As part of its continuing push into the data centre market, Openreach is providing further high speed connectivity to Next Generation Data’s (NGD) data center in South Wales, with additional fiber capacity and diverse routing.

The deal follows a similar agreement with Virtus, inked last September, when the BT company announced it would be building dedicated fiber links to the UK’s large data centers.

The open and wholesale nature of Openreach’s network means that all UK communications providers can access its fiber network, allowing data center companies to offer their business customers high speed Ethernet services from a wide choice of communications providers.

Tim Barclay, MD of sales, marketing and customer engagement at Openreach said by bringing the open access model to the NGD data center in Wales Openreach is enabling NGD to offer customers a wide choice of high-speed Ethernet services.

“We’re also speeding up the provisioning of our Ethernet services by building fiber links direct to major data centers across the UK well ahead of any customer orders,” Barclay said.

Nick Razey, CEO of Next Generation Data, said the agreement underscored NGD’s long established and highly successful relationship with BT and that the agreement would further extend the wide choice of high bandwidth, low latency communications available to NGD customers.

The Openreach fiber network currently covers more than 18 million premises in the UK and is on track to reach 19 million – or two thirds of UK premises – by the end of Spring 2014.

This fiber network underpins the Openreach Ethernet and Optical services portfolio, which offers high bandwidth and secure connectivity.