Fujitsu, which has been associated with the Post Office since 2006, has been granted a £500 million 5 year contract for providing broadband and telephone facilities to the post office, which has around 500,000 customers in the UK.

Fujitsu will be the service integrator to various subcontractors like TalkTalk, which will provide the network infrastructure worth £100million, Capital, which will ensure customer support and specialist service provider MDS, which will take charge of customer billing.

Fujitsu, as IT and Telecom service provider, will take care of migration of both network infrastructure and supporting applications.

This means that BT will not be in the picture any more in the telecom services of the Post Office. This will be a big loss in revenue especially for BT Wholesale.

What was rare with the Post Office broadband service is that even in areas where ADSL2+ was available on the BT Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) platform, it offered only Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) based service. On the other hand, TalkTalk Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) network has been providing ADSL2+ from the beginning and takes care of 92% of the UK homes.

The consumers will be at a loss to know as to which products will be available for them -. whether the full LLU service or only partial LLU service. Partial LLU is more expensive to run but simpler to migrate away from.

Technically, ADSL2+ is capable of doubling the ADSL downstream bits. The data rates can be up to 24 Mbit/second downstream and 1.4 Mbit/second upstream.