London – 14 April 2021: STL [NSE: STLTECH], an industry-leading integrator of digital networks, today announced a strategic collaboration with Openreach, the UK’s largest digital network business. Openreach has chosen STL as a key partner to provide optical cable solutions for its new, ultra-fast, ultra-reliable ‘Full Fibre’ broadband network.
Under the partnership, STL will be responsible for delivering millions of kilometres of optical fibre cable to support the build over the next three years. Openreach has plans to use STL’s expertise and innovation to help accelerate its Full Fibre build programme and drive efficiency. This collaboration with Openreach strengthens a 14-year-old technology and supply relationship between the two companies and further reinforces STL’s commitment to the UK market.
Openreach plans to take advantage of STL’s cutting-edge Opticonn solution – a specialised set of fibre, cable and interconnect offerings designed to drive significant performance improvements, including up to 30 per cent faster installation. It will also have access to STL’s Celesta – a high-density optical fibre cable with a capacity of up to 6,912 optical fibres. This compact design is 26 per cent slimmer compared to traditional loose tube cables, allowing 2000 metres of cable to be installed in under an hour. The high density super-slim cable will also help minimise the use of plastic across Openreach’s new network.
Kevin Murphy, MD for Fibre and Network Delivery at Openreach, said: “Our Full Fibre network build is going faster than ever. We need partners like STL on board to not only help sustain that momentum, but also to provide the skills and innovation to help us go even further. We know the network we’re building can deliver a host of social and economic benefits – from boosting UK productivity to enabling more home working and fewer commuting trips – but we’re also trying to make this one of the greenest network builds in the world. So, it’s good to know that STL’s compact and efficient designs will contribute to this in a significant way.”
Commenting on the collaboration, Ankit Agarwal, CEO Connectivity Solutions Business, STL, said: “We are extremely excited to join hands with Openreach as a key optical solutions partner to build Full Fibre broadband networks for millions in the UK. Our customised, 5G-ready optical solutions are ideally suited for Openreach’s future-proof network requirements and we believe they will enable next-gen digital experiences for homes and businesses across UK. This partnership will be a major step towards our mission of transforming billions of lives through digital networks.”
The announcement comes as Openreach continues to ramp up the build rate for its Full Fibre broadband programme – which aims to reach 20 million homes and businesses by the mid-to-late 2020s. Openreach engineers are now delivering faster, more reliable connectivity to another 42,000 homes and businesses every week, or the equivalent of a home every 15 seconds. 4.5 million premises can now order a gigabit capable Full Fibre broadband service from a range of competing service providers using Openreach’s new network.
STL is an industry-leading integrator of digital networks.
Our fully 5G ready digital network solutions help telcos, cloud companies, citizen networks, and large enterprises deliver enhanced experiences to their customers. STL provides integrated 5G ready endto-end solutions range from wired to wireless, design to deployment, and connectivity to compute. Our core capabilities lie in Optical Interconnect, Virtualised Access Solutions, Network Software, and System Integration.
We believe in harnessing technology to create a world with next-generation connected experiences that transform everyday living. With a global patent portfolio of 462 to our credit, we conduct fundamental research in next-generation network applications at our Centre of Excellence. STL has a strong global presence with next-gen optical preform, fibre, cable, and interconnect subsystem manufacturing facilities in India, Italy, China, and Brazil, along with two software-development centers across India and a data centre design facility in the UK.
Openreach Limited is the UK’s digital network business.
We’re 35,000 people, working in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world.
Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in the UK can be connected.
We work on behalf of more than 660 communications providers like SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, BT and Zen, and our broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 31.8m UK premises.
Over the last decade we’ve invested more than £14 billion into our network and, at more than 185 million kilometers, it’s now long enough to wrap around the world 4,617 times. Today we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof broadband network which will be the UK’s digital platform for decades to come.
We’re making progress towards our FTTP target to reach 20m premises by mid-tolate 2020s. We’ve also hired more than 3,000 trainee engineers this past financial year to help us build that network and deliver better service across the country. Openreach is a highly regulated, wholly owned, and independently governed unit of the BT Group. More than 90 per cent of our revenues come from services that are regulated by Ofcom and any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2020, we reported revenue of £5bn.
For more information, visit www.openreach.co.uk