Vodafone Group expands gigabit fibre-to-the-home networks across Europe

• Vodafone Ireland launches first 1 gigabit fibre service this week
• Vodafone Portugal announces fibre expansion to reach 2.75 million homes

Vodafone Group today announced the commencement of 1 gigabit ultrafast fibre broadband services in Ireland as part of SIRO, Vodafone Ireland and ESB’s €450 million joint venture to roll out a 100% fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network to small towns (with upwards of 4,000 houses) across Ireland by the end of 2018.¹

Carrigaline in Country Cork is the first of 51 Irish towns to receive access to the SIRO network, enabling homes and businesses to experience ultrafast broadband speeds on a par with those in advanced industrial economies in Asia.² With recent data showing that less than 50% of all fixed broadband subscriptions in Ireland provide speeds of 30 megabits or more,³ SIRO’s speeds of up to 1 gigabit (1000 megabits) per second are set to revolutionise the online experience of 500,000 homes and businesses in small towns across Ireland. Ireland is the first country in Europe to utilise electricity infrastructure to deploy end-to-end fibre directly to the premises on a nationwide basis.⁴

Vodafone Group also today announced a €125 million expansion of its FTTH network in Portugal, offering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second to 2.75 million homes and businesses across the country by the end of 2016.⁵ To date, Vodafone has connected 2.2 million Portuguese homes and businesses to ultrafast fibre networks, expanding choice for customers and helping to establish Portugal as one of Europe’s leading FTTH countries.⁶

These investments complement other Vodafone fibre investment programmes and plans across a number of the Group’s southern European markets. Vodafone is also:

• building a new gigabit FTTH network in Spain serving more than two million homes and businesses through a co-investment agreement with Orange; ⁷ and
• 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.⁸

Vodafone Group Public Policy Director Markus Reinisch said: “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.”