Vodafone and NOS announced an agreement to deploy and share fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network targeting nearly 2.6 million homes and businesses in Portugal.

Vodafone Portugal will 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. This will increase Vodafone’s coverage from 2.7 million to around 4 million, representing 80 percent of the households in Portugal.

Vodafone and NOS will deploy, but not share, the link between the central office and the fibre backbone, active equipment and CPEs. Customer connections and activations will be independent of each other.

Vodafone and NOS will start the marketing of FTTH services across the joint network in 2018. NOS and Vodafone Portugal will maintain complete autonomy and flexibility in respect of their respective retail offers.

As part of Vodafone Group’s fixed infrastructure strategy, Vodafone can market broadband services to 100 million homes across Europe.

Vodafone Portugal’s current FTTH deployment program, reached 2.7 million homes as of June 2017.

Vodafone has 1.8 million through self-build, 0.5 million via reciprocal access with MEO, 0.2 million acquired from NOS following the Optimus/Zon merger remedies and 0.2 million via wholesale deal with MEO. The company has 4.7 million mobile customers and around 550,000 fixed broadband customers in Portugal.

Image source: RDM