SANTANDER, SPAIN (Bloomberg) - Vodafone Group plc., the world's largest mobile-phone company by revenue, said proposed regulations for new fixed-line broadband services in Spain may hurt business.

Spain's phone regulator aims to promote competition among networks by preventing phone companies from using Telefonica SA's new fibre network to offer services to customers, as they currently do with the copper-line infrastructure.

It may be too expensive to deploy more than one fibre-optic network in Spain, so the proposals are "a threat to competition", Francisco Roman, CEO of Vodafone Spain, said yesterday in Santander, in the north of the country. "It will hurt consumers" and could strengthen Telefonica's dominance, Mr. Roman said.

Vodafone acquired Tele2 AB's Italian and Spanish units for 775 million euros ($1.12 billion) last year to add fixed-line broadband to its wireless services in those countries.

"We spent hundreds of millions of euros on the Tele2 purchase" without knowing that the regulations were going to change, Mr. Roman said.