 Openreach tests out Nokia's 50G PON tech
BT's networks arm Openreach has laid claim to a new UK broadband speed record, as it inches towards its long-awaited XGS-PON upgrade.
It has been trying out 50G PON, an optical networking technology that tops out at symmetric 50 Gbps – five times faster than XGS-PON. It carried out a test over its existing fibre network at a residential property in Ipswich, reaching 41.9 Gbps on the downlink, and 20.6 Gbps on the uplink.
It can't have escaped anyone's attention that Ipswich is also the location of BT's Adastral Park R&D centre. What are the chances this "residential property" happens to be the abode of a nearby BT researcher?
As impressive as this trial is, Openreach is getting a little ahead of itself – after all, it has yet to commercially deploy XGS-PON. This makes it something of a laggard, given CityFibre and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) both have.
Being the national incumbent and having the largest fibre footprint, it's a different proposition for Openreach, but there's no getting away from the fact that it has been five years since the subject of XGS-PON appeared in an Openreach announcement.
Maybe with this latest trial, Openreach is finally ready to upgrade to symmetric fibre.
"As the country's largest full fibre provider, it's crucial that we continue to research, innovate and evolve our network to meet our customers' demands for decades to come," said Trevor Linney, Openreach's director of network technology.
"The full fibre network we're building today is a platform for the UK's economic, social and environmental prosperity, and this test proves we can keep upgrading the speeds and services our customers experience over that network long into the future," he said. "Today we're deploying XGS-PON ready equipment, and this trial proves we're ready for the next generational leap, as and when it's needed."
Linney's not giving much away when he says XGS-PON "ready", but it suggests that a launch is in the pipeline but not imminent.
The 50G PON equipment used in Openreach's test was supplied by its longstanding partner Nokia, which has conducted one of its semi-regular media blitzes, peppering the wires with a raft of new developments.
Sticking with fixed-line, in addition to this test with Openreach, Nokia has also been providing XGS-PON equipment for Singaporean telco StarHub, which has just completed the nationwide deployment of its 10-Gbps broadband network.
It aligns neatly with the Singapore government's Digital Connectivity Blueprint. Launched in 2023, it aims to upgrade the country's entire digital infrastructure, from networks and middleware, to devices and software. On the networks side, it set a target of boosting domestic broadband capacity to 10 Gbps over the next five years.
The XGS-PON announcement comes not long after Nokia won a deal to help StarHub monetise its APIs.
On the mobile side of things, Nokia has scored a new five-year deal with Orange, one that will see it upgrade the French incumbent's 5G networks in southeastern and western France.
Under the agreement, Nokia will supply O-RAN compliant products from its energy-efficient AirScale portfolio, including baseband, massive MIMO radios, and FDD multiband remote radio heads. It all runs on Nokia's ReefShark processors, and is managed by its MantaRay network management solution. Orange has also agreed to try out various of Nokia's Cloud RAN solutions.
"This new contract extension with Nokia and their industry-leading equipment portfolio will support our pioneering efforts to drive superior customer experience further, reduce our environmental footprint, and make our network as energy efficient as possible," said Orange France CTO Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon.
"We are excited to continue our long-standing partnership with Orange France and contribute positively towards their network performance, sustainability goals, and commitment to net carbon neutrality," added Tommi Uitto, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia. "Our industry-leading, energy-efficient AirScale portfolio and AI-powered MantaRay network management solution will enhance Orange's network performance and deliver premium connectivity experiences to Orange customers."
Nokia shared all this just a day after it bagged a deal to upgrade the backbone network for the DE-CIX New York Internet exchange.
Nokia began last year on a bit of downer after AT&T partnered with rival Ericsson for its $14 billion Open RAN rollout. However, it ended 2024 with a barnstorming return to revenue growth, and judging by this latest torrent of announcements, this year is already off to a better start than the last one. |
BT’s top table turnover continues
BT’s CEO, Allison Kirkby, continues her revamp of the UK telco’s leadership team
She has spent the past year replacing the top table old guard with new recruits
Telco sector veteran and ‘IT dragon slayer’ Jon James has been drafted in as the new CEO of BT Business
He replaces Bas Burger, who is given the task of offloading BT’s international operations
The news comes as BT reports uninspiring fiscal third-quarter results
BT Group CEO Allison Kirkby has further revamped her top executive team line-up with the appointment of Jon James, the former CEO of Denmark’s Nuuday, as the new CEO of BT Business, the UK telco’s enterprise services division that has been struggling for several years.
