Telefonica on Thursday announced a three-year plan to close its copper exchanges, in an effort to migrate to fiber infrastructure. The company’s goal is to close 253 exchanges in 2018, and 200 per year in 2019 and 2020.
The reason for the migration is to reduce the company’s footprint, and slash expenses. The company maintains that fiber access technology requires only 15 percent of the space that copper takes up. Plus, the migration could generate energy savings of up to 60 percent. Sources indicate the company will reuse and recycle certain elements of its legacy network.
“Fiber is the access technology that will support the development of services and customers for the next 100 years and Telefónica is working on the evolution of copper to fiber and enabling the process of network simplification and transformation,” said Pablo Ledesma, Director of Operations at Telefónica España.
“Spain is at the forefront of Europe in the rollout of ultra-fast broadband and digitalization thanks to the push that Telefónica has given to the deployment of fiber and the migration of its consumer and business customers to this new technology,” he added.
