SingTel, Portugal Telecom Partner to Tap into Expertise in IPTV and FTTH

Singapore’s telecom giant, SingTel and Portugal Telecom have agreed to operate under partnership agreement hoping to tap into each other’s expertise and, more importantly, take advantage of ‘economies of scale.’
The partnership includes collaboration on research and development, besides joint creation of applications and solutions. The telecom companies hope that partnership will enable them jointly procure equipments so as to bring down procurement costs and save money.
Under the agreement, both companies will tap into each other’s proven expertise and partnership deals, in areas such as IPTV and FTTH, as well as the mobile and business markets.Portugal Telecom (News – Alert), which provides pay-TV services in the Portuguese market using its copper and fiber networks, has one million customers, and is set to build an additional 600,000 FTTH homes in 2011.
Over the past three years, PT has reportedly gained roughly 30 per cent market share in pay-TV in Portugal and has more than 800,000 pay-TV customers. PT is indeed making inroads into Portugal’s mobile telephony market where it has been driving wireless broadband and smartphone usage. PT also owns businesses in Brazil and countries in Africa and Asia.This year in Singapore, SingTel (News – Alert) launched fiber services to residential customers, delivering 100 Mbps speeds to homes and upgrading mobile network capacity to 42 Mbps. The company’s multimedia efforts are gaining traction with 245,000 customers on its three year old pay-TV service, mio TV.
SingTel has more than 100,000 users on its cloud-based services and it has the reach of 368 million mobile customers.
The telecom firms hope to foster talent pools across the companies including employee secondment programs.“It is with great enthusiasm we partner with a leading player such as SingTel to share best practices and to collaborate on rolling out increasingly more advanced services and to continue to improve time to market, while increasing also our efficiency,” said Zeinal Bava, CEO of PT.
“Collaborating with an integrated telecom service provider like PT, who began operating commercial fiber networks a few years earlier, will bring benefits to our customers by allowing us to gain more experience in fiber, benchmark our costs and improve our processes so that we can be more effective in meeting our customers’ needs,” said Allen Lew, CEO Singapore, SingTel.
Article via iptv.tmcnet