By Telecom Lead Team: Mobile major France
Telecom-Orange announced its partnership agreement with Bouygues Telecom to
share Fiber to the Home networks (FTTH) deployed by France Telecom-Orange
across France.
The
partnership enables France Telecom-Orange to provide a service for sharing its
optical fiber networks in very densely populated areas with Bouygues Telecom
for the horizontal network segment leading to the foot of buildings.
France
Telecom-Orange will be able to optimize its deployment costs by sharing the
available resources of its optical fiber networks.
France
Telecom-Orange will enable its partner to benefit from its network coverage in
very densely populated areas. Within the buildings, Bouygues Telecom will have
to build its own networks or subscribe to available cable-sharing offers. In
this zone, the partnership potentially covers 1.7 million homes.
More over,
outside very densely populated areas of France, Bouygues Telecom has subscribed
to the wholesale cable-sharing offer for the terminal part of France
Telecom-Orange’s FTTH networks. With this offer, Bouygues Telecom will potentially
have access to 8.9 million homes.
The
partnership marks a new milestone in the deployment of its networks and of very
high-speed broadband in France by complementing the agreements signed with Free
and SFR in the second half of 2011.
The agreement
reinforces France Telecom-Orange’s FTTH deployment goals for France and is
testimony to the constructive spirit in which it is cooperating with the other
market players.
For local
authorities, whom France Telecom-Orange plans to associate with these deployments,
the partnership provides an additional guarantee for the coverage of their
territory by networks that are open to everyone.
France
Telecom-Orange’s deployment program calls for an investment of 2 billion euros
through 2015 to bring FTTH optical fiber to 3,600 municipalities (communes).
This will provide coverage for 10 million households by 2015 and 15 million by
2020 (corresponding to 17 million homes), i.e. nearly 60 percent of all French
households.
