Netomnia Update on Plan for 50Gbps UK FTTP Network by End of 2024
Alternative operator Netomnia, which is currently merging with Brsk (here) and supported by broadband ISP YouFibre, has given an update to ISPreview on their plan to deploy ADTRAN’s cutting edge 50G PON kit across their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. This should start to go live before the end of 2024 and package speeds of 40Gbps will be offered.
Just to recap. The combined networks of Netomnia and Brsk currently reach over 1.82 million UK premises as ‘Ready for Service‘ and this is home to a total customer base of 190,000 (30th Sept 2024). But the merged group also has a short-term target of growing this coverage to reach 3 million premises (coverage) by the end of 2025, as well as 1 million customers by 2028, cementing their position as one of the largest national networks.
Both operators are presently using XGS-PON technology to power their networks, which is capable of delivering symmetric speeds up to 10Gbps (YouFibre already has a 7-8Gbps package for £99.99 per month). But at the start of this year we reported that Netomnia were planning a major network upgrade, which would see them rolling out ADTRAN’s 50Gbps (50G-PON) capable kit (here) – the first UK provider to do so.
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However, little was known about the actual roll-out plan for this bleeding edge technology, which is perhaps understandable given that the 50 Gigabit Passive Optical Network (PON) standard is still relatively recent (here). Similarly, at the time of the original announcement, ADTRAN’s related SDX 6400 Optical Line Terminals (OLT) didn’t even appear on their website and that remains true today.
Since then another alternative network, Ogi, has recently announced plans to deploy 50G PON technology into their own FTTP network using Nokia‘s kit in Wales (here), which is due to go live sometime in 2025. Suffice to say that we thought now would be a good time to check in on Netomnia and see how they’re progressing.
What’s new?
The plan is to start rolling out the live 50G-PON service from ADTRAN by the end of 2024 and it will then take around a year to fully deploy – initially based on demand (a difficult thing to quantify for this sort of speed). The new kit will be deployed alongside their existing XGS-PON platform, without disrupting existing customers.
The service will also be launching with some new products, including a full 10Gbps symmetric service (you can’t strictly do this via XGS-PON, due to network overheads and advertising rules etc.) and a 40Gbps package to follow – available for both homes and businesses (exact launch dates for these are not yet known). But naturally this will also require a new ONT (optical modem) and a monster router, the details of which are also not yet known.
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Suffice to say that this is an entirely new realm of performance for the residential market, one that will put the provider into a different league. But it’s also likely to be very expensive on the domestic side, which suggests that the real prize may be in its marketing value and bragging rights. Particularly since neither end-users nor most of the internet are really able to fully harness 40Gbps today (even 1-10Gbps is still a huge challenge – Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver). But technological evolution rarely waits for the slowest users and devices to catch-up.
Naturally, there will always be those who find reason to moan, even when a member of the industry does something as striking as this. But such developments are also the reason why Netomnia are one of the most exciting alternative networks in the UK, which is in no small part down to their willingness to push the boundaries of network technology – often while setting new benchmarks for consumer speeds and affordability.
On the other hand, such ambition does have its limits, which in this case might be tempered a bit by some of the supply-side issues that ADTRAN have recently been experiencing. Getting brand-new technologies to market and in a finished state is rarely a completely smooth process.
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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Why? Why would anyone need 40Gbps service for?
How is your faster horse?
Well apart from bragging rights probably not many. The main benefit will be to mitigate the effect of contention ratios as individual customers ramp up use.
I can’t speak for anyone else but I get the higher speeds because I can and your comments. Jealousy is an unfortunate but entertaining emotion.
Going to have to change my name, aren’t I Jeremy? 50GSPON might work, LGS, hmmm. X was just cooler until Elmo ruined it for everyone.
In 1981, Bill Gates said the same thing about 640k of RAM: “640K ought to be enough for anybody”
At the moment is to fit as many users as possible on single port, so rather having many OLT devices in the cabinet each consuming electricity, they will have less.
Bill Gates is still wrong today about everything, funny how things dont change after 40 years
My solution to the router issue is a Mikrotik CCR2116: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq
Other options available including any hardware with enough power and 2 QSFP28 ports.
