Adtran is the latest telecom equipment company to announce that it’s ramping up domestic manufacturing in order to meet “Buy America” rules for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The company on Wednesday said it will invest up to $5 million in its Hunstville, Alabama, facility, creating 300 jobs. The investment will allow Adtran to expand its US production of optical line termination (OLT) equipment and onshore the manufacturing of optical network terminals (ONTs).

“We of course expect to be BEAD-compliant,” Adtran CEO Tom Stanton said at an event hosted at the company’s 270,000-square-foot facility in Huntsville.

Adtran further said it will work to engage new hires by partnering with local schools for its high school apprenticeship program and developing a co-op program for college students.

The announcement from Adtran follows this month’s news that Nokia will partner with Sanmina Corporation to manufacture broadband network electronics products for BEAD at Sanmina’s facility in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, starting next year.

Additionally today, Nokia announced its partnership with optical supplier Fabrinet to domestically produce fiber broadband optical modules for BEAD. Production will start next year at Fabrinet’s facility in Santa Clara, California, “and brings additional high-tech jobs to the country,” said the company.

Jobs and manufacturing

Speaking at Wednesday’s event at Adtran’s Huntsville facility, NTIA Chief Alan Davidson thanked the company for its investment and noted that BEAD is “not just a connectivity program. It is a jobs and manufacturing program.”

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BT and Ericsson have demonstrated the transmission of 5G services in a wideband frequency division duplex (FDD) radio carrier (over 20MHz) within a sub-3GHz spectrum band.

In what is a European first according to both, the breakthrough demonstrates the benefits of configuring a wide carrier bandwidth of 50MHz in EE’s 2.6GHz band and performing downlink aggregation with two TDD carrier in EE’s 3.5GHz band.

The trial also evaluated an intermediate carrier bandwidth of 30MHz.

“This breakthrough is the latest example of our commitment to maximising the full potential of 5G for our customers,” said Greg McCall, chief networks officer at BT.

“As network quality and accessibility improve, so too will innovation and the 5G services ecosystem. Demonstrating new network capabilities such as those announced today is critical to achieving this goal, and also paves the way to ensuring that 5G SA delivers new possibilities for our customers.”

Conducted on BT’s live network in Bristol and Potters Bar using existing Ericsson commercial hardware and by activating the software feature ‘Large Bandwidth Support Low-Band’, testing with MediaTek Dimensity powered handsets with integrated MediaTek M80 Release-16 modem, the trial has shown a capacity uplift of more than three times with a single FDD carrier.

This is significant for the uplink in 5G Standalone (SA) which is currently based on a single carrier.

5G SA will enable superior experiences, the companies said in a statement, adding that it will enable growing demand for data, driven by cloud gaming, VR and other emerging edge technologies.

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LONDON, August 02, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Adtran today announced that Openreach, the UK’s largest wholesale broadband network, has deployed its FSP 3000 open optical transport technology to enable its new Optical Spectrum Access 100G Single enterprise service. Openreach’s new product offers a dedicated fiber link that empowers more UK businesses to harness point-to-point 100Gbit/s data transport. The solution also brings efficiency benefits that reduce capital and operational expenditure. The latest collaboration builds on more than a decade of successful partnership between Adtran and Openreach.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230802224594/en/

Adtran’s FSP 3000 technology is helping Openreach deliver managed 100G connectivity to UK businesses. (Photo: Business Wire)

“Corporate cloud applications and other data-intensive tasks such as data centre backhaul are fueling a growing demand for bandwidth. Adtran’s scalable optical technology enables us to offer a managed, high-speed service that satisfies that demand at a highly competitive price point,” said Simon Williams, head of optical products at Openreach. “With no filters or amplifiers required, our Optical Spectrum Access 100G Single service offers secure and always-on optical services that can transport enormous amounts of data. We’re also making dedicated, uncomplicated and customizable access available in a slimmed-down package that’s even easier to manage.”

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Vodafone has reported improved sales growth over the first quarter after increasing its prices.

This comes despite the operator losing customers in its biggest market Germany, where sales fell by 1.3% – still an improvement from the previous quarter.

In the UK, where the merger with Three UK was announced, there was a 5.7% increase in service revenue, driven by growth in consumer services.

Consolidating the two brands will create a combined brand value close to £4 billion, making it the most valuable telecoms brand in the UK.

The slight improvement is good news for new CEO Margherita Della Valle, who took on the role following Nick Read’s departure from the group.

Della Valle had previously served as CFO of the company, and Vodafone has moved swiftly to appoint Luka Mucic to the role.

Mucic was the CEO of SAP Se from 2014-2017 and its CFO from 2014-2023. During this time, he was responsible for SAP’s groupwide finance, legal, data protection, procurement, audit, risk management, security, IT and process management functions.

On the appointment, Della Valle said: “I am thrilled that Luka will be joining the Vodafone team. He has a strong track record of international leadership, corporate repositioning and value-creation.

