Telekom Deutschland (TD), the domestic operating unit of Deutsche Telekom (DT), has revealed that it installed around 60,000km of fibre-optic cables in 2018, bringing the total length of the company’s fibre network to 500,000km. Around 8.8 million homes were upgraded for faster broadband connections, with 26 million households now able to access maximum speeds of 100Mbps. In the past twelve months, TD installed 23,000 new street cabinets, increasing the total to 177,600. The firm says it will have largely completed its fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) upgrade by the end of 2020 and this will be followed by the large-scale buildout of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), in which TD will equip up to two million households with FTTH every year. The company is currently conducting two large contiguous FTTH projects in Germany, located in the districts of Vorpommern-Ruegen and Bautzen.
In terms of mobile communications, TD installed 1,300 new mobile base stations last year, increasing the total number to 27,000. The network covers 99.8% of the population, with 97.8% of Germans having 4G coverage. Over 80% of TD’s mobile base stations are connected with optical fibre and they have also been equipped with single RAN technology, making them ready for the new 5G communication standard.