EXECUTIVE BIO

Richard Perry is a highly experienced senior leader with over 25 years of experience in the telecoms industry, with a proven track record in strategic delivery and infrastructure build whilst driving operational efficiency and transformation initiatives.

Perry has a reputation in leading geographically dispersed multiskilled teams and a strong belief in people and leadership development. He says: “I’m driven by people and what they can achieve when given the right support to execute a strategy. This also extends to working with Delivery Partners to form a collaborative and long-lasting partnership which ultimately delivers success for both organisations and our customers.”

Building Networks Connecting People

KMCO Group has consistently delivered the stability & engineering professionalism demanded by our clients & customers throughout London, the Midlands, South of England & Ireland. We believe that when it comes to building networks & related services, we do it better than anyone else.

Your network at your fingertips people as possible has probably been the most interesting thing because it’s tangible: you can see the end products of what you’re actually building.”

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For Community Fibre, this growth is clear. Since joining the business, the organisation has tripled in size. “We’ve scaled delivery from 200,000 premises to fast approaching one million,” Perry says.

“We set out a clear strategy a couple of years ago that by the end of 2023, we wanted to reach 1.3 million premises across London, increasing to 2.2 million by the end of 2024. And we are on that trajectory path now.

“Every year, we have doubled, in terms of organisation size, customer connections, and also the amount of premises that we’re able to connect up. So we continue to grow to meet those challenges and find more ways to be efficient as clearly we can’t just keep increasing the size of the organisation in keeping with a scaling customer base and network.”

With approximately 3.7 million premises in London, and with plans to have built networks to at least 2.2 million of those by the end of 2024, few organisations can claim a similar footprint in the city.

But Community Fibre’s mission doesn’t stop there. The aim, Perry explains, is to build the best fibre network in London, but also to do this with the customer experience and community spirit in mind.

“We continue to invest in our people, continually looking at innovative ways to reach more homes in the fastest, most economically viable manner,” he comments.

“We develop relationships with landlords, in both the public and private sectors, to serve more multi-dwelling units to provide them with fibre to the home. This is a key requirement in London, given the amount of multidwelling units compared to many other cities in the country.

As its name would suggest, community is at the heart of everything

Building brilliant fibre networks

Driven by our brilliance philosophy and by investing in our teams, we work with Community Fibre to design, build and connect properties with a brilliant fibre network.

Community Fibre does. The company provides free 1Gbps broadband to over 500 community centres around London, giving high-speed internet access for training, work, education and community projects, and offers digital skills training to residents in connected Community Spaces through its network of digital ambassadors.

“We have digital ambassador programmes,” Perry explains. “We enable community centres and spaces in conjunction with some of our larger social landlords. So it isn’t just about selling to individuals, it’s about what can we do for that local community to create and provide more access to broadband.”

Partnerships essential to success

All this growth wouldn’t be possible, Perry explains, without having a clear strategy set down from Community Fibre’s board, having great people in position, and striking real, lasting partnerships with build partners. These long-lasting relationships, he adds, have enabled Community Fibre to scale and grow.

900+ Number of employees

“We’ve got a number of build partners that we work with to design our network in the first place, and then to build our core distribution, and, also, then to serve our multi-dwelling unit (MDU) and single dwelling unit (SDU) premises.”

Among some of Community Fibre’s build partners are Niocomm, KMCO and FibreWorks, which the organisation started working with as far back as 2019.

1.3m

Target for premises by the end of 2023

“As we’ve scaled our network, they’ve scaled their ability to support our everincreasing build demands. So we’ve got a long-standing relationship with them, and they’ve been a key success to our partnership.

“Similarly with Indigo, one of our main design and planning partners, we’ve worked extensively with them over the last three years or so to create the plans for our build partners to go and execute on.”

Central to Community Fibre’s approach is one of partnership rather than a traditional client-supplier relationship. This combined effort is helping Community Fibre, and its partners, achieve their goals.

“We work really closely with all of our partners,” Perry says. “It’s a combined effort. I’ve seen in other organisations, in other industries, there’s often a very traditional client-supplier relationship manner. We don’t have that. We work hand-in-hand. Our success is their success and vice versa.

“We are very much part of each others team,” he adds. “And that’s the way in which we found success to deliver. So we don’t have all the answers, our build partners don’t have all the answers, but working together, we come up with workable solutions.

“We encourage dialogue between our build partners as well, so we don’t try and keep them separate,” Perry asserts. “If something’s working for one build partner, then we’re pretty confident others will benefit from that as well. So we’re very much supportive of sharing best practices and working together to achieve our goals.”

Looking to the future at a pivotal time for the industry

The rollout of full fibre broadband is an increasing priority. Although broadband is sufficient for most household needs, the demand for services that use a lot of data, such as online video streaming, is on the rise.

And with the UK Government setting a target for gigabit broadband to be available nationwide by 2030, as Perry explains, the future will see more and more coverage of full-fibre broadband.

“In terms of future trends, we are going to see more emerge in the coming years. Better connectivity enables more people to have a better work-life balance. And because there is less reliance in an office, there’s the flexibility to work from home, even work from other locations that aren’t home on a day-to-day basis.”

Also on the horizon will be new TV services and ways for people to consume media. “I think TV services will massively change in the coming years,” Perry predicts. “We’ll be less reliant on the traditional TV subscriptions that we get today. And even just paying for your TV licence. There’ll be more over-the-top services. To enable that, you need to have good, reliable, fast broadband.”

This, Perry describes, is a pivotal time for the industry. But with increasing competition and more choices than ever for consumers, it is in everybody’s interests to ensure as many premises have access to fast, reliable broadband.

“In terms of the rest of the industry, it’s at a pivotal moment right now. There are lots of alternative networks throughout the country, each receiving significant investment and that’s great. But in order to maintain that investment, you have to be delivering on your plans, both in terms of build and sales.

“What’s put Community Fibre in such a strong position is demonstrating we continuously deliver against our plans,” concludes Perry. “In the coming years, we’ll see some more mergers and acquisitions along the way in the UK telco space. But, ultimately, it’s in everyone’s best interests to ensure that as many premises throughout the UK have access to superfast, reliable broadband.”