Digital twin of the UK mapping 35M premises, transit corridors, and network assets
200,000+ eligible full-fiber connections identified with geospatial analysis
~10,000 tonnes of CO₂e cut annually using cloud-based fleet telematics
Significantly reducing time to insight for data engineers
With Gemini and BigQuery, Openreach is optimizing its commercial fleet and enabling faster broadband installations for millions.
With Gemini and BigQuery, Openreach is optimizing its commercial fleet and enabling faster broadband installations for millions.
Zeroing in on better, brighter future for all
As the UK's largest wholesale broadband network, Openreach is on a mission to build the best full fiber network possible. Achieving this aim depends heavily on a vast workforce of engineers, traveling across the country to install thousands of new connections each week.
In an expansion of this scale, the pace of deployment depends heavily on availability and transit time. At the same time, Openreach has to balance these requirements with a target to become a net-zero business by 2031, maximizing operational efficiency and service coverage while reducing carbon emissions.
“We have the second largest fleet in the UK at just over 20,000 vehicles that drive 200 million miles a year,” explains Rich Hunt, Openreach’s data and insight director. “We’ve been rolling out electric vehicles (EVs) to replace our diesel fleet. We need to be aware of where we send our engineers and how we deliver the best service for the customer.”
Field technicians require vehicles that match their daily schedules without mid-route charging stops that delay service appointments. Meanwhile, fleet operations must factor in low- or zero-emission zones alongside access to charging stations. Executing this transition sustainably and economically requires complex geospatial data analysis, pushing the limits of Openreach's on-premises data infrastructure.
To accelerate its sustainability and connectivity goals, Openreach is utilizing advanced Google Cloud data and AI technologies, including Gemini and BigQuery, to optimize its fleet and drive smarter infrastructure planning.
Raw telematics data of every vehicle is a huge amount of data but also we couldn’t give it the right security constraints on-premises. When we migrated to the cloud, now we can crunch all those numbers quickly and be confident we have the right guardrails in place.
Rich Hunt
Data and Insight Director, Openreach
“Raw telematics data of every vehicle is a huge amount of data but also we couldn’t give it the right security constraints on-premises,” Hunt recalls. “When we migrated to the cloud, now we can crunch all those numbers quickly and be confident we have the right guardrails in place.”
Connecting the entire UK, one mile at a time
Openreach’s journey started with redesigning its core data foundation, moving its fleet telematics data from on-premises Oracle systems to the cloud. With BigQuery, Openreach benefits from robust enterprise-grade security, governance, and reliability features, including encryption-by-default and high availability, providing the confidence needed for critical infrastructure planning.
“We migrated onto BigQuery where we’ve started using some of Google's very powerful geoanalytics capabilities,” Hunt outlines. "20,000 vehicles driving 200 million miles, it's not an easy thing to map and understand. That's where we're able to use data now to help us."
With access to global geospatial datasets from Google Maps Platform and Earth Engine directly in BigQuery, Openreach can now layer raw telematics information over satellite imagery, route networks, and point-of-interest details to gain a smarter view of its fleet. These insights enable Openreach to evaluate daily driving patterns against real-world context, such as emissions zones and charging infrastructure, and make decisions that align with its sustainability goals while ensuring engineers can do their jobs.
This data-driven view has accelerated the rollout of EVs, helping to remove roughly 10,000 tonnes of CO2e off the road every year. Openreach can also isolate the root causes of idling and excessive travel, improve vehicle availability, and perform risk scoring across its fleet to predict potential faults before breakdowns occur.
In addition, BigQuery’s integration with Gemini allowed Openreach to create a living model of the UK, combining data across 35 million homes and businesses with national transport infrastructure to identify eligible premises that can be connected using existing network proximity.
“We built a digital replica of the UK within the Gemini platform. Every road, railway, waterway network, and we added our network. That allows us to do geospatial analysis on how we actually connect customers,” Hunt shares, noting how this visibility helps planners drive smarter, more sustainable network expansion.
“We’ve managed to add another couple of hundred thousand customers that couldn't access broadband yesterday that can today,” he adds.
Unlocking AI context to fuel the
next generation of connectivity
Openreach’s work to build a cloud data foundation also laid the critical groundwork to support its ambitions for AI innovation. Grounding AI in structured, high-quality enterprise data enables autonomous AI agents to move beyond simple automation to more complex, context-aware tasks.
“It's important that you build a data foundation that is truthful to your business but also what happens in the real world,” Hunt emphasizes. “Knowledge Catalog being a contextual brain that allows us to not just understand the context of the processes but what’s happening out there in the organization as well.”
With BigQuery serving as its single source of truth, Openreach can utilize Knowledge Catalog as a context engine to automatically aggregate context from across its organization and curate the operational knowledge needed to power agentic capabilities. By bringing together technical schemas, metadata, coding standards, and even unstructured information like interview transcripts describing processes on the ground, Openreach can now develop custom agents that can help reduce day-to-day friction that slows teams down.
“A problem is how do you take legacy code and transform that into something ready for BigQuery. It was one of the first agents we built using the Agent Development Kit in the Gemini platform,” Hunt says. “We added all of our processes, our coding standards, what we'd like the output to be, the metadata, and also all the design documents. The agent takes all of that in and can then produce production-ready code.”
The ability to automatically convert complex legacy queries has significantly reduced time to insight for data engineers, giving them more time to prioritize building new solutions over manual code maintenance. This velocity directly feeds the front lines, speeding up the delivery of new features and tools that benefit engineers in the field.
Looking forward, the ability to apply AI directly to real operational challenges will allow Openreach to work smarter, move quicker, and build a more connected and sustainable future for the UK.
It's important that you build a data foundation that is truthful to your business but also what happens in the real world. Knowledge Catalog being a contextual brain allows us to not just understand the context of the processes but what’s happening out there in the organization as well.
Rich Hunt
Data and Insight Director, Openreach
Openreach is the UK's largest wholesale broadband network, supporting more than 680 service providers like BT, SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and Zen to provide broadband, TV, phone, data, and mobile services to their customers.
Industry: Telecommunications
Location: United Kingdom
Products: BigQuery, Gemini, Knowledge Catalog
