Vodaphone Buys BT Phones Irish Fixed Line Business For 4.1 Million

Many thousands of BT Ireland home and small business customers whose accounts are to be transferred to Vodafone will be tied to Vodaphone under a major agreement unveiled yesterday between the two firms, and will not be able to terminate their existing contracts once the move takes place.

British Telecom has left the home retail telephone and broadband market. Its 84,000 home consumers will soon be part of Vodafone’s fixed-line customer base. Its additional 3,000 BT small business customers will also be transferred to Vodafone’s existing fixed-line service in coming months.

The deal will boost Vodafone’s total fixed-line customer base to more than 170,000 customers and make it the second-biggest player in the market after Eircom. Vodafone will also have 15 percent of the country’s fixed-line broadband internet customer base.

The proposed deal which is still subject to approval from the Competition Authority, also includes a multi-million euro commitment from BT to upgrade a further 58 telephone exchanges around the country. In doing so it can ensure that more of the Irish population can access its 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.