Orange and Vodafone have launched a joint pilot aimed at consolidating their tower infrastructure in Spain, reports business daily Expansion. The project to combine their respective tower portfolios is aimed at reducing costs by outsourcing management of the sites and ultimately selling them to companies such as Cellnex, Telxius or Axion, with the operators looking to halve the number of antennas in certain locations.
As a result, the partners are running a tender to consolidate an initial 50 sites where Orange and Vodafone towers are in close proximity. If successful, the pilot will be extended to several hundred more towers, said the report.
The operators already cooperate on 3G and 4G network sharing, and the new agreement is expected to help them better compete with rivals such as Telefonica and Yoigo who have their own infrastructure agreement and sold nearly 4,000 towers to Cellnex between 2012 and 2017.
