Vodafone bringing 200Mbps fibre service to Spain next week
Vodafone will begin selling fibre to the home (FTTH) services from next week, thanks to a helping hand from rival telco Orange.
Its FTTH products will be available in six areas around Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Valencia, Malaga and Zaragoza from 1 April, the operator confirmed this week.
There will be a choice of two options at launch: a 200Mbps download/20Mbps connection, and a 100Mbps/10Mbps connection.
Vodafone will be offering the slower of the two services bundled with a mobile offering: the slower of the two services, Fibra 100, can be bought with a mobile plan which includes call minutes and 600MB of data for €54 a month. The same package will cost €64 for the higher-speed Fibre 200 FTTH service.
There are a series of more expensive bundles available, which top out at €90 and €100 for Fibra 100 and 200 respectively. The mobile part of the most costly bundles also brings with it unlimited landline and mobile calls and 4GB of data.
Orange and Vodafone agreed last year to jointly roll out fibre across Spain, with the aim of covering six million premises bewteen them — each agreeing to roll out fibre to half of those homes and businesses. The pair hope to have the six million buildings, which will span 50 cities in the country, fibre-connected by 2017. Work on the deployment began in September last year.
Vodafone's Spanish ambitions got a further boost this month when the company agreed to take over local operator Ono for €7.2bn.
Vodafone highlighted Ono's fibre network when it announced the deal, saying it would be complementary to its own. Its fibre rollout will be "refocused towards areas where Ono has limited or no network presence" following the acquisition, it added.