James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce, and I'm in Vienna for Network X. I'm delighted to be joined today by Trevor Linney from Openreach. Thank you so much for joining us. You're discussing innovation while you're at the event here. What are some of the big innovation opportunities for a fixed access network provider like Openreach?

Trevor Linney, Openreach (00:25):
Well, at Openreach, we're really innovating at every level. That's from civil engineering techniques to help us build fibre faster. It's looking at how we roll out next-generation access technology, so we're moving to XGS-PON at scale. And here today, we're going to talk about fibre sensing, which is a really innovative way of using those fibre-optic cables we've deployed for full fibre for other applications. In this particular case, how to sense water leaks using distributed acoustic sensing.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:00):
We'll come back to fibre sensing because I think that's a really interesting area. But you recently unveiled plans for the rollout of XGS-PON on the network. What can you tell us about this?

Trevor Linney, Openreach (01:11):
Absolutely. So Openreach has been getting on with the job of rolling out full fibre to the UK, and we've got the target of 25 million by the end of this year, and we're making excellent progress against that. And that GPON network is continuing to deliver for our customers. But we know that as future demand rises, you need the next generation of technology. So we are deploying XGS-PON, supporting at eight and a half gigabits per second downstream. We started with our technology trials in Guildford, and now we're scaling up to be able to roll that across the country, and we've talked about bringing that to around a third of the UK in the next five years.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:48):
In the UK, there's obviously a lot of conversation around competition. There's been some consolidation, which I know has impacted the wider market. But I just want to talk about market conditions and the impact they can have on innovation and how it affects your approach when you're seeing what's going on around you. How do you then make sure you're still innovating?

Trevor Linney, Openreach (02:07):
Okay, so as Openreach said, we're getting on with the job of building that full-fibre network, and we really are focused on that big build. But as a network technologist, we're always looking at how we make our network platforms the highest performance we can. So a lot of the work we've been looking at is how do we build really big OLTs or headends, so that we can connect as many customers to the infrastructure, and then our communications providers can then consume that connection. So as we move to XGS-PON, moving from a 10G interconnect to a 100G interconnect, and how do we do that in a way that also drives down energy and we do it in the most sustainable way? I am deeply proud of when we introduced our 2.5G ONT. We call it a green ONT because it's actually over 90% recycled plastics, which actually, when you're talking about putting millions of these devices in people's homes, making that difference translates into a huge amount of avoided virgin plastics. And so we can innovate both not just in terms of speed, but in terms of energy consumption and sustainability to make sure that the really big CPs, Sky, BT, TalkTalk, and Vodafone, want to choose the Openreach network.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:25):
Now you mentioned before about the fibre sensing projects that you've been doing. Can you tell us some more about this? What is it? What's going on, and why is it so important?

Trevor Linney, Openreach (03:35):
Yeah. So, fibre sensing and DAS has been around for a long time. You can look back, you'll see examples of it being used in oil and gas where you had a dedicated fibre alongside the pipe or perhaps even inside it. As we've rolled out our full-fibre network, it's nationwide. To put it into context, one of our fibres is going down almost every street, the mains water or a mains gas pipeline is also down. So how do we bring that national scale and that fibre coverage to adjacencies? And actually, we found that fibre sensing for water is a brilliant example of that. And despite the fact that our fibres are in their own ducts, separate maybe a foot above ground or even the other side of the road, actually, by using DAS, you can sense a water leak, millilitres of water leaks in our fibre infrastructure.

(04:32):
And in the UK, you may know we have a terrible problem with water leakage. Put it in context. The UK loses 1,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of water every day, or the entire water demand of London in a day because our pipes are so old. And the regulator doesn't like that. The regulator fines the water companies. And so there's this brilliant opportunity to say, "Well, how do we use a nationwide fibre network, a novel and innovative sensing technology using AI and ML in order to save water?" Which is great for the country, which has been in drought, it's great for the water companies, and it's a genuine adjacent market for Openreach to pursue. So we're genuinely excited about it. We have already announced two trials with Affinity Water and Southern Water, where they are successfully already detecting leaks that would never have been found using traditional techniques. So we are really hopeful that that's going to be able to scale into a nationwide proposition in the years to come.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (05:37):
Sounds really cool, really interesting, and really innovative. Let's talk a little bit about AI because it's obviously a hot topic in the industry. As we introduce more AI and automation into networks, how should the industry adapt its approach to something like security, which it obviously impacts?

Trevor Linney, Openreach (05:52):
Yeah, it's a brilliant question. And security was already a really big topic for telcos, in particular people like Openreach who provide critical national infrastructure. And so we are both simultaneously looking to AI to say, "How do we improve our operations? How do we detect faults quicker? How do we move to more proactive and predictive maintenance models?" But as you say, whilst protecting the infrastructure from all the stuff you see in the press. And actually, what we found is the technologies and the techniques that were highlighted as part of the Telecom Security Act, things like architectural separation, creating air gaps between your operational systems and your normal OSS and BSS, privileged access workstations, all of those sorts of things you do to protect any CNI, work brilliantly in the context of how do you secure a network.

(06:41):
So we're really pushing on investing heavily in that sort of how do you harden your network, creating the right rules around the architectural guardrails, the implementation policies, where it's safe to use your information, using AI on-prem rather than cloud when it's appropriate, and really building some vigorous and rigorous rules about who can and can't use AI for what, in what context, and how. And I think we probably are moving as fast as we can in the service improvement space, the customer experience space, and then probably a little bit more pragmatically and measured in the network space.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (07:20):
Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Trevor Linney, Openreach (07:22):
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.