Vodafone does five-year backhaul deal with BT

Vodafone has announced that it’s struck a five year deal with BT which will see BT’s wholesale arm providing connectivity between Voda’s base stations and its own network. According to the two companies, the deal comes off the back of predicted demand for high bandwidth mobile applications like photo sharing and downloading music.

The deal will see Vodafone linked up to BT’s 21st Century Network-enabled Ethernet service, which the telco says will mean backhaul speeds of up to 60Mbps.

Vodafone isn’t the first telco to get someone else to do the hard graft on backhaul – T-Mobile struck a similar deal with BT a while back – and it probably won’t be the last. If outsourcing backhaul means mobile operators can spend their cash on areas like dreaming up useful new services, boosting bandwidth and improving customer service, it sounds like a win-win situation for everyone involved.