Creating a first time right fiber connection strategy.

Hi, and welcome to the FTTH Conference here in Amsterdam. We are on the stage in Workshop 1 where we've just had a really interesting workshop session which has been held by IQGeo, Deepomatic, and VIAVI into right-first-time fiber connectivity strategies, and we're going to talk about it in a little bit more detail with representatives of two of those companies. So firstly, we're going to be talking to James Wheatley, who is Head of Product Management at IQGeo, and the Chief Product Officer from Deepomatic is Aloïs Brunel. So thank you both for having a couple of seconds for us. We'll come to you in a second, Aloïs, if that's all right. But there was a lot talked about over the last hour and a half or so. So the really difficult question to start off with, James, is can you sort of summarize what we've just been talking about in this really important session about fiber-connecting? Yeah, sure, James. So, so we, we explain that in the context of the network lifecycle. So planning the network, designing it, building it, operating it, and selling the network. And so that gives you a framework to explain all the challenges and then the different potential ways you can solve some of those challenges using technology to digitize the process. So at a really simple level, you're designing it, you've got a huge volume of network to get out there and to design quickly and effectively. You come to build it, you want to build it quickly, effectively, to quality. And then you want to be able to monetize that network, connecting customers effectively, first time, right? That's the key thing, as you alluded to with the title, because that's the key aspect that you're trying to drive your revenue. And then with our partners from VIAVI, how can you operate that network? And the whole essence really is how the integration between all those different solutions can drive that operational efficiency for the operators in the audience. Sure. And that sort of operational efficiency is absolutely key to this. I wonder if we turned to you, Alois, if we could see what kind of issues, what kind of problems that you've been seeing and what are brought to you most often. What are you seeing? Yeah, so when it comes to both construction and home connections, what we've seen is one of the main problems is we have as an industry to scale our operations because we want to connect as many people as possible in a cost-effective way. And when you scale your operations, you also have to think about how to scale quality. And what we see as you do so, as you scale your operations, is problems with quality, quality of the work being done on the field. So you end up with people not being satisfied, customers not being satisfied because a bad job has been done in the home, they're not connected to the fiber. And also about the quality of the data. So that's really crucial, right? To have good visibility over what's been done, the status quo, the health of your infrastructure, to use that data to operate your network in the many years. In the future, you will have to operate it. So the quality of the data, the quality of the work is one of the main problems when it comes to industrialization of your fiber network and commercialization of your fiber network. Sure. And those are serious problems. James mentioned monetization. Some of those things that you've just talked about are going to have a significant impact on the business and its bottom line potentially. Yes. No, that's the case. Because when you cannot connect a customer right the first time, you will have to come back a second time, a third time. And you will also have to have people do in-person audits, quality control in the back office. So that's very costly. And it takes a long time. So the first thing is that you end up getting a lot of delays in revenue, right? So it's a loss of revenue. If a customer cannot be connected for three months, you're going to lose. lose that revenue for three months. And if they can't be connected at all, you're going to end up losing an entire, you know, customer revenue. So that's really bad. And then in terms of customer satisfaction, you know, customers that are not satisfied, even though they're connected, at some point, they're going to churn and go to see another ISP. So that's something you really want to avoid. And that's a big business impact. It's a big business impact across this entire sector and something that is vital that operators manage to grab hold of. James, we looked in some detail on the screen and in that session that it's a comprehensive product that helps solve some of those problems Aloise has been talking about. In terms of maybe if someone was worried about the installation and how to use it, what would you be advising anybody who was thinking about picking up that system to help them get to where they need to get to? Yeah. And I think it's like everything. Start small, be successful, and then build out from that. And I think we've seen that from both Diplomatic and IQGeo's perspectives. We see that as being a way to success. So start with, you know, documentation of your network and design processes in a particular way. Build that out to scale to the whole organization. And particularly with Deepomatic, there's lots of different use cases, Alouish said, that you can apply that to. Start with one that's going to drive significant value, customer connections, for example, but then expand that out to network operations and so on. So it's avoiding that kind of classic big bang and being able to get time to value and drive operation efficiency sooner and to show those savings early in the process. Fantastic. Well, look, it was a really busy room. There were lots of people here. There was really interesting, quite deep questions. So I think people are clearly thinking about this as something they need to do. And we would encourage them to get in contact and to look at it in more detail to find out how this is going to help solve the problems and maybe deal with some of those monetization issues. But for now, for giving us that extra bit of insight, Alois and James, thank you very much for talking to us. No problem. Thanks. Thank you.