CityFibre is building an open access network that will connect up to 8 million premises in 285 cities, towns and villages across the UK, covering a third of the country.
The provider, which has entered into a supply partnership with Nokia, will use the company's access nodes for its nationwide private fibre exchange network, fibre modems for customer homes and IP aggregation switches.
CityFibre will use the supplied Lightspan access nodes to provide multi-gigabit residential broadband (up to 10Gb/s in both directions) and higher bandwidth services to its wholesale customers, such as connecting enterprises and providing backhaul to mobile networks. Powered by Nokia's Quillion chipset, the same access nodes can be used for both XGS-PON and 25G PON (25Gb/s) on the same fiber, should CityFibre wish to do so in the future.
CityFibre is committed to building a "better by design" complete fiber network that provides the fastest, most reliable service and best value for our partners and their customers," said John Franklin, Chief Technology and Information Officer at CityFibre. By partnering with Nokia, we have recruited a trusted, market-leading technology provider to help support the nationwide 10Gb/s XGS-PON technology deployment program.
Sandy Motley, President of Nokia Fixed Networks, added: 'The demand for faster speeds continues and we are delighted that CityFibre has chosen our 25G ready solution to support their GPON to 10G XGS-PON national network upgrade programme, supporting their highest capacity wholesale service offering to the UK market mission."
The program is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of this year.
CityFibre recently confirmed a £4.9 billion debt program that will fully fund one-third of altnet's rollout in the UK market by 2025.
