IN Brief:
- Volunteer Openreach engineers are testing Geotab connected-vehicle technology during an early-adopter phase.
- Vehicle data will be used to examine maintenance risk, fuel consumption, utilisation and driver safety.
- A successful trial could lead to deployment across more than 23,000 Openreach company cars and commercial vans.
Openreach has begun an early-adopter trial of Geotab connected-vehicle technology, using fleet data to examine driver safety, vehicle maintenance, utilisation and fuel consumption before deciding whether to extend the system across its wider fleet.
Volunteer Openreach engineers are taking part in the initial phase. The trial is intended to test both the technology and the user experience before any broader deployment across the company’s more than 23,000 company cars and commercial vans.
Geotab describes Openreach as operating the UK’s second-largest commercial fleet. Its engineers drive millions of miles each year to build and maintain communications infrastructure, making vehicle availability part of the company’s field-service capacity rather than a standalone transport requirement.
The trial will use connected-vehicle data to identify potential maintenance issues before they develop into breakdowns. Openreach also plans to analyse fuel consumption, vehicle utilisation and information that could support its transition towards lower-emission vehicles.
Predictive maintenance depends on turning vehicle data into an intervention early enough to prevent a failure. Fault codes or changes in operating behaviour have limited value if they are only reviewed after a van has already broken down. The operational test is whether fleet teams can distinguish actionable warnings from routine data and schedule maintenance without taking vehicles out of service unnecessarily.
The same dataset can show how intensively individual vehicles are being used. That can identify assets with consistently high duty cycles, vehicles spending substantial time idle or parts of the fleet whose actual operating pattern differs from the assumptions used when they were assigned.
Those measurements become particularly important when planning lower-emission or electric replacements. Fleet averages can obscure the daily mileage, route profile and downtime available for individual vehicles. A more detailed picture of duty cycles gives Openreach a stronger basis for deciding which vehicles can change powertrain without undermining operational availability.
Driving information will also be shared directly with participating engineers through an app. Geotab says drivers will be able to review their own behaviour and make adjustments, creating a direct feedback loop rather than restricting all telematics data to central fleet managers.
Employee privacy has been incorporated into the system design. Geotab says controls limit data collection outside working hours, while Openreach has worked with the CWU and Prospect, its recognised trade unions, on the trial. That governance becomes necessary when connected-vehicle systems generate information about how an individually assigned vehicle is being driven and used.
The trial structure gives Openreach a chance to assess those controls before increasing the deployment. Beginning with volunteer engineers reduces the scale of the initial implementation while providing operating data on how drivers and fleet teams interact with the system during normal work.
Judy O’Keefe, Director of Fleet Management at Openreach, said the trial is intended to improve understanding of fleet performance so the company can improve safety, reduce downtime and provide better support to its engineers. Those remain objectives of the project rather than measured outcomes at this stage.
Vehicle downtime has a wider operational effect for a field-service organisation because the van normally carries the engineer, tools and equipment required to reach and complete scheduled work. An avoidable breakdown can therefore remove several elements of service capacity at once, particularly where replacement vehicles or specialist equipment are not immediately available.
Fuel data has a similarly practical role. Consumption can vary with vehicle type, load, route, driving behaviour and idle time. Telematics allows those factors to be examined at a more granular level, although lower consumption will still depend on operating changes rather than data collection alone.
Openreach has not committed the full fleet to Geotab. The primary announcement makes wider deployment conditional on the early-adopter phase proving successful. Any description of the project as a 23,000-vehicle rollout would therefore overstate its current status.
The trial instead tests whether richer vehicle data produces useful maintenance, safety and utilisation decisions at an organisation operating one of the country’s largest commercial fleets. Large deployments can generate substantial quantities of telemetry; the operating value depends on reducing that information to interventions that fleet teams and drivers can actually use.
If the early-adopter phase meets Openreach’s requirements, the technology is intended to extend across more than 23,000 vehicles. Until then, the project remains a controlled fleet trial with a potentially much larger deployment behind it.
