Hellas Online joins the VDSL club

Hellas Online (HOL), a competitive unbundled local loop (ULL) network service provider based in Greece, on Tuesday became the latest service provider in the country to offer VDSL broadband services.

Offering up to 50/5 Mbps speeds, the service provider's VDSL service will be offered as part of three double-play bundles, including wireline calling to national, international and wireless numbers.

Eligible HOL customers will be able to get the service for a promotional price of €30 ($39.50) per month, while Vodafone Greece's wireless customers will get an additional €5 a month discount and an additional discount from their wireless service plan.

HOL's move comes at a time of growing activity in Greece and the broader VDSL-based broadband market. In late November, fellow competitive ULL providers ForthNet and Wind Hellas both introduced their own VDSL service packages leveraging OTE's wholesale VDSL service. Like Hellas, they are offering up to 50 Mbps speeds in addition to charging users an additional €10.00 ($13.00) to add VDSL services to existing ADSL2+ offerings.

All of this activity in Greece is part of a broader VDSL migration movement in Europe where incumbent service providers are looking to quickly extend their traditional copper to better compete with cable operators.

Outside of Greece, other notable planned and ongoing VDSL deployments include those of Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia. Deutsche Telekom recently launched a plan to invest €6 billion ($7.7 billion) to roll out VDSL2 with vectoring over a Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) architecture, while Telecom Italia said it's on track to cover 6 million people, or 25 percent of the population with its VDSL2-based FTTC network.

For more:
- TeleGeography has this article

Special report: Bonding telcos' love affair with copper through VDSL2

Related articles:
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Wind, ForthNet to offer VDSL service over OTE's new network
Greece's OTE debuts VDSL double-play data, voice package