The DST Group presents today a project that foresees an investment of eighty million euros to create an optical fiber network in Porto. The company reveals that there will be 1,000 kilometers of fiber to serve a potential number of 360,000 users, the population of Porto.
The project brings together in partnership four companies of the group and the entities that make up Porto Digital (which includes the municipality of Porto, the University of Porto, the Portuguese Business Association, among others) represented in a new company: Porto Digital, Operador Neutro de Telecomunicações, SA The company will be responsible for the development and operation of the infrastructure, which will be open to any operator when ready.
At the end of the first semester of 2010, the objective is that all public and private schools are served by the new infrastructure. DST explains in a statement that it is in negotiations «to transpose the same business model […] to other cities in the country. «
It is recalled that DST already integrates public-private partnerships for the development of fiber optic networks in the Minho region. In these cases, the participating company has the same competencies for developing and operating an open access infrastructure.
Porto Digital has also been involved for some time in the infrastructure of the Porto area with a high capacity network, within the scope of the CityNet project. You can review here the information that TeK published in 2007 on this topic.