You doing a write-up if/when you get it? 🙂
@Matt I’m sure he already has it
Don’t think any of the public have it in the UK.
Not sure what kind of things I could write or talk about. Speed tests are only exciting once.
Look for an older Arista 7280. Less expensive and generally faster.
I disagree 🙂
having kit thats able to sustain that sort of traffic level thats “home-user” tier, as well as knowing if any services can even get anywhere near to saturating the link is interesting.
Speed tests themselves likely won’t show you decent speeds, I’m guessing they’ll have to have in-network test files to pull to test connectivity performance.
Its good they pushing the boundaries, but the practical use case is really bragging right, 40GBPS is datacentre levels of bandwidth.
However having the best flagship product can bring people to your brand, it works well in the PC tech industry, so maybe it will work to some degree in the broadband market, it gets the Netomnia and Youfibre names out there.
I was wondering if 24 hour 4K news channels / heavy 8K media companies are the main user cause for this type of speed?
High time critical nature. Otherwise CDNs?
I would welcome any increase in speeds, so good work lads.
any proper user of a 40 gig line would probably not want it on PON anyway (or at least, they’d want assurance that they’re the only customer on that PON and therefore cannot suffer from congestion within the access network). they’d also pay heavily for the privilege of getting what is effectively a leased line service with leased line performance.
unless you’re sending uncompressed video then you don’t need such connectivity, and if you are then you’re probably using dedicated IP links that don’t go near the internet (eg TV studios, sports stadiums, major public spaces like No10/Parliament/Whitehall) have fibre that’s ready to be lit up at a moment’s notice, and the major broadcasters all have private WANs to link their facilities. Even satellite and cellular feeds from the field are only on the order of tens of Mbps at the absolute maximum.
An entire UK university will have less than 40Gbps bandwidth. At work we have redundant 10Gbps at the moment to become 25Gbps next year I believe. Sustained 10Gbps transfers is really hard to achieve in my experience.
It is probably only of use to business users and could well add a lot to costs meaning charges may increase even if you do no take the HS product
If you follow the roman numeral sequence started by XGS-PON then 50G should be known as LGS-PON. Next stop CGS-PON.
I like that!
I do wish Netomnia could make use of its News blog area to share updares. The last update of any note relating to fibre builds was in July, and they’ve not yet shared plans on where they will be building in 2025, considering we are into Q4 of 2024. Really excited for their network to reach me where i live, but hard to be excited when there isn’t enough information about their builds in the public domain,
They probably aren’t building anywhere new, but building out where they already are.
Where is BT Ivor when you need him 🙂
So I was right, as BT ponder, dwell and trial to a few selected new rollout sites, XGS-PON to 1 tier level (GIG1) from March next year, the competition (the might ALTNETS) are gearing up for actual deployment of 50G-PON as I said in other posts before.
BT left in the dust with their current legacy product, GPON, where they belong. 🙂
glad you remembered me.
My opinions are much in line with the others – in terms of providing faster speeds to individual customers then this is a total gimmick, in terms of alleviating congestion then it may make more sense (though with the typical poor takeup of most altnets is there really any risk of congestion to begin with?)
Openreach doesn’t seem to be suffering from major congestion issues with GPON – and as has been said to you before, GPON kit is cheaper (important when you operate at actual scale and have profitability in mind, unlike most altnets) and they can deploy newer technologies when the technical need arises, rather than to generate press releases.
Welcome back Ivor 🙂
I actually agree with you except for the last bit on BT’s GPON as they should have started rolling out XGS-PON by now. BT just storing up more expensive with GPON ONTs that need to be replaced later and another (long winded) trial(s) and roll out programme.
It would probably make more sense for Openreach to stick with GPON for now then jump straight to 50G.It just depends how quickly the price of the gear comes down. I’m not holding my breath though.
Openreach have been installing XGSPON-ready kit for years. The only GPON-only stuff still going in was bought ages ago, ONTs.
Delighted Openreach are not in a rush: more room for other networks to differentiate through innovation.
