Phones Freedom As Vodaphone Buys BT Fixed Line Business For 4.1 Million

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.

BT has decided to leave the Irish home retail telephone and broadband market. Its 84,000 home customers will soon be part of Vodafone’s fixed-line customer portfolio. Also its 3,000 BT small business customers will be transferred to Vodafone’s existing fixed-line service in the coming months.

Vodafone’s total fixed-line customer base increases to more than 170,000 customers with this deal, making it the second-biggest player in the Irish telecommunications market after Eircom. Vodafone will also increase to having 15 percent of the country’s fixed-line broadband internet consumers.

This agreement which is still needing clearance from the Competition Authority, also includes an commitment from British Telecom to upgrade a further 58 phone exchanges around the republic. In doing this it can allow more of the population to access its modern 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.

This component of the deal will further impact revenue at Eircom, further challenging the already embattled company. Of BT’s 84,000 home users, about 80pc of them use broadband services that BT sources from Eircom on a wholesale basis. Once the new exchanges are upgraded by BT, the amount of wholesale fixed-line internet services that Vodafone will have to source from Eircom will decline.