BT Group

Multinational service provider BT has deepened its relationship with optical transport supplier Ciena, by renewing a five-year contract to deploy the vendor’s 6500 converged packet optical platform.

Ciena has been a supplier to BT since 2005 when it became one of the preferred suppliers to the operator’s 21CN deployment, the mega-project to migrate BT’s entire customer base from the existing UK public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network.

BT has made an offer to the UK government to voluntarily provide high-speed broadband to 99 per cent all homes and businesses across the country within five years, which would largely be delivered by Openreach.

The government said it received the offer after it committed to introduce a Universal Service Obligation (USO) through regulation to give every home and business in the UK the right to request a high-speed connection of at least 10Mb/s.