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Home and small business customers with BT will have there accounts transferred to Vodafone. They will now be tied to Vodaphone under a deal announced between the two firms, and will not be able to end their existing contracts once the move takes place.

BT has decided to leave the home retail telephone and broadband market. Its 84,000 existing home consumers will soon be part of Vodafone’s fixed-line customer base. Also its additional 3,000 BT small business customers will be transferred to Vodafone’s existing fixed-line service in coming months.

This deal will increase Vodafone’s total fixed-line customer base to more than 170,000 customers, making it the second-biggest player in the market after Eircom. Vodafone will also increased to having 15 percent of the country’s fixed-line broadband internet customer base.

The proposed deal which is still subject to approval from the Competition Authority, also includes a multi-million euro commitment from BT to upgrade a further 58 telephone exchanges around the country. In doing so it can ensure that more of the Irish population can access its high-speed internet services.

Already BT has unbundled 22 exchanges. BT will then sell its Irish wholesale broadband capacity to Vodafone, which will then in turn market it to fixed-line customers.

This part of the deal will make further impact on revenue at Eircom, challenging the already embattled telecoms company. Of BT’s 84,000 home users, about 80pc of them use broadband services that BT buys from Eircom at a wholesale basis. Once these new exchanges are upgraded by BT, the amount of wholesale fixed-line internet services that Vodafone will have to source from Eircom will drastically decline

Tags: b, broadband, Broadband Internet, bt, business, business;finance, c, Communications, coporate, e, f, Finance, h, I, internet, ireland, m, mobiles, n, o, p, phones, r, retail, t, telecommunication, telecoms, v, vodaphone, w, wholesale