BT Group’s infrastructure unit Openreach has signed an agreement with American networking and communications firm Adtran to limit its dependence on Chinese company Huawei and to speed up construction of a fibre-based broadband system across Britain.
Under the government’s new rules, ‘high-risk’ vendors (such as Huawei) are excluded from sensitive ‘core’ parts of 5G and gigabit-capable networks, with a 35 percent cap on high-risk vendors supplying parts to the non-sensitive areas of 5G and high-speed fibre-based networks.
Huawei currently accounts for 44 percent of the UK’s full-fibre market, as per government data. BT, which currently has Huawei and Finnish Nokia Oyj as strategic partners, said earlier this year that complying with the government’s new rules might cost it £500 million.
Openreach wants to provide ultrafast broadband service to 20 million homes before the end of the year with its Full Fibre network, and Adtran’s SDX Series of optical line terminals (OLTs) and Mosaic Cloud Platform will help it to achieve that ambition.
More than 600 retail carriers across the UK currently rely on Openreach to offer a broad portfolio of services to resident customers, enterprises, and small-to-medium businesses.
Openreach claims to have the biggest fibre broadband network in the UK, covering more than 27 million premises.
