Openreach Prep 100Gbps Cablelinks to Support 8.5Gbps UK Broadband
Network access provider Openreach (BT) are understood to be preparing a new 100Gbps capable Cablelink (Ethernet) solution to support their future 8.5Gbps speed full fibre (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband products for UK homes. But initially any retail providers taking part in the XGS-PON pilot will need to use multiple 10G Cablelinks for capacity.
Just for a little context. The Cablelink products are how Openreach provide data capacity for their full fibre and other connections (i.e. the connection between their fibre headend and an ISP’s own equipment). But at present the fastest links available only go up to 10Gbps, which will become a bit tedious once their 8.5Gbps FTTP products start becoming available (commercially) to homes and businesses in the future.
ISPreview now understands that Openreach are developing a new 100G Cablelink Service Connect (GEA-CSC) product to help cater for the capacity demands of their future broadband products. At present this is still a bit of a work-in-progress solution, which means we’re not expecting it to even enter the trial phase until around this time next year.
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The fact that this is lagging behind Openreach’s FTTP (XGS-PON) pilot of broadband speeds up to 8.5Gbps, which are due to get underway from 23rd March 2026 (here and here), does seem odd. But Openreach’s pilot is currently only set to be available across a few tens of thousands of premises in the Guildford, Woking, Brookwood, Puttenham, Clandon, Shere and Worplesdon areas – out of those they only anticipate in the hundreds of customers.
Suffice to say that any ISPs taking part in the pilot (we currently only know of EE) will, for now, need to use multiple 10Gbps Cablelinks to support XGS-PON’s significantly faster top speeds. We don’t currently have any details on the pricing for the new 100G Cablelink products, but that should become known later this year and is likely to be more affordable than the equivalent of 10 x 10G links.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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is it still gonna have 100mbit upload haha
The ‘S’ in XGS-PON thankfully stands for ‘symmetric’, so at long last it should be symmetric thankfully!
They are not going to go bankrupt haha
Anon2, they wont go bankrupt. Been some close calls with debt and takeovers over the years.
No older tech just holds the country back, and charging over the odds for services just because you are a business, makes business pass it on to everyone else. Like locking smaller business out of fttp and trying to force leased lines. Symmetric fttp would be far cheaper and be perfectly OK for small businesses….
I’m supprised 100Gbps Cablelinks aren’t already available. Would be interesting to know the max number of 10G links being used at the moment. Like is it just 3-4 or are there 27 or something in some places. I presume it’s under 10 mostly otherwise 100Gbps Cablelinks would of been brought in sooner.
On average it’s as you say. In most exchanges there’s more than one ‘L2s’ and you need to connect to every L2s in the exchange in order to gain full coverage. A Typical large ISP in a exchange with say 3 FTTP L2s and 1 mostly FTTC L2s is likely to have 2-3 10G links to each L2s so they’d have 100G in capacity overall but not down one cablelink. Obviously smaller exchanges might have like 2 L2s and they’ve just got 1-2 10G on each or something and still using 2x 10G on the backhaul – but that’s getting less common.
Interesting thanks for the insight.
Wow, I would have thought this would be in place when XGS is rolled out, so potential packet ordering problems then if traffic goes over misconfigured bonded links.