The CEO of National Broadband Ireland (NBI) has highlighted the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the national roll-out of fibre broadband, and the delays that ensued as a result.
NBI signed the contract to deliver the National Broadband Plan (NBP) in late 2019. At that time, work commenced on technological and design research into what would be needed to implement the plan.
NBI also began hiring staff around that time. In March 2020, the company’s offices were being established in Citywest in Dublin.
However, when lockdown was announced, it caused significant disruption across several areas of the business, NBI CEO Peter Hendrick told Agriland this week.
“Within two weeks, we went into lockdown, and everybody was moving into a virtual world. The recruitment process of bringing people on board was all online,” Hendrick said.
He added: “Equally, with all of our contractors, [we were] trying to go through a process of agreeing contracts, getting them mobilised and training them.”
NBI’s progress was also significantly hampered by its own staff members coming down with Covid-19, and the knock-on effect for close contacts, its CEO explained.
“We’re talking about crews of teams. It could be surveyors or designers. If they were working together in the office one day and somebody was a close contact, everybody had to go remote again.
“That’s manageable in an office environment, because maybe people can do the same job at home, but when we talk about the build [the outdoor aspect of the process], once we moved from the surveying, we obviously lost time,” Hendrick said.
He added: “If somebody is a close contact in a team of six that are out on the road, or if any one of that team has Covid, than the entire team had to stay out of work for five days.
“Then they’re not doing anything, they can’t do the same work,” Hendrick noted.
“The work is on the road; the work is in building infrastructure, opening roads, installing cables. And I suppose the ‘start-stop’ for contractors in terms of the build programme was very difficult to manage.”
Although NBI was deemed as “essential service” under the public health guidelines and work was able to continue, the company’s chief said that it was at a disadvantage due to that nature of the work.
“That’s okay if you’re talking about a network that’s already built. But you’re talking about massive build programmes of infrastructure, where it’s not just one person in a van. It’s crews of people in a van. At one point our contractors had to put Perspex between the driver and the contractor,” he explained.
“So you think about all the logistical challenges that we would have faced across the country, that’s where we suffered a significant amount of delay. Our surveys being delayed, our design being delayed, the commencement of construction being delayed,” Hendrick added.
“Today, what we’ve done is increased the number of designers and surveyors, so we’re ahead about 10% to 15% on those activities. On the build programme, now we’re trying to ramp up. And a lot of that comes down to the number of tree-trimming contractors we have on the ground before we install a cable or replace a poll.
“That’s all about catching back up. It’s all about trying to recover the delay that we suffered around the survey and design in the early part of the programme. Once we catch back up, we’re very confident in terms of delivering on the timeline of the project,” he remarked.
The NBI CEO concluded: “Please God in the coming weeks, Covid will be behind us and we’re at full steam ahead.”