Advanced Television

PT Portugal targets 5.3m fibre homes by 2020

November 6, 2015

From Branislav Pekic in Rome

Portuguese operator PT Portugal announced plans to extend its fibre optic network to an additional 3 million homes by 2020.

Speaking at a press conference, the CEO of PT Portugal, Paulo Neves, said that the operator currently has over 2.3 million households passed, making it the largest fibre optic network in the country.

For 2017, PT Portugal is aiming for 3.3 million homes and businesses passed, arriving to 5.3 million in 2020, at a rate of 600,000 households per year.

The plan will see PT Portugal laying 30,000 kilometers of fibre, enough to go 22 times from north to south Portugal. According to Neves, the intention is to place Portugal among the top 10 countries in the world with the most fibre.

The investment, whose value was not revealed, is based on a new technology developed by PT Portugal’s technology unit PT Inovação. The NG-PON2 technology represents an evolution of the existing G-PON technology and guarantees an increase of speed up to 80 Gbps, 16 to 32 times faster than currently available. It will be commercially available from the first half of 2016.

According to PT Portugal CTO, Alexandre Fonseca, the intention is to export the new technology to other markets as well.

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