Openreach Pick Huawei and Nokia Kit for UK FTTP Broadband Rollout

Openreach (BT) has today unsurprisingly announced that Huawei and Nokia have been awarded key contracts to deliver the new electronics (headend) that will support their on-going “Fibre First” project, which aims to roll-out 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband to 3 million UK premises by the end of 2020.

The network operator has a strong history of working with both companies, particularly Huawei (e.g. heavily used for both VDSL2 / FTTC and now G.fast), and as such today’s announcement won’t come as much of a surprise. As for the FTTP side of things, exchange based headend equipment (explained at the end of this article) from Huawei is already being used and Nokia is expected to start installing their own similar kit from July 2019.

Diversifying your supply chain like this is a fairly common practice, as opposed to the risks of sticking all your eggs into one basket. We should add that a lot of the kit being played with as part of EE’s (BT) future deployment of 5G Mobile technology also comes from Huawei (here) and they’ve already picked Nokia’s new ReefShark chipsets to support that side of things (here).

Peter Bell, Openreach CTO & NGA Operations Director, said:

“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 whilst 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.”

Jeffrey Zhou, President of Huawei Access network, said:

“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. Huawei is committed to building a better connected UK.”

Frederic Guillén, President of Nokia Fixed Networks, added:

“We’re excited about this new five-year collaboration with Openreach and are confident that our innovation, strength and operational expertise will benefit all broadband subscribers in the UK.”

Openreach’s “full fibre” FTTP/H network currently covers just 560,000 premises (here) but the operator is working to ramp this up, which is supported by their recent move to hire a further 3,500 engineers (here). The initial deployment is focused upon up to 40 UK towns, cities and boroughs, with Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester having already been confirmed.

The operator also harbours an aspiration to reach 10 million premises by around 2025, although they’ve previously said that this may only be possible with support from other ISPs (difficult since so many are now doing their own builds), as well as softer regulation, reduced logistical barriers (improved planning, wayleaves etc.) and the ability to switch-off old copper networks as areas move to FTTP (expensive and complex).

However an agreement on the above is looking increasingly likely but may hinge on the Government’s forthcoming review of future telecoms infrastructure (due imminently). We should add that deploying FTTP isn’t cheap and Openreach has already indicated that covering 10 million premises in the future could cost between £3bn to £6bn (full details).