BT Openreach puts ADVA's FSP 3000 to work for its new optical service line

While much of the action at BT Openreach (NYSE: BT) lately has centered around its fiber-based consumer broadband initiatives, its new Optical Spectrum Access product (OSA) appears to be a new move to offer retail service providers another option to serve their respective multisite business customers.

ADVA Gareth Spence

ADVA's Gareth Spence discusses BT's selection of the FSP 3000. Click here to view the video

Leveraging ADVA's FSP 3000 platform, Openreach is moving toward offering a flexible optical service line that can meet a number of business applications, including data center connectivity for cloud and virtualized services, business continuity and disaster recovery, financial trading, video conferencing and data backhaul.  

Complementing the service will be a set of consulting capabilities to provide customers with necessary network planning, application development and business model development.

To date, Openreach has over 250 retail service provider customers in the UK for its OSA service.

Offered in 2.5 Gpbs and 10 Gbps bandwidth increments on dedicated fibers, Openreach had been delivering the service via ADVA's FSP2000 (up to 35 km) and Ciena's 4200 platform (up to 70km).

There a number of benefits Openreach can extend to its retail service provider customers. When Openreach begins deploying the ADVA FSP 3000 platforms next January, it will be able to provide service reach of up to 55 km in addition to cutting service turn up time to 35 days and offering 40 Gbps wavelength options.

Obviously, BT's drive here is to compete with aggressive rivals like Virgin Media (Nasdaq: VMED), which continues to up the ante of its own wholesale wireless backhaul offerings and even cloud-based services.

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