Telekomunikacja Polska (TP), Poland's incumbent service provider that now offers services under France Telecom's (NYSE: FTE) Orange Poland brand, on Thursday appointed partner Relacom to create a consortium to construct 1,800 km of fiber throughout the country.
Although neither Orange Poland nor Relacom disclosed the specific financial details of the agreement, they did say that the project is being co-financed by the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Regional Operational Programme, a European Union initiative supported by the European Regional Development Fund.
Set to be complete in 2013, the obvious question is whether or not the new network facilities will be used to connect premises or for backhauling its growing base of wireline broadband and mobile wireless traffic.
Like other incumbent telcos, Orange Poland has been extending its existing copper network by rolling out VDSL to battle the country's cable operators, rolling out a Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) network architecture. By March 2013, the service provider set a goal of installing or upgrading 1.2 million lines to VDSL, 220,000 of will be able to deliver 40 Mbps speeds.
Network upgrades have been a major priority for Orange Poland. Last July, the service provider announced that it was upgrading its core network with Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) CRS-3 core router and ASR 9000 aggregation service routers.
For more:
- see the Relacom release
- here's the Cisco release
- TeleGeography has this article
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