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French operator likely to increase number of towers sold in second phase of deal with infrastructure specialist Cellnex.
Bouygues Telecom has agreed to sell 230 mobile towers to specialist company Cellnex Telecom for €80 million, but could more than double the number of sites offloaded in a second phase of the deal.
The towers are located throughout France, mainly in rural and suburban areas, but with a small percentage in urban areas, Cellnex announced on Monday.
The French mobile operator’s total towers portfolio comprises 15,000 sites. The deal with Cellnex marks the start of an ongoing relationship between the pair, the towers firm said.
Indeed, the companies are already looking at a second phase to the deal, which is expected to be agreed in the coming months and will see the total number of towers sold off rise to 500. Bouygues Telecom has also signed a 20-year services deal with Cellnex.
"We trust that this agreement opens the door to extend it in the future to other areas such as construction of new towers on demand (build to suit), or the deployment of new technologies based on ‘small cells’ for mobile broadband extension," said Cellnex CEO, Tobias Martínez.
"This deal strengthens our European scope and thus our ability for building a partnership with customers operating in different European markets to whom we can offer telecom connectivity solutions," he added.
The transaction opens up the French market to Cellnex, which already boasts a presence in its home market of Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
France has 56,000 telecoms towers in total, 20% of which are operated by independent companies, Cellnex said. As in other markets, its operators are in the process of rolling out 4G networks, mainly using existing 2G and 3G towers, but they are also facing the challenge of supporting large numbers of concurrent users, which means network densification.
