Q: Wholesale has emerged as an important pillar of Orange Polska’s business. Why are your services so attractive to other operators?
In short, it is because the infrastructure market is booming in Poland and we are uniquely positioned to benefit from this trend. Demand is mainly driven by three factors.
Firstly, fibre networks in Poland are growing rapidly. We estimate that in 2022, fibre’s reach expanded such that more than a million new households are able to connect. Poland is catching up to western European countries in regards to fast broadband infrastructure. Over the past few years it was mainly Orange Polska rolling out fibre. More recently, a whole new segment of the industry, focused purely on infrastructure players, has emerged. Their strategy is to focus on building fibre networks and providing wholesale access to them to all interested players who offer retail services. One of these businesses is, obviously, Światłowód Inwestycje, co-controlled by Orange Polska. But there are many others. Rollout of these networks require a lot of cabling and data-transmission links. Using existing solutions and infrastructure helps to optimise this process. Our ducts and poles have a lot of excess capacity, that we offer to other operators to meet this demand.
The second demand driver is also directly linked to the fibre boom. We are actively providing opportunities within our own fibre access network to other operators who want to expand their footprint for fixed broadband services. The number of connected customer lines through this wholesale access has more than tripled in the past two years. We are on a good path to reach our strategic goal in this domain.
Thirdly, our wholesale customers are increasingly other mobile operators. Traditional datalinks that connect mobile base stations are less and less capable of carrying the amount of customer traffic, which is constantly growing.
They increasingly need fibre to connect their masts to preserve network quality. We have come up with dedicated solutions meeting these needs.
Please note that all these demand factors have one common denominator: the ongoing surge in data consumption in Poland, which requires both high-speed fixed broadband and excellent mobile connectivity.
We can meet this demand owing to our country’s largest stock of telecommunication infrastructure. This mainly includes more than 200,000 km fibre network, almost 150,000 km of ducts and around 1.3 million telecom posts. We are also investing into modern digital solutions that allow mass-scale operations between operators’ IT systems and provide high-quality digital maintenance of the co-operation.
Q: What are the key priorities in this area for 2023 and onwards?
Our agenda is very busy. The market that I just described will develop further and we will benefit from it. There will be many new households that will be connected to highspeed internet. The new financing trigger in this area will come from European funds. While political disputes over European Recovery Funds continue, European Funds for Digital Development (EFDD) have already been approved and the process of their allocation has just started. The main goal of the EFDD programme, worth EUR 2 billion (and to be used by 2027), is to build a gigabit society in Poland, particularly to provide advanced public e-services, support cybersecurity and develop the data-based economy using modern digital technologies. These new networks will constitute a new market for us, offering additional opportunity to use our infrastructure.
The allocation process of the dedicated 5G spectrum has finally restarted. 5G technology will activate new investments in mobile networks over many years to come. Fiberisation of this infrastructure will continue. We have just entered the market for MVNO wholesale services, offering our network to fixed operators willing to enter the market for mobile services. MVNOs constitute a very small portion of the Polish mobile market and I believe we have prepared an offer which will be unique on the market and will attract a lot of newcomers.
The first two years of implementing our .Grow agenda in wholesale were very successful, and I am confident we will continue to build this momentum over the coming years.