Line maintenance to be outsourced by BT Openreach

A contract to both manage and maintain the BT Openreach copper phone network has been won recently by a joint venture between Telent and Carillion, the cable and broadband pipe maintenance companies.

Telent and Carrillion were chosen for the contract to look after the BT Openreach telephone and broadband network over another joint venture by Balfour Beatty and Skanska.

Initially the contract will be to cover the part of the network that connects homes throughout the country to the BT telephone exchanges over copper wire connections, although the contract will eventually cover the rolling out of a fibre optic broadband network by BT Openreach and the extension of the UK broadband network.

Extra support was obviously needed when BT Openreach set a date of 2012 for its deployment of high-speed fibre optic broadband connections to about 10 million homes across the country and to meet this deployment schedule BT Openreach chose to outsource some of its workload.

Due to the sheer scale of the work required under this contract and the various steps that need to be taken by all parties prior to any work being carried out on the network it has been reported that the deal has not yet been signed off.

The 2012 date is likely to coincide with the government plans to provide universal broadband services connections of at least 2Mbps by this date throughout the UK and BT will be working to help achieve this goal with the rollout of its new fibre optic network over the coming years.

Many experts believe that latest move will also be in response to the huge network expansion recently carried out and completed by Virgin Media which now offers its customers cable broadband connection speeds of up to 50Mbps.

Source – Tech Watch