United Group to roll out Gbps across Balkans
October 8, 2018
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Balkan telecoms and media provider United Group has announced the rollout of the first 1 Gbps services across the region via its local cable platforms SBB (Serbia) and Telemach (Montenegro, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina).
The majority of the deployments will be via the Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network using Docsis 3.1 technology, with the capacity of offering speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
United Group is investing €600 million over five-years in the project, of which €293 million is in Serbia.
Cable operator SBB will roll-out the service in the cities of Novi Sad and Subotica from October 18th, before being extended to Belgrade and Kragujevac in 2019, taking the total number of potential households capable of receiving the service to over 700,000.
The 1 Gbps packages will be launched by Telemach in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica (on the GPON network) and in Slovenia. Telemach customers in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) will get the 1 Gbps service from 2019.
United Group has more than 1.8 million customers in the region and was recently acquired by UK-based private equity firm BC Partners from US rival KKR.