Under the terms of the agreement, Orange Poland will get access to an initial 40,000 fibre-to-the-home connections in the Wiekopolska region of western Poland giving Orange additional reach in the area.
“We are consistently investing in the development of our fibre-optic network, and this year we will spend up to PLN800 million ($216 million) for this purpose,” said Tomasz Kowal, director of regional development at Orange Polska. “Cooperation with over 20 operators, such as Inea, helps us reach new customer groups faster without unnecessary duplication of infrastructure. It is definitely a more effective approach.”
After gaining access to the first 40,000 FTTH connections, the agreement is likely to be extended to up to 150,000 additional homes, with the eventual plan being to extend the partnership to new areas over the coming months. By the end of 2019, the partnership will encompass 370,000 households including 150,000 in the wholesale internet space.
The deal is set to help reduce the amount of expensive overbuilds, as the country aims to accelerate the deployment of full-fibre services nationally. As part of the deal, Orange Poland will only pay for the infrastructure its uses and the price will depend on the number of active clients.
The company delivers almost 3 million FTTH connections across Poland and intends to deliver 5 million connections by the year 2020.
In related news, Orange Poland has announced that it will allocate up to 40% more bandwidth to its LTE 4G network by 2020, as well as increasing and expanding its number of base stations. In partnership with T-Mobile, Orange Poland with convert its 15MHz spectrum in 1800MHz band, used jointly with T-Mobile into two independent carriers of 10MHz.
The part second is the LTE commissioning in the 2100MHz band, with Orange spending 10MHz currently used by the 3G networks, taking the total amount of bandwidth allocated for LTE services to 45MHz. The company says that the changes “will allow aggregation of up to four so-called carrier bands, which will translate into network capacity and higher transfer speed”.
