Vodafone Spain, the country’s third-largest broadband provider by subscribers, has confirmed that the upgrade of its HFC cable broadband platforms to the DOCSIS 3.1 standard was successfully completed in the third quarter of 2018. The legacy cable network – which was inherited via the EUR7.2 million (USD8.2 million) takeover of Grupo Corporativo ONO in July 2014 – passes more than seven million homes. (Note: Vodafone’s fibre-to-the-home [FTTH] networks currently pass more than ten million homes – a figure which is doubled when including wholesale access to Telefonica’s fibre infrastructure.)
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in January 2017 Vodafone contracted Chinese vendor Huawei to help it to deploy DOCSIS 3.1 technology, with a view to providing symmetrical downlink/uplink speeds of more than 1Gbps to end-users.