Vodafone continues FTTH push in Europe
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Vodafone continues FTTH push in Europe

Vodafone Group is to launch high-speed fibre broadband services in Ireland this week, as part of its joint venture with Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board (ESB).

The €450 million joint venture called SIRO aims to rollout FTTH to small towns across Ireland by the start of 2018.

Carrigaline in Country Cork will be the first of 51 Irish towns to receive access to the SIRO network, which is said to have ultrafast broadband speeds on a par with those in advanced industrial economies in Asia.

Ireland is also said to be the first country in Europe to utilise electricity infrastructure to deploy fibre directly to premises nationwide.

At the same time, the operator has also announced a €125 million expansion of its FTTH network in Portugal, which will offer speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second to 2.75 million homes and businesses across the country by the end of 2016.

To date, Vodafone has connected 2.2 million Portuguese homes and businesses to its fibre networks.

Vodafone is also in discussions with Italian electricity company Enel which has announced plans to create a new infrastructure company to build a national FTTH network open to all operators across Italy.

“The successful economies of the future will be gigabit societies with ultrafast fibre-optic connections available everywhere. Vodafone is playing its part in realising that objective:  we have demonstrated that we invest in fibre-to-the-home when conditions allow us to do so, working together with other forward-looking companies to build the ultrafast digital infrastructure that Europe needs,” said Vodafone Group’s public policy director Markus Reinisch.

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