CityFibre UK Pilot uCPE Universal Customer Premises Equipment

Network builder CityFibre has today announced that they’re piloting enhanced “virtualisation capabilities” for business ISPs across their UK full fibre broadband and Ethernet network, which among other things includes the interesting addition of Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE).

At present the operator is investing £4.9bn to cover up to 8 million premises – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – with their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network by the end of 2025 (here). So far the operator also already covered 1.7 million UK premises – with 1.5m ‘Ready For Service‘ via a supporting ISP (here).

However, CityFibre also provide various Dark Fibre and business connectivity services, which help to underpin the above work. As part of that, the operator is now working with Telco Systems, a provider of edge compute solutions and subsidiary of BATM Advanced Communications, to pilot enhanced virtualisation capabilities across its network.

The goal of this is to give business ISPs a faster and more flexible set of solutions for their customers, while also reducing costs, complexity, and environmental impact. Part of this involves a pilot of Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE), which is something we’ve seen other operators (e.g. Vodafone) playing around with too.

What is uCPE?

At present a lot of fixed broadband and mobile networks still rely on specialised hardware to help deliver certain services to consumers and businesses, such as a router, firewall or WAN optimiser. All of these tend to come from different manufacturers, which can leave networks beholden to those firms for future updates.

The idea of uCPE is to create a general-purpose platform that can provide network services (such as SD WAN, firewall etc.) as virtual functions to any site on a network (VNF). As a result, the operator no longer needs to rely on, or be limited by, specialised hardware to deliver services and some or all of that functionality can instead be delivered virtually as software.

The uCPE system mentioned above is powered by Telco Systems’ Edgility OS (operating system) and Edgility Central (cloud-based management and orchestration system). The pilot supports bandwidths of up to 10Gbps, without business ISPs incurring the higher costs of ‘vendor-locked’ multi-gigabit-capable equipment.

This edge compute technology, says the operator, will enable business ISPs to “rapidly deploy, remotely manage and automatically upgrade products such as VoIP, SD-WAN and next generation firewalls from any chosen vendor over a single uCPE device, with no need for engineer visits.” The fact that future services can then be provided without the need to despatch, install and power additional on-site hardware also slashes the total cost of ownership, and carbon footprint of the operator.

David Tomalin, Group CTO of CityFibre, said:

“This is another important step towards our ambitious vision for a fully virtualised network. Telco Systems’ carrier-grade networking expertise and management of virtualised edge devices at scale makes them an ideal innovation partner. Their ‘Edgility Suite’ enables us to efficiently manage vast numbers of physical edge devices from a single location.

By separating the software systems from network components, and introducing whitebox hardware, we can enable our ISP partners to radically improve their service offering to businesses while providing greater control over costs, choice of virtualised service vendor, and reducing waste and CO2 emissions. These are the benefits of a network that is Better By Design.”

Arguably, some broadband routers can already do a lot of this and there are limits to such an approach, such as when physical connectivity standards change. Nevertheless, this does seem to be the future direction of travel for CityFibre, as well as a growing number of other operators.