I agree with you. HOWEVER – for many millions of households, Openreach is the only provider that might actually deliver a fibre connection.
Giganet rolled out in our area but they excluded certain streets (like ours). And on some streets, randomly excluded certain properties (anything that required wayleaves). This is the issue with many alt-nets. They cherry pick cities/towns/villages, then cherry pick which streets they install in, and then further cherry pick the easiest properties to deploy to.
With Openreach, there is a better probability of having an entire area covered, even the more expensive-to-deploy streets (like ours). Openreach will be here in summer 2025 and realistically, that is the only hope for us to get anything faster than FTTC.
Giganet is a no-go (they’ve confirmed no build for our street). Cityfibre is building in our city (initial spine works), but I don’t expect them to do anything different to Giganet. Trooli has now popped up as well, again not hoping for much.
Whatever their faults, and there are many, but they get the job done. And to their credit, they have announced a symmetric product which should soon be widely available. And hopefully faster symmetric products in the future. Who knows.
Netomnia 50 Gbps – yeah great move. But realistically, less than 5% of UK properties will actually be able to order that service from them.
Would be happy with 0.1Gbps let alone 50Gbps 🙁
Same. It’s depressing when some people are getting the 4th or 5th iteration/generation of a new product (with sometimes up to five vendors to choose from) when you are still stuck on ancient VDSL. I live in an urban area.
For those who say this is pointless – I agree… for a single customer.
The thing you have to remember is that PON networks have inherent contention, so capacity is split and shared with all customers on a given OLT port. upgrading to 50Gbps allows ISPs to increase capacity density and reduce contention across packages. XGS PON offers 10Gpbs, so it is not inconceivable that a subscriber on Youfibre’s 8Gpbs package could take 80% of the available bandwidth. If the split ratio is 1/64, that’s 63 potential customers that would have 2Gbps to share.
I caveat that all of the above is theoretical, but it is possible. So don’t think of it in terms of a single customer but rather joint capacity enabling you to more realistically reach higher speeds (1Gbps) without contention. Again, with the caveat of available backhaul capacity too.
As long as the networks don’t use it as an excuse to increase contention ratios. 128:1, 256:1…….
Except that it doesn’t help today.
The initial ONT are large and expensive, mostly 1u rackmount devices. This is test lab tertiary at the moment and not ready for commercial rollout except for some very isolated cases.
For high speed dedicated services it’s technical and commercially better to do p2p.
In terms of real world look at Openreach split ratios. They run up to 1:32 split on gpon. You aren’t seeing reports of significant congestion there yet.
@ Insider.
I don’t deny that commercial services shouldn’t be using dedicated P2P connections. Those that require DIA shouldn’t be using connections with contention.
There’s certainly a lot of bragging involved with these announcements but there are real world practical applications, even if they can’t be realised today.
Perhaps greater split ratios are on the way, as I imagine there are noticeable packaging and power advantages.
I’d be happy with just a standard gigabit connection in my street from any provider other than Virgin Media or OpenReach
All these companies and none of them are in my area!
So you have a choice of two gigabit networks and hundreds of ISPs and are still unhappy?
100s of ISPs? Where? Not in my street.
Virgin Media/O2 is a running joke, I had it and got rid of it because of all the problems.
There are no Alt Providers which means I have to pay full price to get OpenReach’s restricted upload speeds. So yes, I am unhappy.
“100s of ISPs? Where?”
Via Openreach of course
It’s only in the last 10 years that transatlantic subsea cables were upgraded from 10G to 100G channels. The type of customers utilising 100G channels are the likes of the big tech companies connecting datacentres together.
Any Enterprise customer requiring 10G capacity, or more, would likely require SLA’s far better than those offered by a shared 50G PON, so they’d likely have direct connectivity with 4 hour fix SLA’s.
50G PON will likely be under utilised, dependent on the number of connected premises, so this is probably more aimed at marketing rather than need. As and when future bandwidth requirements increase, GPON, XGS PON and 50G PON can work in parallel on a single fibre.
