Openreach has chosen Huawei and Nokia to help deliver its national FTTP rollout to three million homes and businesses across the UK by the end of 2020.
The companies have been awarded contracts to provide new electronics that support Openreach’s exchange based equipment – known as the headend. The kit acts as a digital gateway, managing and translating high-speed data signals between customers’ premises and the wider network.
Huawei has already started to deploy the new kit across the Openreach fibre network, whilst Nokia is expected to start installing equipment from July next year.
Both deployments will play a critical role in supporting Openreach’s ‘Fibre First’ programme to reach three million premises by the end of 2020, using ‘Fibre-to-the-Premises’ technology where fibre optic cables are laid from the exchange right to people’s front doors.
Openreach wants to extend this rollout still further to around 10 million premises by the mid-2020s, and ultimately the majority of homes and businesses across Britain if it has the right conditions to invest.
Peter Bell, CTO & NGA Operations Director, Openreach
We’ll be going flat out to make FTTP available to three million homes by the end of 2020, and we want to reach 10 million by the mid-2020s, so using cutting-edge technology will be integral to achieving that.
Jeffey Zhou, President of Huawei Access Network
As a long-term strategic partner of Openreach, we look forward to continuing our work with the fibre and network delivery team. We welcome the opportunity to help build a better, faster and intelligent network that helps Openreach customers stay connected.
