Company also hits 200,000 homes served milestone in 86 municipalities across rural Galicia
Galician-based neutral open access network provider Rede Aberta has announced it will begin trials of 50G-PON with its vendor Huawei. The project has been scheduled for Q1 2024 and will take place in the city of Santiago de Compostela – where the telco is headquartered – and rural environments surrounding it. Huawei launched its commercial 50G-PON solution in April.
The telco unveiled the trial at an event inaugurating its new 1Gbps fibre connection to the remote and photogenic Fisterra lighthouse, over the weekend.
Rede Aberta CEO Pere Antentas said the trial will be “a pioneering initiative in the European Union” and will target biotech companies in the city. He emphasised the trial continued the company’s fibre innovation after launching XGS-PON based services last year. He suggested data usage could grow up to nine times on the company’s network by 2030.
Last month, the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF)-owned Rede Aberta secured €50 million senior debt package from Allianz Global Investors to expand its FTTH network. The CEBF, managed by Cube Infrastructure Managers, is a €555 million fund established to help achieve the European Commission’s Gigabit Society objectives.
The fibreco is active in more than 80 municipalities within the four provinces of Galicia and has rolled out more than 2,000km of fibre. By 2026, Rede Aberta aims to cover approximately 430,000 households. In conjunction with its sister company, Asteo, which operates in Castilla y León and Extremadura, the CEBF Spanish fibre platform aims to become the largest wholesale-only neutral open access fibre network in rural Spain.
In his speech Antentas said the fibreco will also work with partners to create “the CPDs of the Camino” – a network of data centres in Galicia that will provide “management autonomy, without interruptions in services and away from the vagaries of geopolitics.”
He also highlighted the telco had also been a successful bidder for funds in the UNICO Plan of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the A Coruña province and has already executed a third of the 36,550 planned units, which gives the company confidence it can reach 100% before the end of 2024. “We hope to continue with the UNICO 2023 Plan in Pontevedra, if we win the competition to which we have submitted,” he said.
Collaboration with other operators
Antentas thanked the contribution of local telecommunications operators which he said contributed to the spread of fibre in the countryside. “They helped us deploy the fibre in the most remote corners. They have the final [reach in] the territory; they are our eyes in the countryside. Without them we would not be here,” he told Código Cero.
In addition, he announced that R and the Más Móbil joined Rede Aberta as customers. “A milestone…because it is the confirmation that we are a neutral operator that we do things well. R is the reference operator in Galicia and a much-loved brand in our land,” he said. The two take the fibreco’s customer list to around 20 local, regional, national and business ISPs.
Image (from left to right): Carles Paradeda, financial director of Rede Aberta, Pere Antentas, CEO of Rede Aberta, Aurea Domínguez, mayor of Fisterra, Maria Rivas, deputy delegate of the Government in A Coruña and Julian Cerviño, director of AMTEGA