By Kostas Ketsietzis

The OTE group and the Grid Telecom group (a subsidiary of IPTO) – Terna Energy will apparently share the large PPP Ultra-Fast Broadband, with a budget of 700 million euros, for the development of fiber optic networks in a large part of the Greek region not covered by telecommunications providers.

According to information from the eight companies that participated in the competitive dialogue, bids were finally dropped by both. Wind, Vodafone, PPC, AVAX, Mytilineos-METKA and Intracom were left out of the process.

The next period will be known in the poetic areas of the seven that have been determined in the competition will be undertaken by each contractor. Each area (lot) has a similar budget (approximately 100 million Euros each) and approximately the same number of estimated connections (approximately 110-120 thousand connections each).

It is reminded that Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFBB) is one of the largest telecommunications PPP projects in Europe and the largest in progress in our country. It has a budget of 700 million Euros (plus VAT), with 300 million Euros coming from public funding.

The UFBB is expected to generate more than 750,000 connections at a speed of at least 100 Mbps, with a capacity of playback at 1Gbps and aims to accelerate the achievement of the connection goals of the European project of the “Gigabit Society”.