News
The operator said it plans to expand its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf by one million households by 2025
Deutsche Telekom has been accelerating its fibre rollout significantly in recent months.
At the end of 2020, Telekom said it had already rolled out FTTH to around 2 million households in Germany, having added around 600,000 in 2020 itself. Since then, the company has announced a target of passing 10 million homes by 2024, ultimately aiming to cover all of Germany’s homes and businesses by 2030.
A few months later, in March, the operator said that it was aiming to rollout FTTH to one million homes in Berlin, with 600,000 of these completed by 2025.
Now, the operator is making similar large-scale commitments to three more of Germany’s largest cities, aiming to increase its FTTH networks in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf by over a million homes and businesses by 2025.
Hamburg will account for 540,000 of these households, with 375,000 in Frankfurt, and 160,000 in Dusseldorf.
Deutsche Telekom is reportedly investing €2.5 billion annually in its rollout of fibre networks until 2024.
“The expansion of high-performance networks is our top priority – whether with 5G in mobile communications or fibre optic broadband expansion. To achieve this, we are massively increasing the investments in our network: As already announced in February, by 2024 from currently around 1.5 billion euros to around 2.5 billion per year only for fibre-optic expansion,” said Srini Gopalan, MD for Telekom Deutschland.
It should be noted that Telekom is, of course, not only focussing its fibre rollout on urban metropolises, but is also targeting rural areas as part of its ‘More Broadband for Germany’ programme. In 2021. Telekom wants to connect 200,000 households and companies in underserved rural areas to its fibre network in 2021.
The FTTH Council Europe recently released statistics that showed that over half of European homes now have access to an FTTH connection. Here the pace of Germany’s fibre rollout was evident, with the country passing an additional 2.7 million homes from September 2019 to September 2020, beaten only by France (4.6 million) and Italy (2.8 million). Germany also exhibited the third-highest growth rate in FTTH deployment, increasing 66% compared to the previous year.
But, despite these promising statistics, there is clearly still much work to be done in Germany. The FTTH Council’s report notes that copper-heavy countries, like the UK, Italy, and Germany, account for 60% of the homes left to be passed with fibre in the EU27+UK region.
Can Germany reach its fibre deployment goals for 2025? Find out what the experts think at this year’s Connected Germany conference
Also in the news:
What’s the score? Total Telecom’s quarterly financial Score Board
The 5G-aliser: May 2021 update – Standalone 5G is coming
AT&T eyes $150bn media merger with Discovery
