UK ISP Lightspeed Broadband, which is deploying a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the East of England region as part of a £300m investment (here and here), has today confirmed that they’ve chosen to go with Nokia’s 10Gbps (symmetric) capable XGS-PON technology and whole-home Wi-Fi 6 kit to power their service.

The operator, which started their rollout in April 2021 with an initial team of 100 engineers, plans to cover 100,000 homes and businesses by the end of 2022, and after that they also hold an ambition to reach 1 million UK premises by 2025.

As a result of today’s deal, we now know that this rollout will be supported by Nokia’s full fibre XGS-PON kit for both customer homes and the operator’s Points of Presence (PoPs), as well as their aggregation switching and IP edge solutions. It also includes Nokia’s whole-home Wi-Fi 6 Beacons and their Altiplano management platform.

Steve Haines, CEO, Lightspeed Broadband, said:

“We are delighted to be a key account for Nokia, which we feel reflects our strategic relationship and growth potential. Nokia has demonstrated the flexibility and agility we need to support our ambitious deployment plans.”

Phil Siveter, CEO UK & Ireland at Nokia, said:

“High speed broadband is crucial to the UK’s economic growth, and we’re delighted to be supporting Lightspeed’s entire deployment, from the customer’s Wi-Fi router to the Broadband Network Gateways that connect Lightspeed to the global Internet.”

Openreach and various other UK network builders are also using Nokia’s FTTP kit, as well as other solutions from rivals like ADTRAN etc.

All well and good but if they offered over 1Gbit speeds you’ll still be limited by Nokia’s gigabit ethernet port on the router

not on they ONU, no.

There are ONTs for this with a 10G-BaseT Ethernet port or combos ONT+router+AP which make available the same port for LAN. That’s what is being used already in Switzerland on Salt and Italy in the trial with TIM and OpenFiber (and they offer the full 10G/10G profile).