Ireland Shifts to Vodafone for Broadband Connections
A new contract between British Telecom and Vodafone led to the transfer of Irelands voice and broadband services to Vodafone. Small businesses and residential consumer broadband customers of British Telecom will now receive their connections from Vodafone. The deal which has been in play for several months know is deemed to beneficial for both companies and consumers.
Vodafone, the mobile phone company, has become the second largest provider of land based broadband in the recent months. It has gained a total over three thousand small businesses and eighty-four thousand residential customers as a result of the transfer from British Telecom. The seven year contract ensures that Vodafone will maintain its major position in the broadband market today. Other than land based broadband connections, Vodafone is also known for mobile broadband connections and other mobile phone based data applications.
British Telecom will now be focusing on wholesale broadband and its underlying infrastructure. Using a technique called Local Loop Unbundling, British Telecom intends to increase the number of corporate customers using previous resources devoted to consumer businesses. One of these new customers is the new consumer broadband provider, which is Vodafone.
The contract is valued around 4.8 million pounds in assets. This latest business transaction make perfect sense for the situation in Ireland where small business and consumer broadband only accounts for about ten percent of the overall customer base of British Telecom in the area. According to British Telecom (Ireland) CEO Chris Clarke ‘Our core focus has been the corporate market. And infrastructure-based competition hasn't happened in Ireland."
The executive also added that they are planning to unbundle fifty-eight more exchanges to add to the twenty two exchanges already unbundled by British Telecom. Using this unbundling technique almost two-thirds of Ireland will have broadband speeds of up to 24Mbps which is a great increase from the previous available broadband speeds in the area.