The only current advantage of 50G PON, I can think of, is to support more customers per fibre
I wonder if Netomnia will do higher splits at exchange level to limit the amount of work required for let’s say 128 splits as I can’t see a home user being able to use those speeds, the kit for 25Gbit is still up in the 2K range.
Given the Adtran SDX6405 is a 4 port chassis I doubt they’d be lighting up PONs preemptively. Install on demand until the price per port goes way down and port density per RU way up.
50GSPON is bleeding edge stuff. There are no large deployments, only smaller ones to limited populations using Huawei kit. There are no ONTs not needing rack mounting and the optics are very pricey.
As Ex Telecom Engineer says really. Should be able to provide end customers who are on the 2gbps/7gbps/10gbps with actual throughput ANYTIME of the day, rather than more constrained bandwidth being shared in hope people not maxing it out 24/7.
Another positive step for ALTNET customers against the incumbent Openreach with its legacy GPON product.
I do wonder if Netomnia hope to capitalise on small businesses that either pay for a leased line and it’s hurting them, or those other small businesses stuck on something like VM Business Broadband who desperately need something better, but couldn’t afford leased lines. I suspect this may be the case, and Netomnia through their ISP partners could offer a business package with enhanced SLA that’s still cheaper than a leased line equivalent.
It wasn’t clear from the article, but I assume this means they would be planning to roll this out across the entire post-merger footprint (Netomnia and Brsk) and not just the original Netomnia footprint?
Nonetheless, great to see investment in proper next-gen kit. Will really help them stand out in the market as a proper performance focused wholesaler.
Nokia there 🙂
YouFibre passes my home, im just about coming up to end of contract with BT, not going to bother with any early terminatiin as BT leave bad credit report even over a few pounds! so you better believe 30days (to be safe) before December contract ends, calls/emails will be going in to switch and book YouFibre, last check 8000mbps package was available but with this news of 50G kit being deployed maybe other packages to be made available in the coming months? I know Ogi are around Cardiff Newport, Heads of the valleys areas, but YouFibre are 100% in my street as a neighbour has FTTP with them..
This is great news Technology is continuing to progress and even if 50G is headline grabber, it should go to put BT to shame and hopefully light a fire under them to roll out worldclass FTTP speeds for their own network and sto playing around with sub 10G fttp and asymmetric packages and just carve up their leasedline business to offer full symetrical Fast FTTP nation wide.
YouFibre/Netomnia .. Here we come
guessing you missed the article a few weeks back re openreach doing some sync installs/trials in april 2025. guessing it was more important to get the 16million build so far actually built ( 4m added per year build rate now ) and on a budget ( no doubt at the start xpon was a lot more ££ than gpon module and prob xpon module is now close to the price of a gpon module, hence the installs in a few months etc )
They wired up bedford in 2022. It’s been more than 2 years since then and nothing. When you ask them, they say they don’t know. When I asked Jeremy he said he’d check, then ghosted me.
I don’t understand how you can wire up an entire town and then just ‘forget’ about it. It seems like a giant waste of money to me. Fortunately I didn’t wait and got openreach FTTP as soon as it became available but i’d really much rather have had 500/500 from YF than 1000/110 from Openreach
oh well. I do wonder, but i’m passed the point of asking now because you just get fobbed off. I suppose before i get moaned at , I should point out netomnias website says Bedford has been ” Live ” for over 2 years. But it’s not. You can’t order it and no postcode in the entire town works.
Wow
The contractor they had in Bedford went bust (light source I believe). Once they finish their Essex builds it should resume with that contractor
All this talk about going that fast, I would just like something quicker than 35mbps!
Not a lot of point to it right now. But if someone like Steam could saturate it and the in-home networking tech needed for it came down to a reasonable price and the subscription cost was sub-£100 then being able to download a 200 GB game in under a minute a is a big draw for me. None of those conditions are true right now but could well be in a few years.
And here I am living with Starlink because I can’t get more than 30Mbps
Well Netomnia about to fire up in Wrexham, Don’t think I can afford this any which way!
Anyone got a motherin law I can sell?
This is so pointless and just covering up cracks
Debt high, losses high, doubling up of costs with Brsk merger.. what next
yawn…..BT troll alert.