CETIN

CETIN a.s., (also known as Česká telekomunikační infrastruktura, its former name ) is a Czech telecommunications company that is part of PPF Group, an international investment group formerly majority-owned by Czech billionaire Petr Kellner. The company was created as a result of the separation of O2 Czech Republic a.s. into two companies, following a decision taken at O2 Czech Republic’s general meeting on 28 April 2015. The actual separation took place on 1 June 2015. CETIN, the new company created alongside O2, now runs the fixed-line access network, the mobile access network and international telecommunication services that were previously run by the combined O2 Czech Republic.

The CETIN network takes in 65,000 km of optical cables and 20,000,000 km of metallic cable pairs throughout the Czech Republic. It covers 99.6% of the population with a mixture of GSM, UMTS, LTE and 5G mobile technology by 6,000 base stations, and SDH, WDM, Ethernet and IP technology at fixed locations. On an international level, CETIN owns PoP (Points of Presence) in London, Vienna, Bratislava, Frankfurt and Hongkong.

CETIN is continuously accelerating existing metallic networks through bonding and vectoring technologies. In addition, the company is also engaged in the construction of new fiber-optic connections to the fiber-optic network. The goal is to reach one million connections at 1 Gbps by 2026.

PPF Group decided to squeeze out CETIN’s remaining minority shareholders at CETIN’s general meeting on 3 December 2015. The shares owned by these minority shareholders therefore passed to the majority shareholder. As a result, in January 2016, PPF Group completed the acquisition of 100% of the share capital of CETIN.

CETIN became the general partner of the Prague Spring (Pražské jaro) music festival in 2016. The company introduced a new feature to the 71st year of the festival in cooperation with Prague Spring – streaming the opening concert online to locations at Kampa Park in Prague and also to eight cinemas in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In July 2020, the infrastructure and retail parts of the three Telenor-branded operators in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Serbia were separated and to form the CETIN Group, a wholesale operator and provider of active and passive telecommunications infrastructure services in the Central and Eastern Europe.

In November 2020, CETIN signed a five-year cooperation contract to build a 5G mobile network with the Swedish company Ericsson, which will upgrade more than 4,000 base stations across CETIN's mobile network through Ericsson Radio System for 5G Standalone (SA) and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA).

In October 2021, Czech investment group PPF agreed to sell a 30% stake in telecommunications infrastructure group CETIN to Singapore GIC investment fund.