Openreach Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group, is responsible for running the UK’s physical network infrastructure.  Established in 2006, they maintain the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets, and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone networks. Openreach’s customers are the 690+ communications providers who sell phone, broadband and Ethernet services to homes and businesses across the UK. With a workforce of over 35,000, they tackle complicated engineering problems, installing and maintaining the complex kit that delivers fibre broadband services, as well as coordinating works with councils, highways agencies, energy suppliers and landowners. 

Maintaining the UK’s vast physical network is a challenging undertaking and Openreach are realising the benefits of using drones for a number of applications, for example: 

• Surveys of existing infrastructure, where inspections at height are required
• Site surveys when deploying new infrastructure
• Overhead fibre deployment, where drones can easily negotiate obstacles like rivers 

Not only does drone usage reduce the time taken to undertake these tasks, Openreach are hugely reducing the risk to their engineers from working at height. 

With drones being used by Openreach engineers on a more regular basis, dealing with the significant administrative overheads related to Civil Aviation Authority(CAA) regulations has become increasingly onerous.

Openreach researched commercially available Drone Management Systems, but found them over complex, difficult to use and expensive for what was required. They approached Mitra to build a simple “one stop” web application that could be accessed by engineers via their existing devices i.e. Openreach smartphones and laptops. Mitra leveraged our experienz low-code platform to create and configure an app that captures all the information required across all the tasks in a simple, linear and consistent format. The app also provides an individual pilot flight log and history as required by the CAA. A management dashboard gives oversight of pilots, flights and drones and the data can easily be shared, by exporting files as PDFs as required for the CAA. Mitra built the prototype based on lowcode technology, ensuring fast development time, and the flexibility to adapt to new use cases and add new features, tasks and process steps when required. The prototype became a minimum viable product(MVP) and Openreach have signed a contract for a one year licence with Mitra.