CityFibre is building an open access network that will connect up to 8 million premises in 285 UK cities, towns and villages, reaching a third of the country.
The provider has entered into a supply partnership with Nokia, under which it will use the company’s access nodes for its nationwide network of purpose-built fibre exchanges, fibre modems for customer homes and IP aggregation switches.
The Lightspan access nodes being supplied will be used by CityFibre to offer its wholesale customers multigig residential broadband (up to 10Gb/s in both directions) and higher bandwidth services such as connecting enterprises and providing backhaul for mobile networks. Powered by Nokia’s Quillion chipset, the same access nodes can be used for both XGS-PON and 25G PON (25Gb/s) on the same fibre, should CityFibre wish to do this in the future.
John Franklin, chief technology and information officer at CityFibre said: ‘CityFibre is committed to building a full fibre network that is ”better By design”, providing our partners and their customers with the fastest and most reliable services at the best value. By partnering with Nokia we have enlisted a trusted and market-leading technology vendor to help support a nationwide 10Gb/s XGS-PON technology deployment programme.’
Sandy Motley, president, fixed networks at Nokia, added: ‘The demand for ever-faster speeds continues and we’re delighted that our 25G ready solution has been chosen by CityFibre to enable their GPON to 10G XGS-PON national network upgrade program, supporting their mission to offer the highest capacity wholesale services into the UK market,’
Shipments are scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of this year.
CityFibre recently confirmed a debt package totalling £4.9bn that will fully fund the altnet’s roll-out to a third of the UK market by 2025.
