ECI Telecom has won its largest ever contract, an $800 million deal with British telecom BT's
Openreach to help bring a large-scale super-fast broadband network to Britain. Openreach recently announced plans to invest a further $1.51 billion, or 2.5 billion in total, to extend deployment of fibre-to-the-premise and fibre-to-the-cabinet to around two thirds of Britain by 2015.
ECI, a private company, will work with Openreach in deploying the next generation access to up to 18 million households and businesses throughout Britain in the next 3-5 years. Deployment is scheduled to begin in July-August.
Openreach was created in 2006 to give communications providers equal access to Britain's local access network.
ECI supplies communications platforms for carrier and service provider networks. It was acquired by the Swarth Group and certain funds for $1.24 billion in 2007 and delisted from Nasdaq.