Vodafone Portugal and NOS, a Portuguese media holding company, have signed an agreement to deploy and share a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network which will be marketable to around 2.6 million homes and businesses in Portugal. The two companies will provide reciprocal access to each other's networks on commercially agreed terms.
The total number of homes and businesses to be shared by the two companies will be around 2.6 million covering both existing and greenfield areas (undeveloped land in a city or rural area).
Vodafone Portugal will gain access to 1.3 million homes and businesses in new areas. This will increase its total coverage from 2.7 million to around 4.0 million, representing 80 percent of the households in the country.
Each party will deploy, but not share, the link between the central office and the fibre backbone, active equipment and CPEs (customer-premises equipment). Customer connections and activations will be independent of each other.
Marketing of services across the joint network will commence from the beginning of calendar 2018. Both Vodafone Portugal and NOS will maintain complete autonomy and flexibility in respect of their respective retail offers.
The agreement is consistent with Vodafone Group's fixed infrastructure strategy, which aims for an optimal mix of build, strategic partnerships, wholesale and buy approaches. As a result of this strategy, Vodafone can already market high-speed services to 98 million homes across Europe, and this agreement extends this to over 100 million.
Vodafone Portugal's current fibre-to-the-home deployment program reached 2.7 million homes as of June 2017. The company has 4.7 million mobile customers and around 550,000 fixed broadband customers.