BT’s wholesale access arm will use the vendor’s software-defined, fibre access platform nationwide.
Openreach will rely on ADTRAN’s SDX series of optical line termination (OLT) technology and Mosaic Cloud Platform to help it achieve its catch-up goal of making gigabit and multi-gigabit services available to 20 million homes by the mid-to-late 2020s.
ADTRAN claims to offer the industry’s highest OLT port density per rack via the SDX platform and can support gigabit and multi-gigabit access links on the same OLT port.
More than 600 retail carriers across the UK use Openreach’s infrastructure to deliver services to enterprise, small-to-medium businesses and residential customers.
The UK is one of Europe’s laggards when it comes to fibre deployment – the FTTH Council Europe’s most recent figures, for the year ending September 2019, suggest that take up is at 2.8% with the percentage of homes and other buildings passed at 18.2%. It is third from the bottom of the FTTH Europe Council’s ranking of 34 countries.
On track
Peter Bell, Network Technologies Director, Openreach said, “We’re already making our new ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband network available to around 32,000 UK homes and businesses every week – and we’re on track to reach our target of reaching four and a half million premises with ‘Full Fibre’ by the end of March 2021.
“ADTRAN’s solutions will play a key role in helping us achieve that as we’re continually searching for innovative technologies that can help us build the network better, broader and faster for our customers.”
This is because it promises to enable Openreach economically to scale its GPON and XGS-PON network with greater flexibility than older tech solutions can.