Operators across Central and Eastern Europe seem to be rushing to offer their subscribers higher broadband speeds.
Just this week we saw Inea, one of the top five cable companies in Poland, introduce a 1Gbps service for its fibre customers. Also in Poland, the DTH platform operator Cyfrowy Polsat launched its LTE Plus Advanced service. Available initially to a potential 2 million people around the country, it provides for download speeds of up to 300Mbps.
Meanwhile UPC Polska, the country’s leading cable company, has just introduced the Connect Box, as well as announced plans to double its network’s reach, to around 6 million homes, in the next five years.
In Romania, UPC has reported on the success of Connect Box, which it introduced to the market 10 months ago. A product increasingly familiar to Liberty Global customers in several European countries, its performance, offering download speeds of up to 500Mbps, has attracted strong interest, not only from domestic customers but also businesses.
In the Baltics, the Latvian incumbent Lattelecom has been testing G.fast data technology, which will allow it to offer download speeds of up to 780Mbps on its existing copper cable network. Starman, Estonia’s leading cable operator, is set to roll out Europe’s first national 10Gb Ethernet Passive Optical Network later this year, while in Lithuania the incumbent Teo has said that thanks to its investment 70% of homes in the country had access to high-speed broadband services as of the end of last year.
Elsewhere, Telekom Austria-owned Vipnet is already providing internet access speeds of up to 500Mbps in Croatia and progress is being made in many other markets.
In that respect, developments in Central and Eastern Europe, with the ultimate aim of offering customers better services, not only mirror those in other parts of the continent but in some cases are even more advanced.