily getting ahead in its planning, setting up its contractor capacity and building its systems to enable automation and execution at scale. The altnet has leveraged Openreach’s Physical Infrastructure Access to reduce its build cost and increase its speed of deployment. This has been an advantage compared to the rollout in South Africa where Vumatel’s network was mostly trenched.
“Our work so far has set us up for the next phase and our focus now is changing gears to increase capacity across these functions to reach our monthly build and customer connection plan,” Iovino continued.
The next phase has three clear objectives. To increase its monthly build rates, to build a quality network and to relentlessly focus on customer experience.
The first of these objectives will see Brsk continue to ramp up in areas that other network operators are not present in, with Iovino and Kock adamant in their approach to avoid overbuild. “We believe that overbuilding of FTTP networks is highly inefficient,” Kock said.
“Overbuild completely defeats the purpose of covering the country efficiently. Spreading efforts across the market is the most logical and efficient way to achieve faster penetration to move the UK forward.”
The altnet is continuing to pass premises across three of its regions including large areas of Stockport and Greater Manchester including Edgeley, Portwood, Stockport West, Stockport North, Didsbury, Chorlton, Cheadle, Davyhulme, Fallowfield, Flixton, Gatley, Hazel Grove, Heald Green, Hulme, Moss Side, Poynton, Rusholme, Sale, Timperley and Urmston. Brsk is also active and has live networks in Burnley and north of Bradford.
To ensure that work continues apace in these areas, Brsk must address the skills shortage that is inhibiting many actors in the sector. “This shortage has made it difficult to attract and retain experienced engineers who can easily move to operators that are willing to pay a premium,” says Kock.
“The industry is facing a severe shortage of skills – from planning, project management, civil and technical skills for deployment and the installation of the network.”
The altnet aims to address this issue through investment in training and development. Brsk is building its own internal teams and is working with its partners to import skilled engineers from their network in the South African market which has now moved into a phase of maturity.
This plan includes an apprentice program which is generating experienced engineers by buddying up new trainees with more experienced engineers, providing longer term opportunities for local employment.
Iovino and Kock also have their minds on connections, having so far connected over 3,000 customers. The pair echo the industry-wide concerns of a lack of education in the consumer markets.
Iovino said: “We see the impact of this daily when selling our service to communities that only have existing FTTC/Coax services. Our customer’s response is “... but I already have fibre…” – which then prompts an FTTP vs FTTC explanation, and why full fibre is a better service.
“Stricter rules should be in place which mitigates false advertising, improves understanding in the market and enables consumers to distinguish between the products and services they are signing up for. This will go a long way to encourage the market to accelerate the adoption of full fibre services and migrate off copper technologies.”
This is their second run at building a FTTP network and Iovino and Kock have had the Brsk roadmap planned out from the start, using their experience as founding members of South African FTTP infrastructure operator Vumatel, which is now the largest fibre broadband network in the country..
“Ian and I started out by doing a bit of everything in the start-up days of Vumatel which meant we were well exposed across the business to the build, marketing, operations and maintenance. Ian would take weekend support calls from customers in the early days, every day presented a new challenge for us.” Iovino said.
“We made mistakes of course and learnt lessons that we have taken forward as we build out and scale the Brsk network and operations. Doing this the second time around has meant that we can plan for the future of the business from the get-go, and it has given us the opportunity to do things better, and the right way from the start.
“Having worked and seen the evolution to maturity of a fibre marketplace in another country, we have been extremely impressed with the supportive regulatory environment that the UK government has created to attract private capital to drive the rollout of gigabit broadband across the UK. We are very excited about the opportunity and the speed at which the market is moving,” added Kock.
