Openreach partners with ADTRAN to build ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband to customers throughout the UK

May 14, 2020 - HUNTSVILLE, Ala: More than 600 retail carriers across the United Kingdom rely on Openreach to deliver the wholesale capacity to support a broad portfolio of services to enterprise, small-to-medium businesses and residential customers.

Peter Bell, Network Technologies Director, Openreach said: “We’re already making our new ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband network available to around 32,000 UK homes and businesses every week – and we’re on track to reach our target of reaching four and a half million premises with ‘Full Fibre’ by the end of March 2021.”

“But we don’t want to stop there. Our new network will support the UK’s economy for decades to come and help it bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic, so we’ll be accelerating our Full Fibre build throughout the year. ADTRAN’s solutions will play a key role in helping us achieve that as we’re continually searching for innovative technologies that can help us build the network better, broader and faster for our customers.”

By delivering the industry’s highest OLT port density per rack, ADTRAN’s SDX platform will enable Openreach to economically scale its GPON and XGS-PON network with a level of flexibility that could not be realized with traditional access solutions. The platform’s disaggregated, flexible design provides the framework to support Openreach’s vast number of customers by delivering the granularity of interconnect speeds required to meet the needs of retail service providers of all sizes. Capable of supporting gigabit and multi-gigabit access links on the same OLT port, Openreach’s retail customers can deliver the right mix of enterprise, business and residential services based on their own demographics, industry type and residential interests.

“ADTRAN is thrilled to be part of Openreach’s plan to upgrade the UK’s broadband infrastructure and the selection is a proof point that ADTRAN’s open, disaggregated approach to service creation and delivery is a blueprint for the telecommunications industry,” said Dan Whalen, ADTRAN’s Chief Product Officer. “Given the breadth of Openreach’s Full Fibre network, having the ability to deliver GPON and XGS-PON services from the same OLT port streamlines service delivery and reduces the complexity of network design. We make it possible for any service provider, based anywhere in the country, to have the service options they require to fit their customer’s needs.”

About ADTRAN

At ADTRAN, Inc., we believe amazing things happen when people connect. From the cloud edge to the subscriber edge, we help communications service providers around the world manage and scale services that connect people, places and things to advance human progress. Whether rural or urban, domestic or international, telco or cable, enterprise or residential—ADTRAN solutions optimize existing technology infrastructures and create new, multi-gigabit platforms that leverage cloud economics, data analytics, machine learning and open ecosystems—the future of global networking. Find more at ADTRAN, LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Openreach

Openreach Limited is the UK’s digital network business.

We’re 35,000 people, working in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world.

Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in the UK can be connected.

We work on behalf of more than 620 communications providers like SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, BT and Zen, and our fibre broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 27.5m UK premises.

Over the last decade we’ve invested more than £14 billion into our network and, at more than 185 million kilometres – it’s now long enough to wrap around the world 4,617 times.

Today we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof broadband network which will be the UK’s digital platform for decades to come. We’re making progress towards to our FTTP target to reach 20m premises by mid-to-late 2020s. We’ve also hired over 3,000 trainee engineers this past financial year to help us build that network and deliver better service across the country.

Openreach is a highly regulated, wholly owned, and independently governed division of the BT Group. More than 90 per cent of our revenues come from services that are regulated by Ofcom and any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.

For the year ended 31 March 2020, we reported revenue of £5.1bn.