Openreach has chosen two tech giants to help deliver their national rollout of Fibre-to-the-Premises technology.

Nokia and Huawei have been awarded contracts by Openreach to provide new electronics that support the company’s exchange based equipment (headend).

The kit supplied and installed by both companies will be installed as part of an exchange known as a “Handover Point”.

Both Huawei and Nokia will play a key role in supporting and deploying the Fibre First” programme.

The programme, announced in March this year, set out its proposals to reach more than three million British homes and businesses by the end of 2020 using fibre technology.

Peter Bell, CTO and NGA Operations Director at Openreach said: “We’ll be going flat out to make FTTP available to three million homes by the end of 2020, and we want to reach 10 million by the mid-2020s, so using cutting-edge technology will be integral to achieving that.”

Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and London made up the eight cities that are part of the first phase of Openreach’s “Fibre First” programme as 40 UK cities, towns, and boroughs will be connected with FTTP networks.

This comes after the communications regulator Ofcom warned the digital business network’s parent company BT that it was too involved with the independently-owned provider’s strategic plans nearly a month ago.

Fibre, Fibre, Fibre

Huawei has already started deploying the new kit across the new fibre network whereas Nokia is expected to install equipment by July 2019.

Jeffrey Zhou, President of Huawei Access Network highlighted their partnership with Openreach has been going for several years.

Zhou commented in a release: “As a long-term strategic partner of Openreach, we look forward to continuing our work with the fibre and network delivery team.

“We welcome the opportunity to help build a better, faster and intelligent network that helps Openreach customers stay connected. Huawei is committed to building a better connected UK.”

Frederic Guillén, President of Nokia Fixed Networks added: “We’re excited about this new five-year collaboration with Openreach and are confident that our innovation, strength and operational expertise will benefit all broadband subscribers in the UK.”