Ronan Kelly, the President of the FTTH Council Europe, has presented Orange Spain and Dana Tobak, Chief Executive Officer of Hyperoptic with an FTTH Award for their outstanding contributions to the acceleration of FTTH in Europe.

Dana Tobak is very familiar with the business of running companies and Hyperoptic is not her first telecom company as she also founded Be Broadband in 2004. Convinced that she could contribute even more to a Gigabit Britain, Dana launched Hyperoptic in 2011, focusing at first on London and then expending to reach other urban areas with the aim of reaching 2 million homes and businesses by 2022 and 5 million by 2025.

“Hyperoptic’s networks is expanding at an incredible speed. It has been growing its network reach by over 100% for the last three years in a row and as the driving force behind this, the FTTH Council Europe wanted to acknowledge Dana’s tremendous work in making FTTH more accessible.” stressed Ronan Kelly during the Award Ceremony.

Accepting the award on behalf of Dana Tobak, Pascal Koster, CTIO of Hyperoptic said: “To be recognised by her industry peers means a great deal to Dana. When she co-founded Hyperoptic it was with the aim to shake up the UK broadband sector, which had been neglected for too long with a compelling full fibre offering. With her team, Hyperoptic is delivering on this vision and we look forward to continue working with our partners in the industry to deliver the full fibre broadband the UK needs. “

Orange Spain, represented by Gervais Pellissier, Orange Group Deputy CEO & Chairman of Orange Spain, received the FTTH Council Europe Operator Award for the company’s overall contribution to FTTH on the Spanish market. In more than 20 years of existence Orange Spain has played a pivotal role in the Spanish success story and has built a proven track record with now the objective of reaching 16 million households by 2020 with FTTH.

“The Spanish market is an example of achievement for FTTH deployment. Last year the choice of Spain as location for the FTTH Conference was highly symbolic and we are pleased to see this virtuous trend continuing with the FTTH award going to Orange Spain this year. We wanted to recognise the role of Orange Spain as a challenger investing massively on the Spanish market.” explained Ronan Kelly.

Receiving the award on behalf of Orange Spain, Gervais Pellissier indicated: “We are very proud at Orange Group of this success of our Spanish colleagues – congratulations and thanks everyone at Orange Spain! In 20 years they have developed fantastically, becoming the country’s incontestable number two. Fibre has been a key component of the Orange growth strategy, and Spain is our most successful operation in this respect, representing nearly 3 million out of our Group’s almost 6.5 million FTTH lines at the end of 2018.”