Openreach has selected Huawei and Nokia to provide a range of equipment in support of its ultrafast broadband roll out across the UK.
The vendors will provide switches, modems and street cabinet ‘side pods’ that use G.fast technology to deliver download speeds up to 330Mb/s to 10 million homes and businesses by the end of 2020.
Huawei and Nokia have been working with Openreach on one of the world’s largest trials of G.fast technology in Huntingdon, Gosforth and Swansea. Moving on to the next stage, a large-scale customer pilot roll-out will begin in parts of Gillingham in Kent and Cherry Hinton, near Cambridge, later this year.
This deployment will help Openreach deliver its ambition of getting ultrafast broadband of at least 100Mb/s to 12 million premises in the same timeframe, and the majority of the UK by the end of 2025 (see BT puts G.fast at heart of its broadband strategy).
Clive Selley, Openreach CEO, said: “Openreach is pioneering G.fast technology because we want to get affordable ultrafast speeds to as many people as possible in the fastest possible time. This country already has the best superfast broadband coverage and take-up amongst the big economies in Europe, and we want to repeat that success with ultrafast. We’ll be going flat out to reach 12 million homes by 2020 and we are really leading the way by bringing cutting-edge kit to the UK at a huge scale.”
Huawei is a long-standing supplier and partner to Openreach. Jeff Wang, president of Huawei Access network, commented: “Huawei’s investment and innovation in G.fast will help Openreach to deploy ultrafast broadband from the street cabinet instead of the distribution point, making the business case viable for a large-scale rollout and accelerating the rollout speed.”
