UK broadband provider TalkTalk on Monday announced it has inked a multi-year commercial MVNO agreement with O2’s parent company Telefonica.
Until now, TalkTalk had been relying on Vodafone’s infrastructure to provide network connections to its 350,000 mobile base since 2010, but now the new deal will see the operator making use of Telefonica’s infrastructure instead.
“This is a significant development for TalkTalk, building on our success in mobile to date,” said TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding.
“We are ideally placed to benefit from the market shift to quad-play, with a sizeable and growing number of customers already choosing to take mobile from us.
“We see real opportunities in both the near term and further out, to work with Telefónica UK to further accelerate our quad-play growth.”
As part of the deal, O2 will offer 2G, 3G and 4G services to the operator’s mobile customers across the country.
TalkTalk claims that the new deal will enable it to offer quad-play bundles to customers featuring fixed line, mobile, broadband and TV services in one package as it plans to “build a scale and profitable quad-play business over the medium term”.
Announcing the deal, Ronan Dunne, chief executive of Telefónica UK, said “We are pleased to be able to announce our commercial MVNO agreement with TalkTalk, which builds on our heritage of being the trusted provider for many notable MVNO, public and private sector organisations in the UK.
“This recognition, as a leading source of essential connectivity, comes as a result of our continued and significant investment in our nationwide network. We welcome the start of what we hope will be a successful and prosperous relationship for both parties.”
