Orange and Vodafone have reached an agreement to strengthen their existing mobile and fixed network partnership in Spain. Aiming at promoting a sustainable investment model, this agreement will result in a faster and more efficient deployment of NGA networks (including new technologies, such as 5G) over a wider geographic area, delivering significant benefits to their respective business and residential customers.
Mobile broadband network agreement
The new agreement expands the one signed by both companies in 2006 and renewed in 2016. The new conditions will bring network sharing from towns between 1,000 and 25,000 inhabitants to municipalities with fewer than 175,000. The agreement includes active sharing for 2G, 3G and 4G technologies of both companies. The expected number of sites shared will amount to 14.800. The active sharing initiative will be extendable to the future 5G rollout. Thus, more customers will benefit from 5G’s new features, such as low latency and high speed; achieving also a more efficient deployment.
The agreement would still allow both companies to own independent strategies in large cities, where efficiencies from shared deployment are limited, and to have their own services and Core functionality in 100% of their networks as well as separate spectrum management and network performance.
Fixed broadband network agreement
The agreement also expands previous fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) co-investment agreements to new geographic areas through new wholesale access or co-investment agreements. This new wholesale agreement will enable Vodafone to offer its fibre and convergent services to 1 million additional households over Orange’s network. Furthermore, both companies will have access to the future fixed broadband deployments of the other party
Laurent Paillassot, CEO of Orange Spain said, "we have always promoted infrastructure sharing as a key lever to reach more customers faster and more efficiently both in fixed and mobile networks. The extension of the agreement with Vodafone allows Orange to further extend mobile coverage in Spain, and accelerate its future deployment of 5G at more efficient costs".