Openreach to Fully Withdraw Multiport ONT on UK FTTP Broadband Lines
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has informed UK broadband ISPs that they are now “fully withdrawing” the service option of a Multiport Optical Network Terminal (ONT / ONU) device and the related Box Swap service (i.e. replacing an existing / older ONT with a new Multiport ONT) on full fibre lines. The move follows last year’s complaints about “technical issues” with the service.
The ONT (or optical modem) device is usually installed inside your home or office, near to where the fibre optic broadband cable physically enters your property, and its primary job is simply to take the optical signal and convert it into an electrical one that can then be connected to your broadband router via a Local Area Network (Ethernet) port. The standard ONT is usually a very small single port device for one FTTP line.
However, back in May 2024 Openreach introduced a new Nokia based Multiport ONT device on FTTP lines for those who needed it (here), which was useful for education sites, libraries, post offices, petrol stations, hotels and more. But this appeared to create some technical issues for broadband ISPs using services on Multiport ONTs installed on both Nokia and Huawei based head end exchanges.
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In response to the aforementioned issues, the operator ended up temporarily withdrawing the service for new provisions until 13th June 2026 (here), while they worked with their vendors to try and fix the problems. Sadly, that effort has not been successful and so Openreach have now taken the decision to fully withdraw the Multiport ONT option from 22nd June 2026 for new provisions (the temporary withdrawal date has also been aligned to this).
Existing deployments will continue to be supported and replacements for any faulty Multiport ONT’s with multiple active services will continue to occur, unless there is only a single active service and then faulty Multiport units will be replaced with single port ONTs. Openreach had separately also been conducting trials with a new Adtran based Multiport ONT in Northern Ireland and Ipswich, but that too will now be brought to an end on the same date.
None of this is to say that Openreach won’t try to deploy a Multiport ONT service again in the future, perhaps once XGS-PON based full fibre technology has been fully deployed across their national broadband network. But for the time being it seems to be too problematic for their current platform.
In terms of the problems, some anecdotal feedback suggests that a few of those who tried to order more than one FTTP service / line through a Multiport ONT often ended up with the original (first) active FTTP connection ceasing to function. Trying to rectify such issues often resulted in several costly engineering visits, which were sometimes wasted as there wasn’t always much they could do.
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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 possible to deploy a small optical splitter (either passive or active if that causes too much signal attenuation) that be deployed inside buildings that allows multiple ONTs to connect to a single drop cable? After all the signal is already being passively split at the poles.
That would seem like a sensible option. Although I assume they’d have to be careful about future splits upstream lowering the signal strength too much. Not sure how often that’s done anyway. Probably just a bit of an admin nightmare.
Openreaches contention ratio on a single fibre has typically been 32:1, where on most Alt nets I’ve looked into have a contention ratio more at 64:1, So if we take as given that everything else upstream of the connectorised block terminal on OR is within spec, then a single split at the premises wouild be completely fine, Any more than that would imo start to be pushing it, and thats before you consider that actual users on the line.
Multiport ONTs (imo) only really save running a second (or more) line from the CBT to the prem.
Technically you can the problem will be on the OSS side, you could provision one manually but then if you have any issues, changes to the line the system will fall over itself.
My work had one of these put in for multi fibre lines for a bit of redundancy and as the tech installing it had never seen one before, he accidently turned off our fibre line instead of provisioning one of the other ports so we had no internet all together! had to quickly call out a more senior engineer who managed to get it back on but did take till the end of the day
Not much redundancy if it shares literally the entire path…
Oh dear, problems at Openreach 😉
I thought the endless trials Openreach do to make sure this stuff worked before release were supposed to find issues out?
Someone didn’t do their trial(s) effectively…
Still not entirely sure why Openreach decided to build GPON instead of XGS-PON. On the consumer side, all that is required for an upgrade is an ONT swap, so unless the GPON ONTs they ordered in bulk were cheaper or something, I don’t see how they made any savings from starting out with GPON
The GPON kit was ordered massively in bulk at a huge discount from list price.
Because Openreach started their rollout *before* there was such a thing as XSGPON is the first reason, and the second being the vast majority of people take a service that works on GPON. Thirdly the primary cost in an FTTP rollout is getting the fibre physically installed. What goes either end is almost an afterthought. Openreach could just forget about XSGPON and go straight to 25G-GPON.
one solution is to use a spare fibre from the csp. I think for G-pon and XGS-pon services that would make some sense for the time being.
As aluded in the article very few isps can cope with multi port onts
This only works if there are multiple fibres in the CSP, which is mostly on Openreach’s Blown Fibre network type. The newer CBT network would need a multi fibre cable to be brought in for the same effect but they usually use single fibre drop wires.
With that in mind they could bring a new drop wire and connect to the existing CSP, saving space
The cable to the CSP is predominantly a single-fibre drop cable so there would be no spare fibre at the CSP.
My Huawei continues to run fine with a service on the second port. Before I took an altnet service was running fine with services on ports 1 and 2. Briefly had 1, 2 and 3 occupied with no problems.
Maybe the Chinese stuff isn’t so bad after all.
Most of the Anti-Chinese stuff was just political under pressure from Trump, as far as I know no malware or back doors was ever found in any Huawei kit. I have just upgraded my Plusnet Hub 2 router to a TP-Link Archer BE220 and at £65 is a great value upgrade.
@Polish Poler It isn’t that the “Chinese stuff” doesn’t work, it works, the issue is a) did they poach the tech from others without paying their dues (not the end of the world for me personally) b) are they actually coding secure products or is the drive to lower the cost effecting the “quality” of work producing insecure gear. BUT with our own drive to AI ALL THE THINGS, we can say the same about our own coding in the western world.
I’m pretty confident my ONT isn’t going to be compromised given it’s no public facing IP address and the management is behind a router. OLTs seem okay. Routers a different matter entirely.
I never had any issues with these as suggested. Working services always ported to port 1 correctly and new service activated on port 2.
The primary issue was CP related, they would place a 4 port order for a “speed upgrade” or instead of a takeover it would be a whole new contract/service on port 2 for a residential property.. So a new 4 port was ordered for no genuine reason.
It’s a very niche set off issues relating to how VLANs and multicast is handled. The issues boils down to a chip on the ONT board. So the fix would be waiting for the chip manufacturer to provide a fix to the vendor, vendor provide and validate a new software package and then openreach to do the same.
Who knows, maybe there will be some decent multiport offerings with xgs
Be interesting to know if this was entirely a technical issue with the hardware or if in part it was a provider issue; I can remember back 10+ years to the challenges on the early Bradwell Abbey pilot deployments on the original Huawei 4 port ONTs with built in voice port and BBUs trying to get the provider to place an order a service in the 2nd and 3rd ports and not to take over the existing port 1 live service and that was with a human in the loop.
I can well imagine that introduce automated order processing workflows that something non standard like the presence of or request for a multiport conversion could result in things going wrong and services getting ceased/ported instead.
The issue I can see is Openreach seem to be building out optitap CBTs on poles round here (and I assume the same for underground CBTs for ducted properties) sized based on a 1:1 optitap port to passed property ratio; so unless you have properties passed and using an altnet then installing multiple parallel customer lead in cables might start to provide problematic once you reach high levels of FTTP uptake.