Deutsche Telekom touts broadband investments
Created September 17, 2013Deutsche Telekom plans to turbo charge its national broadband infrastructure with a speed upgrade for its mobile LTE network and the widespread roll out of vectoring in the fixed network.
“We’re strengthening our position as the leading network provider for our customers. No other telecommunications company invests as much as Deutsche Telekom,” claimed René Obermann, chairman of the board of management of Deutsche Telekom in a press release. The operator expects to invest more than €23 billion in Germany between 2010 and 2015.
In its expansion of the network infrastructure, the operator says it is implementing the “best possible” combination of technologies, including mobile communications, fixed-line, IP-based infrastructure and wireless connections (Wi-Fi).
In mobile communications, Deutsche Telekom says it will increase top speeds on its LTE network up to 150 Mbps. That means high-speed LTE will be available immediately in well over 100 German cities, increasing to almost 200 cities by the end of the year. In addition, Hamburg will become the first German city to be equipped with Wi-Fi technology on a large scale.
In the home, the use of vectoring technology on Deutsche Telekom’s expanding fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) network will enable data transfer speeds of up to 100 Mbps. Around 12 million households are already connected to the FTTC network, and the number of connections is expected to double by the end of 2016. To achieve this, Deutsche Telekom says it will need to set up 17,600 additional multifunctional cabinets and lay approximately 10,000 km of new fibre-optic cable to connect them.
Underpinning these changes, Deutsche Telekom says it will continue to modernize its network by converting it to a high-capacity converged IP-optical infrastructure, which it calls the TeraStream architecture. In collaboration with Cisco, the IP technology was successfully tested in a pilot in Croatia at the end of 2012, and will also be rolled out in the Group’s other European subsidiaries and affiliates over the next few years. The Terastream architecture will allow the intelligence for network operations and services to be transferred into the cloud, the operator says.
By Pauline Rigby
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