According to UK digital infrastructure provider Openreach, its roll-out of Full Fibre technology saved £10 million (€11.6m) in build costs in Fiscal Year 22/23, while extending Full Fibre broadband to remote communities that were previously out of commercial reach.

The company is deploying ‘SHE’ (Subtended Headend) where new fibre-optic cables can be built out from specially-adapted existing green roadside cabinets. Ultrafast broadband optical signal boosting equipment, normally housed in a main exchange building, is installed at the cabinet.

Engineers have now deployed around 100 individual SHEs, across the UK, connecting up around 160,000 homes and businesses that would otherwise have been beyond commercial reach, and avoiding the need to build over 1,262 km of new fibre cabling or ‘spine’.

By ‘piggy-backing’ on the existing VDSL copper based cabinet network in this way, Openreach’s new Full Fibre cables can potentially be extended three times their normal reach, over 200km – with the capacity to connect up to a thousand additional homes and businesses from a single SHE location, while cutting up to six months in build time and the costs involved in deploying new fibre cables or ‘spines’ all the way from an exchange to a property.

The technology can also be installed the same way in small remote exchange buildings that are served by a main exchange, helping to extend the reach of Openreach’s Full Fibre network further still.

“Openreach has a strong track record of investing more than any other company into rural broadband upgrades,” stated Andy Whale, Openreach’s Chief Engineer. “We’re rolling out Full Fibre to reach 25 million homes and businesses and a quarter of that – around 6 million premises – will be in the hardest to reach third of the country.”

“We’ve already built Full Fibre to around half of those harder to reach homes and businesses and this innovation is helping us to build faster and further into these more remote parts the country – especially in more rural areas, on a very large scale but more efficiently and at a much lower cost,” he added.

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Categories: Articles, Broadband, Equipment, FTTH, Telco

Tags: Full fibre, Openreach, Subtended Headend)