Openreach Speeds Up FTTP Broadband Rollout with New Machine

[UK Sentinel]

Openreach has started to deploy a new 25 tonne “Clean Fast” machine in the United Kingdom, which is a significantly faster, cleaner and quieter way of digging their new optical fibre cables into the ground. The kit is currently being tested around the rural Hope Valley (near Derwent Dam) in Derbyshire.

At present Openreach’s new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network is available to over 4.5 million premises (homes and businesses) across the United Kingdom, although they plan to extend this out to reach as many as 20 million premises by around 2025-30 (at a cost of c.£12bn). Some 3.2 million of those properties will also be in rural or semi-rural areas (here).

Suffice to say, anything that can help the operator to keep their build costs down is a good thing, particularly as they enter rural communities where the cost of deployment is often disproportionately higher than in urban locations. This is where the new Clean Fast machine comes into play, which sounds pretty close to being an all-in-one style civil engineering solution.

According to Openreach, the Clean Fast machine can “simultaneously” channel out a 60cm deep trench, suck all the debris out of it, install the new underground network (e.g. cable duct) and then quickly seal it up again. “It means significantly less disruption to local life, with roads closed for shorter periods of time and all of the mess normally associated with laying cables underground automatically collected, reducing dust and debris,” said a spokesperson.

 

Openreach Speeds Up FTTP Broadband Rollout with New Machine UPDATE2

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