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U.K. network provider offers SMEs an alternative to dedicated lines in nine locations initially, followed by a wider rollout.
Openreach is working on the roll out of a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) offer designed specifically for small businesses in the U.K. and on Wednesday named the first locations that will have access to the new network.
Speaking at Total Telecom’s Connected Britain 2016, Openreach CEO Clive Selley listed the first nine locations to receive FTTP for SMEs over the coming nine months.
Bath, Bristol, Bradford – where the telco has already carried out trials – Manchester, Salford and Liverpool will be in the first phase of rollout, Selley said, as will Holborn, Westminster and the City of London.
"Business FTTP will fill the gap between consumer and point-to-point Ethernet products," Selley said.
The new FTTP offer will give small businesses access to high-speed connectivity via a cheaper alternative to the dedicated lines used by larger companies.
The rollout will continue beyond the first phase, with Openreach aiming to cover hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across the U.K. by 2020, he added. The FTTP project forms part of the telco’s plan to connect 1 million SMEs to ultrafast broadband by 2020, Selley said.
The deployment will focus on businesses based on high streets and in science and business parks, as well as clusters of SMEs that do not currently have access to fibre broadband from Openreach.
BT’s networks arm said it will roll out the network over the next nine months and that the first retail communications service providers will be able to offer the product to business customers by the end of December.
As it stands, around 300,000 homes and businesses have access to Openreach’s FTTP infrastructure. The firm’s plan to expand its footprint will also benefit residential customers in the targeted footprint, it said, making reference to its much-publicised goal of extending ultrafast broadband to 12 million homes and businesses by the end of 2020.
Additional reporting by Nick Wood.
