Vodafone signs fibre deal with NOS in Portugal

Vodafone Group announced on Monday that its Vodafone Portugal division, and Portuguese telecommunications and media conglomerate NOS, have signed an agreement to deploy and share a fibre-to-the-home network which would be marketable to around 2.6 million homes and businesses in Portugal.

The FTSE 100 firm said both it and its Euronext-traded counterpart would provide reciprocal access to each other's networks on commercially-agreed terms, although financial details were not disclosed.

It said the key terms of the agreement included that the total number of homes and businesses to be shared by the two companies would be around 2.6 million, covering both existing and greenfield areas.

Vodafone Portugal would gain access to 1.3 million homes and businesses in new areas, consisting of new fibre builds in NOS's current cable footprint, NOS's existing fibre reach in areas greenfield to Vodafone, and building homes in new areas.

That would increase its total coverage from 2.7 million to around 4.0 million, reportedly representing 80% of households in the country.

At the back-end, Vodafone said each party would deploy, but not share, the link between the central office and the fibre backbone, active equipment and customer-premises equipment.

Customer connections and activations would remain independent of each other.

Marketing of services across the joint network would begin at the start of calendar year 2018, the Vodafone board confirmed.

Both Vodafone Portugal and NOS would 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,” Vodafone’s board said in its statement.

“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.”