11th April - Vodafone UK announced a new managed network solutions agreement that will see BT Wholesale provide and manage high speed connectivity between Vodafone’s UK base stations and its core national network.

Inset shows a BT Engineer at work.

Under the terms of the five-year agreement, BT will deliver a cost-efficient and flexible solution that enables Vodafone UK to manage the predicted growth in traffic and bandwidth requirements from its range of new bandwidth-intensive mobile applications, such as web browsing, video streaming and music downloads, without the need to invest significant capital in self-build technology.

The five-year contract deploys BT's new 21st Century Network-enabled Ethernet service, offering backhaul speeds of up to 60 Mbit/s. The new next-generation, carrier class service provides customers with flexible and scalable bandwidth to meet increased demand, with costs that match actual traffic and revenue increases. This agreement allows Vodafone UK to avoid capital investment risk, while benefiting from the economies of scale and national reach BT Wholesale offers.

“By working with BT Wholesale, we are able to realise immediate cost efficiencies and focus on our customers while BT provides a managed service for our growing access and backhaul needs,” said Jeni Mundy, Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone UK. “This agreement supports us in our continued drive to expand our market-leading position in sales of mobile internet and broadband products and services, and positions us to meet growing demand from our customers.”

Sally Davis, chief executive of BT Wholesale, said, “Communications providers want to drive revenue growth from new services while closely managing their capital and operational investments. Choosing to outsource the requirement to BT means the customer gets the benefits of scalability, flexibility and our expertise to deliver capacity where and when it’s needed, efficiently and profitably. Vodafone and its customers will also benefit from cutting edge Ethernet connectivity on 21CN.”

Consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to access and send data such as photos, video and gaming and high speed web browsing. These high-bandwidth applications put an additional load on backhaul networks. BT is able to manage this access network and flex it to cope with the demands that Vodafone’s customers put on it.