After college James wasn’t keen on running up a debt at university. He wanted some kind of technical apprenticeship and he found one with Openreach.

Now he’s helping the company roll out more efficient telecoms services. “Basically we connect each customer to the street cabinet via a fibre cable. Fibre doesn’t degrade like a copper line and offers faster broadband”.

His skills have been useful in other ways too. Drawing on his hobby of building model railways and roller coasters, he designed a miniature street model for the company that demonstrates how the infrastructure works. “You can plug a little phone in that buzzes and there are lights in the road to show where the cables go”.

James speaks modestly about his model but it’s had a big impact – it’s currently being used in the government scheme in Scotland to show people what ‘fibre to the cabinet technology’ is and how it works.