Vodafone Agrees Fibre Sharing Deal With Portugal Telecom

Vodafone has agreed a 25 year  fibre sharing agreement with Portugal Telecom as the British-based operator seeks to expand its fixed line footprint in Portugal to strengthen its consumer quad-play offering and unified communications services for businesses.

The deal commences in December 2014 and will enable both companies to reach an additional 450,000 homes.  Vodafone’s existing FTTP deployment in the country currently serves more than one million properties and the company is aiming to reach 1.5 million by the middle of next year.

Vodafone Portugal

The fibre sharing agreement means Vodafone will be able to offer mobile, superfast broadband, telephone, and television services to two million homes by the end of 2015.

“This fibre sharing agreement is significant as it accelerates our fibre-to-the-home roll-out plans and enables us to bring converged products and services to almost half a million more homes and businesses across Portugal,” says Vodafone Europe CEO Philipp Humm.

Vodafone has been investing heavily in fixed line networks as it seeks to offset falling mobile revenues in Europe. It is building fibre infrastructure in Ireland, Italy and Spain, while it has also agreed deals to purchase cable firms Ono in Spain and Kabel Deutschland in Germany.

This fixed line infrastructure, along with a series of global partner deals, underpins Vodafone’s One Net unified communications service, which is used by 3.5 million people around the world. Vodafone offers SMB services in 10 countries and serves multinationals in 14 markets, with the network it acquired in the £1 billion takeover of Cable & Wireless used to provide services in the UK.

Vodafone has recently refreshed its range of One Net services for SMBs and large enterprises and has just announced that small businesses will soon benefit from Microsoft Lync integration.

Read this story and other Portuguese tech news on our sister site, B!T.pt

What do you know about Vodafone? Take our quiz!