Infrastructure-sharing agreements on rise in Europe

As a result of shrinking income, telecoms operators from different member states are forced to cooperate. Such cooperation can focus either on developing their services in other EU countries, optimising the management of existing infrastructure or deploying new infrastructure. This movement, initiated in the 2000s in Scandinavia, became more widespread from 2008, then declined somewhat, but picked up this year. In most cases it is still limited to national level (see table).

To help bring down network operating costs, operators…