According to Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, citing those close to the deal, the fibre project will cost between €4 billion and €5 billion million ($4.7 billion and $5.9 billion) and follows the £31bn Virgin and O2 merger that took place earlier this year.
The newly formed Virgin Media O2, jointly owned by Telefónica and Liberty Global, reportedly preparing to upgrade its entire network to fibre-optics by 2028 and to increase its number of subscribers to 21 million in the same period.
No official comment from Telefónica, Barclays or LionTree has been given.
In related news, Telefónica Tech has launched a blockchain-based certification service that allows any company to authenticate documents, transactions, projects, files or any type of digital content quickly, easily and with legal support.
Each certification generated through the TrustOS managed blockchain service combines the digital signature of the user with a trace of the content to be certified as well as the time stamp in blockchain to establish the time the certification was issued.
In addition, Telefónica Tech's new service allows companies to generate digital evidence of authorship, ownership and integrity of the dynamic history of versions and interactions of any digital format with the same probative value, compared to a classic digital signature that only offers these guarantees for a specific version of a PDF document.
