Friday, 24 July 2009

Vodaphone Buys BT Phones Irish Fixed Line Business For 4.1 Million

By Jasom Tams

BT Ireland home and small business customers will have there accounts transferred to Vodafone. They will now be tied to Vodaphone under a major agreement unveiled between the two firms, and will not be able to terminate their existing contracts once the move takes place.

British Telecom has left the home retail telephone and broadband market. Its 84,000 home consumers will soon be part of Vodafone's fixed-line customer base. Its additional 3,000 BT small business customers will also be transferred to Vodafone's existing fixed-line service in coming months.

The deal will boost Vodafone's total fixed-line customer base to more than 170,000 customers and make it the second-biggest player in the market after Eircom. Vodafone will also have 15 percent of the country's fixed-line broadband internet customer base.

The deal which is still need clearance from the Competition Authority, also includes a agreement from British Telecom to upgrade a further 58 phone exchanges around the country. In doing so it can allow more of the Irish population to access its high-speed internet services.

Already BT has unbundled 22 exchanges. BT will then sell its Irish wholesale broadband capacity to Vodafone, which will then in turn market it to fixed-line customers.

That will ultimately impact revenue at Eircom, further challenging the already embattled telco. Of the 84,000 home users currently with BT, about 80pc of them use broadband services that BT sources from Eircom on a wholesale basis. Once additional exchanges are upgraded by BT, the proportion of wholesale fixed-line internet services that Vodafone will have to source from Eircom will decline.

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