LONDON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Liberty Global Chief
Executive Mike Fries said the opportunity to sell wholesale
access to its British broadband network was "ripe for the
picking", but the company's Virgin Media-O2 joint venture was in
no rush to announce a deal.
"The wholesale opportunity is ripe for the picking," Fries
told the Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media and Telecoms
conference on Thursday.
"If there's anybody on this call that thinks that BT
Openreach isn't going to have competition for wholesale: there's
just zero probability of that."
He said emerging fibre broadband network builders in Britain
would be hit by the roll-out plans of Virgin Media-O2 - jointly
owned by Liberty Global and Telefonica - and BT.
"I think the window is slowly closing for many of these
alt-nets," he said. "There's not enough wholesale customers to
support their network construction. And they only have a
fraction of the funding they actually need."
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)