Fujitsu To Build 1Gbps Rural Broadband Network

Network giant Fujitsu has announced plans to build a £2 billion superfast fibre network, which will bypass BT’s street cabinets and offering high speed connections to five million homes in rural Britain that currently have poor broadband coverage.

The proposal would create a network to compete with BT’s Openreach division, albeit using BT’s own ducts and poles to carry the fibre. Fujitsu says its proposal depends on the regulator Ofcom imposing a fair price for access to that infrastructure – a process which is currently in heated dispute.

Faster Fibre From Fujitsu?

The roll-out to five million homes will cost about £2 billion and would roughly halve the “final third” of Britain still short of fast broadband, according to Andy Stevenson, managing director of the network solutions division of Fujitsu.

“It is contingent on a fair pricing regime for access to BT ducts and poles,” said Stevenson. However, the announcement was not designed to force a decsion on infrastructure access, he said: “It was planned all along.”

It would also involve local community groups helping to smooth the way into different rural communities.

The government has offered up to £530 million to support the provision of broadband to hard-to-reach parts of the country, administered by Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), but ISPs have threatened to boycott the bidding process , and are locked in a dispute over the price of access to BT’s ducts and poles, which will  be the basis of of any rural broadband provision.

Virgin Media and TalkTalk have both put their names to the Fujitsu announcement, committing to resell Internet services from the poposed network where appropriate. Although Virgin Media is rolling out its own fast broadband network (reaching a million homes with a 100Mbps offer), the Fujitsu project would be complementary, sources said.

Virgin and TalkTalk would be keen to support the Fujitsu network, as they want to have an alternative provider besides Openreach, which they accused in a leaked letter of overcharging by about four to five times for access to its infrastructur.

For its own fast broadband roll-out, Virgin is concentrating on the more commercially-viable urban parts of Britain.

Fibre to the home, not the cabinet

“In the vast majority of areas, Fujitsu will run fibre optic cabling directly to the home” said Stevenson, contrasting this “FTTH” approach to BT’s which relies more on getting fibre to street cabinets.

Fujitsu also plans to offer greater physical access to its fibres, so providers like Virgin can actually send their own light signals along the cable, instead of having to use an Ethernet service as BT plans to provide.

The network will support speeds up to 1Gbps.

Minister welcomes Fujitsu’s move

The Fujitsu announcement, looks like the end of that stand-off, so it is no surprise that it is welcomed by Vaizey: “I am delighted that Fujitsu along with Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Cisco share the Government’s vision.” he said in the Fujitsu release. “The collaboration between these companies was exactly the sort of ambition and innovation the Government wanted to stimulate by removing barriers to broadband rollout. ”

The announcement carried statements also from Cisco, whose equipment will be used, and from both TalkTalk and Virgin.