Community Fibre goes all-in with Amazon Web Services to transform London’s full fibre broadband market

Community Fibre, London’s best quality broadband announces today that it is going all-in on leading cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), migrating its customer services and implementing AWS technology to enhance consumer experiences, as it expands its rapid roll out across London and the South East to reach 2.2 million homes and businesses with its full-fibre, multi-gigabit-capable broadband by the end of 2024.

Community Fibre’s mission is to deliver 100% full fibre broadband to all of the London communities it serves, helping to provide residents with opportunities for education, training, employment, social inclusion, and community projects by supplying community spaces across the city with free 1 Gbps fibre connection.

In October 2022, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) announced that it had signed a new finance facility of £985m to support its network expansion, as unlike most providers, Community Fibre builds, operates and owns its dedicated 100% full fibre network with its advanced technology. Therefore, it does not rely on any other provider’s cables to deliver fast and reliable 100% full fibre broadband directly into individual properties. Currently, more than 1 million residential properties are able to connect to its fibre broadband services in the London and the South East. 

To support its exponential build, Community Fibre is working with AWS in a bid to evolve its critical IT infrastructure services, such as its customer Contact Centre, Marketing outreach, and Network analytics onto AWS, as well as using a number of AWS services to help scale and better serve its growing customer base. The critical move will allow the broadband provider to continue digitalising both technically and financially, as well as engaging new partners using AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalogue that makes it easy for businesses to discover, procure, entitle, provision, and manage third-party software, data and services.

Community Fibre is enhancing the customer experience by upgrading its existing Contact Centre and migrating it to Amazon Connect, an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact centre offering superior, low-cost customer service using machine learning (ML).  This enables  Community Fibre to create more personalised experiences for customers and manage larger call volumes.  The migration was completed in 12-weeks instead of 12-months, allowing the broadband provider to continue to cope with the demands of a customer base that is rapidly growing, whilst reducing the propensity to call rates per customer. This new technology has enabled Community Fibre to grow its digital channels, providing an omni-channel experience and starting to personalise the delivery of customer experiences, as well as helping the ISP to consolidate Box Broadband, which it acquired in 2021, into a single platform.

Community Fibre is also expanding its use of AWS products to include AWS artificial intelligence (AI) and ML services to build new functionalities for its customers, including the launch of several new features including Self Service, Advanced Personalisation Services, Improved Broadband Diagnostics, Robotic Responses, and out of hours chat services.

Chris Williams, Chief Information Officer, Community Fibre, said: “Historically, we've held a fantastic relationship with Amazon Web Services across many functions, so we're delighted to now be working with the cloud provider to help scale and grow our business. The use of Amazon Connect will continue to be central to Community Fibre's IT strategy, helping to enhance the digital experiences we provide to our customers and vendors as we grow.”

Joe Carroll, General Manager of Digital Native Businesses, EMEA, Amazon Web Services said: “We are committed to helping UK businesses to innovate and grow with the cloud. Community Fibre is an example of a digital innovator that is using cloud to transform the market it operates in and compete at scale with a great customer experience. We are excited to work alongside Community Fibre to use cloud to bring new services to market faster, enhance the customer experience, and underpin its expansion.”

Other AWS services used to power Community Fibre’s critical operations include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for elastic compute, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for cloud object storage, Amazon Aurora for building and managing relational databases, Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and managing the provision of data and actionable insights, Amazon Kinesis for processing and analysing streaming data at scale, and Amazon GuardDuty for security and threat detection.

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