Altice this week increased its target for fibre network rollout in France and said it will extend the technology to an additional 3 million homes and businesses in Portugal by the end of the decade.
In France the company’s Numericable-SFR unit aims to pass 12 million homes with fibre by the end of 2017 and reach 18 million by the end of 2020, rising to 22 million by end-2022.
The 2017 number is in line with an earlier forecast from the firm, but its 2020 target is 3 million more than it previously predicted.
At the end of the third quarter of this year, Numericable-SFR passed 7.4 million fibre homes, Altice said.
Its PT Portugal subsidiary passed 2.3 million homes with fibre at the same date, but aims to increase this to 5.3 million by the end of 2020. This represents a new target, Altice said, but it has previously been unclear on its fibre goals for the company.
Separately, PT Portugal shared an interim target of 3.5 million homes passed by 2017.
"PT will invest more and innovate more than it has before," the telco’s CEO Paulo Neves said, in a statement.
The operator said it will use NG-PON2 technology to raise fibre broadband speeds to 40 Gbps and 80 Gbps, or 16-32 times faster than the current speed of around 2.5 Gbps in the downlink.
"With the launch of this technology, as well as having the biggest and best fibre-optic network, PT also has the most innovative network", said chief technology officer Alexandre Fonseca. "We have a future-proof network."
Neither Altice nor PT Portugal commented on the spend involved. Altice simply noted that it is making "accelerated network investments."