James will take on the poisoned chalice from 3 March. He will replace Bas Burger, who has been grappling with the tough turnaround assignment at BT Business since the start of 2023, shortly after the telco merged its Enterprise and Global units to form a single unit in order to cut costs – BT merges units to form BT Business and save £100m.
Burger had been the CEO of BT Global up to that point and, in a way, he will be going back to those roots starting in March, though this isn’t a glamorous assignment: Kirkby’s strategy is to focus on the UK, believing BT’s international operations are a distraction and a drag on margins, so Burger’s job will be to “devote all of his time to the optimisation of BT’s international operations and explore options for the unit,” the operator noted. Those options include trying to find a partner that could take a stake in a spun-out operation that would be underpinned by the next-generation Global Fabric infrastructure built over the past few years – see What now for BT’s Global Fabric?
James, meanwhile, will be tasked with reversing the fortunes of BT Business, which is shrinking by the quarter. Hopes are high that he could repeat his performance at Nuuday, the services company spun out of former Danish national operator TDC, where he is credited with revamping the company during his tenure as CEO, which began in mid-2021 and ended about a month ago. Critical to his turnaround strategy at Nuuday was an IT transformation that enabled the company to become a more agile, efficient and customer-centric company – see How Jon James slayed the Nuuday IT dragon.
Prior to his time at Nuuday, James held various senior positions at Tele2 Netherlands (2017-19), Swedish cable operator Com Hem (2014-2016) and the UK’s Virgin Media (2007-2013).
“Jon’s considerable experience from the UK and European telecoms markets, together with his track record in leading businesses through transformation, will be hugely valuable as we fully focus BT Business on the UK,” noted Kirkby.
James added: “I am excited and honoured to join BT as CEO of BT Business, the UK’s leader in B2B telecoms. BT Business has an unbeatable combination of deep customer relationships and world-class technology expertise, and I am looking forward to working with Allison, Bas and the BT Business team as we build an even stronger asset for our customers, our shareholders and for the UK.”
James is the latest new name in the frame at BT’s top table, which has seen multiple changes since Kirkby took over as CEO a year ago. She added Tom Meakin, a former partner at consultancy McKinsey, as chief strategy and change officer and in September ousted chief digital and innovation officer Harmeen Mehta. Then in November 2024, Kirkby announced Claire Gillies as the new CEO of BT’s Consumer division, replacing Marc Allera.
The numbers game
BT’s fiscal third-quarter trading update, released today, indicates the task ahead for Kirkby, Gillies and (from March) James.
Total revenues for the three months to the end of December came to £5.18bn, down 3% year on year, with the decline mainly due to “continued challenging non-UK trading conditions” and lower smartphone sales for BT’s EE consumer division.
BT Business, which is still the telco’s second-biggest division after the Consumer unit, reported a 2% decline in revenues, to £1.98bn (including sales to other parts of BT’s operations). For the first three quarters of the current financial year (April to December 2024), BT Business reported a 5% decline in revenues to £5.85bn, compared with the same period a year earlier, showing that the division’s sales are in steady decline.
The Consumer division’s revenues were also down in the fiscal third quarter as well as during the first three quarters of the fiscal year, by 2% in both instances, though this is due to the impact of lower device sales: BT noted that Consumer returned to service revenues growth in the third quarter.
Despite the declining revenues, BT Group’s margins are improving slightly, thanks to greater cost controls (a key focus of Kirkby’s strategy): Fiscal third-quarter adjusted EBITDA came in at £2.1bn, up 4% year on year.
BT noted that its cost transformation plan “remains on track as we continue to create a simpler BT Group, delivering efficiencies across all units; energy usage in our networks was down 3% in the year to date, and total labour resource down 3% year on year to 117k; we achieved an 11% reduction in year-to-date Openreach repair volumes,” noted the operator.
Openreach, BT’s quasi-autonomous wholesale fixed access network division, remains the division that continues to grow, albeit only slightly, with fiscal third-quarter revenues up by 1% to £1.53bn.
Openreach’s focus is further building out and monetising its fibre access network. Having passed an additional 1 million premises with fibre in the fiscal third quarter, Openreach’s fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure now reaches 17 million UK premises and is on course to reach 25 million by December 2026.
And there is strong wholesale demand for Openreach’s FTTP network: In the fiscal third quarter, net additions were 472,000 to take the total number of commercial fibre connections to 6 million with a take-up rate of 35%. However, Openreach is losing out to fibre access network rivals in areas where it hasn’t yet rolled out its own FTTP infrastructure: As a result, Openreach’s total broadband lines declined by 208,000.
Overall, the numbers weren’t to the liking of investors, as BT’s share price dipped by 2.4% to 142.5 pence on the London Stock Exchange in Thursday morning trading.
- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV |
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