“Luka is joining us at a critical time as we undertake the transformation of Vodafone.”

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As network engineers strive to meet the ever-growing demand for bandwidth, their choice of passive optical network (PON) components, including connectors, splitters, and muxes/demuxes, becomes critical.

The continued adoption of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) technology is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry. In fact, some analysts project the DWDM system market to reach a value of $18 billion by 2032, up from $8 billion in 2022. This multiplexing technology increases the bandwidth of new or already-installed fiber networks by enabling the transmission of multiple active wavelengths of light over a single fiber.

As network engineers strive to meet the ever-growing demand for bandwidth, their choice of passive optical network (PON) components, including connectors, splitters, and muxes/demuxes, becomes critical. In this article, we explore how the increased trend toward DWDM is impacting the need for customizable components that can support higher-density deployments both indoors (central offices, data centers, or micro-edge data centers) and outdoors (outside plants).

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June 2023 saw CTC Union celebrate thirty successful years in business.

A key technology partner of Fibre Technologies, CTC Union was founded in 1993 and develops and manufactures Fibre Optic Equipment including industrial switches, media converters and a wide range of other Fibre Optic products.

CTC Union’s software development system follows the cybersecurity IEC62443 regulations for the design of Industrial & Telecom networking products. With their own in-house R&D and factory CTC Union develops and manufactures high-quality products in Taiwan.

CTC Union’s goal is to provide reliable, temperature resistant and rugged designs for mission critical systems used in harsh environments. With more than 30 years of experience in design of Telecom products, CTC Union is highly motivated to deliver various access switches and FTTP CPE products.

Fibre Technologies has been a CTC Union partner for over ten years and are experts in the product range and applications, selling CTC Union products into a number of industries.

In recognition of our long standing partnership CTC Union kindly sent us a gift in celebration of their thirty year anniversary which is now proudly displayed in our office.

We thank our partners at CTC Union for supporting our relationship and we wish them congratulations on their successful thirty years in business. We look forward to continuing our relationship

As the UK rollout of full fibre (FTTP) broadband gathers pace, BT are increasingly turning their attention to the challenge of how to extract all of that valuable copper leftover from their legacy phone network. Initial trials have already taken place, and they now expect to extract over 200 tonnes of copper cable this year.

The complete extraction of BT and Openreach’s legacy cables and kit will be a slow process because some parts of the UK are still likely to need them for many years longer, while consumers also have to be given time to migrate. Nevertheless, Openreach’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network already covers 10.27 million premises, and they aim to reach 25 million by December 2026. But they recently hinted that this might grow up to 30 million by 2030 (here), which would only leave a tiny portion of premises stuck on ancient copper, or even aluminium, lines.

The process of moving end-users away from copper and on to fibre optic infrastructure is already underway and that will only expand over the coming years, albeit very gradually. BT recently stated that it remained “confident” of being able to “recover” an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper from their old legacy network through the 2030s.

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A new survey of over 6,000 adults in the UK, which was conducted by consumer charity Citizen’s Advice, claims to have uncovered that “up to” 1 million broadband customers “disconnected” their broadband ISP connection over the past year because the cost-of-living crisis left them unable to afford it.

The survey itself included 1,215 respondents known to be in receipt of Universal Credit (state benefits). Overall, some 6% of people claiming Universal Credit said they had stopped spending on broadband altogether, which compares to just 1% of respondents not on Universal Credit.

However, what’s not clear is where these people went (e.g. did they fall back to mobile data, stay disconnected or borrow a neighbour’s service?), although we assume that they must have found some sort of solution because the aforementioned survey was “conducted online“. Sadly, the survey didn’t dig into this, and so we’re missing some vital context.

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If you already have, or are thinking of implementing, a managed service using Openreach’s Optical Spectrum Access then Fibre Technologies and our partner ADVA can help you get the most out of it.

OSA Filter Connect is an enhancement to the fully managed base product offering that enables you to access the underlying dark fibre, via spare ports on the filter, with your own DWDM equipment. This effectively gives you your own virtual dark fibre with all the key benefits that dark fibre offers – like the freedom to control and increase bandwidth usage at no extra cost – without compromising on service and maintenance levels.

 Openreach will maintain a minimum of one managed wavelength for you, although you can choose to have multiple managed wavelengths on the service from them. All the other filter ports are available for you to deploy your own equipment over, with each channel able to support up to 100G.

In this way Filter Connect provides you the best of both worlds; top-class service from Openreach who will look after the fibre and managed wavelengths with 24/7 monitoring together with the flexibility for you to develop and manage your own services over the spare channels on the optical filter.

Since the OSA service is built using the ADVA product set, FTL and ADVA are the perfect consultancy and product partners to assist you in maximising the ROI from your OSA service.

If you would like more details, please email sales@fibre.co.uk