name, nature

Community Fibre is London’s largest and fastest 100% full fibre broadband provider for residents and operates exclusively across the capital. Its mission is to bring faster, more affordable broadband to Londoners, and serving its local communities is at the very heart of what it does.

ast year, Community Fibre Limited announced that it had signed a new finance facility of £985m, which will enable the company to continue to execute its rapid rollout of a full-fibre broadband network to 2.2 million London homes by the end of 2024.

Here to tell us more about its strategies for growth, innovation, sustainability

and

outreach is

Mike Brooman, Head of Supply Chain.

FULL-FIBRE SERVICE

Speed, service and reliability are at the core of the broadband Community Fibre provides.

“Unlike most other providers, we build, operate and own our dedicated 100 per cent full fibre network, all the way from the cabinet

Customer Service

The Altnets team provides an incomparable service to our clients. Their knowledge of the telecoms industry and strong relationships with our manufacturing partners means they can fully support you through the whole procurement process, save you time and money, and solve any problems arising in the supply chain.

Our team are there through every part of the procurement process. We support customers with future forecasting and strong communication throughout the procurement process in the case of any issues or shortages affecting the supply chain. We are focused on saving customers time and money on their telecoms builds, no matter how large-scale and complex.

Award-winning Altnets are the UK’s leading telecoms procurement specialists.

We offer bespoke, flexible and scalable supply chain solutions for the UK’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

90+ years of industry experience and close ties to manufacturers, industry bodies and ISPs means we understand the challenges Alternative Networks (Alt-Nets) face.

Our mission is simple: to improve reliability and efficiencies for our customers.

How do we do this?

By auditing your current supply chain, extensive forward planning and working with our manufacturing partners to provide you the best quality products while maximising return on investment.

Who are Altnets?

We offer internet service providers the ‘full package’: product procurement, supply chain management, planning, forecasting and scheduling.

We set up the business to be a one-stop-shop for telecoms builds, partnering with the UK’s leading manufacturers to reduce product delivery times and carbon emissions across the supply chain.

Our sales team reviews each customer’s current bill of materials, pricing and lead times to ensure they are getting the most out of their supply chain. We will always identify areas where we can speed up product delivery and save our customers money.

We provide complete support to our customers, giving advance warning of any complexities and bottle necks in the supply chain, providing confidence that they will receive the products needed in a timely manner to achieve their network build within required timeframes. Our unique freight-forwarding solutions save time as well as carbon emissions.

Our Values

What we offer

A completely tailored service for each client

Unparalleled knowledge of the global telecoms supply chain

Strong relationships with the world’s best fibre optic manufacturers, ensuring you access to the best products

Bespoke product design and development

The best return on your investment

Complete management of the procurement process from start to finish An award-winning team of expert supply chain specialists to the property, therefore not relying on Openreach or any other provider’s cables,” explains Mike. “While a lot of companies advertise their internet as being fibre, often it's only fibre to the cabinet and then it's copper or coax from the cabinet.

“At Community Fibre, we provide a full-fibre network all the way to the home, allowing us to promise incredibly fast symmetrical speeds to sell to residential customers, with packages up to 3,000 Mbps and businesses up to 10,000 Mbps. Living in southern Lincolnshire, I'm struggling to get above 25 Mbps. I’m very jealous of what we can provide to our customers.”

INNOVATION/TECH

At Community Fibre, process and technology innovation are essential to securing these speeds and reliability. But what does innovation look like at the company?

Mike answers, “We’re always trying to push the boundaries of modern technology and Wi-Fi connectivity for our customers. Considering we can provide 3,000 Mbps speeds into residential customers' homes you clearly need a highly capable product that can keep up with the rest of the connectivity issues customers may have. They're likely to have 10s of devices able businesses. It provides the Velops which go into the customer's properties to produce the Wi-Fi signals. The way we collaborate with Linksys is game changing, because it’s able to adjust to our forecast on the fly.

“If we see an opportunity in the market where we think we're going to increase sales in a certain product range, Linksys has the flexibility to support us by delivering on shortened lead times, and to connect around their home and they'll be expecting full Wi-Fi strength throughout their property.

“We work closely with our partners such as Linksys to stay on the front foot of that road map. We are moving forwards onto tri-band Wi-Fi 6, one of the more advanced Wi-Fi capability products. We also have roadmaps leading us towards Wi-Fi 7. We keep on top of that innovation and work with them to bring the best products to our customers.

“Linksys is critical to installation in our customers’ homes or adjusting its manufacturing systems or processes to deliver faster at different levels of our product range.”

But speed is not the only concern for Community Fibre customers, the reliability of Wi-Fi signal, security and user capability are crucial factors too. This is where innovation in customer service provision becomes important.

Mike explains, “One of the things we really like to see is the ability for our customer services team to proactively resolve issues at customers' homes.

Reliable & flexible mesh WiFi 6/7 solutions for ISPs

Linksys

35 YEARS of networking innovation.

“Rather than waiting for the customer to phone up to say they may have a problem with their Wi-Fi, we're able to monitor that network strength and capability across our entire network. When we see issues, we can be proactive against them and hopefully resolve any outages before the customer even notices because we've got such advanced reporting capability.”

Community Fibre is currently undergoing a full change in its Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

“We've basically overhauled our entire technical map,” summarises Mike. “Within the last couple of years, we moved from Google to Microsoft suites. Everything is changing, upgrading and bringing with it some innovative solutions. We're also implementing AI into our customer services to be able to support them and look for patterns. By doing so, we're creating opportunities for our customers to resolve problems themselves without needing to necessarily phone us and speak to us in advance.

“It's those small innovations one step at a time that really make a difference when you add them all up.”

Supply Chain Strategy

At Community Fibre, Mike’s role as Head of Supply Chain is to ensure the company uses the best suppliers, offers value for money and is always improving its products and services.

He breaks down their supply chain strategy into five key areas: suppliers, sustainability, quality, value and global community provision.

Suppliers

“The relationships with our suppliers are crucial to strengthening the relationship with our existing supply chain,” says Mike. “There are suppliers that we've worked with from day one, newer suppliers that have joined us along the journey and there are still suppliers that we haven't yet met that will help us across the finish line. Strengthening those relationships builds the resilience of our supply chain, allowing us to continue to build faster than anyone else and get our targets across the line.

“Supplier relationship management is a key priority for the team, not just this year but probably for the coming years as the shape of the business changes.”

But how do they nurture these relationships with suppliers?

“We strive to be open and transparent in our communications with our suppliers,” responds Mike. “We provide regular feedback and work collaboratively to identify areas where we can support each other and be innovative.”

For Mike and his team, true collaboration means working together closely with suppliers to strive towards mutually beneficial strategic goals. This might