is designed to help accelerate the roll-out to 200,000 homes across the South of England by 2024. It will also enable Community Fibre to continue its focus on building in London while expanding its FTTH platorm in the UK. Te acquisition is supported by Community


Fibre shareholders Warburg Pincus LLC, DTCP, Amber Infrastructure and Railpen. Box Broadband will remain an independent company, trading under the Box brand in the South of England. Box Broadband’s CEO, Graham Sargood will continue to lead the business. Graeme Oxby, CEO at Community Fibre said:


‘Box Broadband has already established itself as a provider of fast and reliable trusted services to communities in Surrey and West Sussex that are underserved from a speed perspective. As such, this is an exciting opportunity for us to invest in a company that shares our vision of affordable connectivity for all, and to expand across the South.’ In the same month, Netherlands provider


Delta Fiber secured €2bn for the roll out of its XGS-PON fibre network throughout the Netherlands. Te network expansion was designed to see


the firm grow to two million fibre connections in 2025, with higher internet speeds than previously available. Te financing was secured by underwriters ABN AMRO, ING, SEB, Santander and Deutsche Bank, who will place the loan with a consortium of national and international banks.


SEPTEMBER Passive equipment vendor, Folan is to acquire


British counterpart, Mainframe Communications in a move designed to gain a greater foothold in the UK fibre market. Created in 1988 and owned until now


by founders, brothers Ian and Bill Carter, Mainframe Communications specialises in the design, assembly and distribution of passive optical equipment, solutions and connectivity for FTTx, industry, data centres and optical LAN. Te collaboration will provide a greater capacity to meet the needs of British clients. As well as providing a foothold in the


potentially lucrative UK market, the acquisition of Mainframe Communications will lead to an acceleration of Folan’s international operations, its contribution eventually increasing to 40 per cent of its income, compared with 15 per cent at present. Ludovic Robert, President and CEO of


Folan’s parent company, Groupe R&D said: ‘By gaining a foothold in the UK through Mainframe Communications, which is well- known and fully embedded in the country, we are continuing our project to expand both the group and Folan, strengthening the capacity of


Fibre Yearbook 2022


this national player and enabling it to seize the opportunities provided by the simmering fibre market in the UK.’ In the same month, Adtran and Adva entered


into a business combination agreement to merge the two companies. Te aim was to create a global, scaled provider of end-to-end fibre networking solutions for communications service provider, enterprise and government customers. Te combined business will offer a wider portolio for providing homes, businesses and 5G infrastructure with scalable, secure and assured fibre connectivity, paired with cloud-managed Wi-Fi connectivity and SaaS applications. Te $930m merger is also expected to create significant value for the shareholders of each, with approximately $52m in pre-tax annual cost synergies realised within two years post-closing, driven by identified supply chain efficiencies and operating model optimisation. Adtran and Adva will combine under a new holding company, which will be renamed Adtran Holdings once the transaction is closed during the second or third quarter of 2022. Adtran Holdings will have global


headquarters in Huntsville, AL and European headquarters in Munich, Germany. Te new management team and board of directors will have a balanced mix of executives from both companies. Adtran’s Chairman and CEO, Tom Stanton,


will serve in the same capacity following the close of the transaction. Adva’s CEO, Brian Protiva, will transition into the role of executive vice chairman.


OCTOBER In October, the most popular story on the Fibre


Systems website was the news that Facebook is to launch its first subsea cable connecting Europe to the U.S. Te social media giant announced its


commitment during an Inside the Lab event in which its engineers shared some of the company’s latest developments in connectivity technologies. Te new cable is reportedly designed to


provide 200 times more internet capacity than the transatlantic cables of the 2000s. Facebook has yet to confirm when the project will be completed, but it has selected a build partner in NEC Corporation. Earlier in the year, NEC and subsidiary


OCC Corporation completed full qualification of subsea repeaters and optical cable containing up to 24 fibre pairs (48 fibres). Tis development could allow cable owners like Facebook to construct subsea telecom cables with higher traffic capacity and lower cost-per- bit of the wet plant, in line with space division multiplexing (SDM) system architectures. n


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For Your Application Needs


▪ DWDMs/CWDMs, couplers/splitters


▪ High power pump combiners ▪ Isolators, circulators, U-turns


31 www.lasercomponents.co.uk


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