Faced with a challenging installation due to the location of a new build home perched on a hill, Openreach used its drone team to carry out the work. The drone enabled the engineering team to manoeuvre the required cables over gardens, fences and nearby properties to reach the new build and connect the home to full fibre broadband with Zen.
Gary Taylor, drone co-ordinator in chief engineers at Openreach, said that drones are used where normal installations can't be carried out, to get round the obstacles between the pole and the property. He said that the technology is used to pull cables out, connect customers and taking photographs of the project from the sky.
"It takes out all the man hours engineers need to get over fences, gardens and properties," said Taylor. "Now a drone can do that in a matter of minutes."
Openreach first used a drone deployment to help install the cable for a new FTTP network near Pontfadog in Mid-Wales in late 2017. A year later the drone team used drones to fly broadband cable across a river to reach a remote property in the Highlands, Scotland.
The use of drones has since become a strategic part of Openreach operations to navigate obstacles on more complex sites and is used as a time saving solution as it can sometimes take days to navigate more difficult terrain using traditional methods.