Openreach Selects Huawei and Nokia for "Fiber First" program

LONDON — Openreach has chosen Huawei and Nokia, to help deliver its national rollout of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, which will reach three million British homes and businesses across the UK by the end of 2020.

The companies will 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 fiber network, while Nokia is expected to start installing equipment in July 2019.

Staying Ahead of Demand
According to Peter Bell, Openreach CTO and NGA operations director, “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. Britons consume more than double the amount of data they did just three years ago and while we’re already a leading digital economy, Openreach continues to invest in network upgrades to make sure we can repeat that success and keep well ahead of demand.”

Both deployments will play a critical role in supporting Openreach’s "Fiber First" program to reach three million premises by the end of 2020, using fiber-to-the-premises’ technology where fiber 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.