In order to achieve its goal of having multi-gigabit services to 4.5 million premises across the U.K. by March of next year, Openreach is now working with Adtran.
Openreach, which is a division of BT Group, had previously worked with Nokia and Huawei on its FTTx deployments, but picking Adtran may be a way of hedging its bets. The U.K. government has restricted the use of some of Huawei's fiber and 5G gear. President Donald Trump is pressuring the U.K. government to enforce a stricter ban on Huawei.
While the financial terms of the agreement weren't released, it's a huge customer win for Huntsville, Alabama-based Adtran.
Openreach will deploy Adtran's SDX series optical line terminal (OLT) posts and its Mosaic Cloud platform to support Openreach's GPON and XGS-PON network. Openreach plans to have 20 million locations passed with fiber by mid-to late 2020s.
“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," Openreach's Peter Bell, network technologies director, in a statement. “But we don’t want to stop there. Our new network will support the UK’s economy for decades to come and help it bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic, so we’ll be accelerating our Full Fibre build throughout the year.
"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.”
RELATED: Adtran fuels U.K.-based toob's gigabit deployments
Last year, U.K.-based toob picked Adtran to help it build a full fiber platform to deliver gigabit speeds to more than 100,000 premises by the end of 2021.
With rural areas largely underserved by broadband, the British government set forth a mandate of having full-fiber to every home in the U.K. That has led to plethora of fiber builds by new service providers such as toob, CityFibre, Gigaclear, and Hyperoptic. Liberty Global-owned Virgin Media is looking to expand its fiber network beyond urban areas in the U.K. via a wholesale fiber network joint venture.