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Vodafone Germany to Invest €2 billion in Gigabit Broadband

Vodafone Germany to Invest €2 billion in Gigabit Broadband Image Credit: Vodafone Germany

Vodafone Germany to invest approximately €2 billion in Gigabit ultrafast fibre broadband services in Germany over the next four years, delivering around 13.7 million Gigabit connections for both consumers and businesses. 

The Gigabit Investment Plan comprises three related initiatives;

Giga-Business

This initiative builds on the partnership agreement announced in July 2017 with Deutsche Glasfaser, a leading provider of fibre-to-the-premises networks in Germany, to reach 19 of Düsseldorf’s industrial and commercial business parks by early 2018.

Vodafone Germany aim to reach 100,000 companies in around 2,000 business parks in next four years, at a cost of approximately €1.4-€1.6 billion. Vodafone will work with a number of partners with either specialist fibre skills or relevant infrastructure assets, including Deutsche Glasfaser. Under the plan, the partner will deploy the passive infrastructure, while Vodafone will operate the network and supply services to customers. 

Giga-Municipality

Vodafone Germany aims to provide Gigabit services to around one million consumer households in rural areas, in co-operation with local municipalities. Under this co-investment model, the local municipality will build and own the passive network infrastructure from the central office to the home, with the potential support of government fibre subsidies. Build-outs will only begin once around one third of the homes in a municipality have committed to buy fibre services.

Vodafone will operate this network under a long term partnership/rental agreement, building the link between the central office and its fibre backbone, deploying the active equipment (including CPEs) and paying the connection costs for each household. For Vodafone, this is expected to cost around €0.2 – €0.4 billion. 

Giga-Cable

This initiative aims to enhance Vodafone’s entire cable footprint from the current top speed of 500 Mbps to 1 gigabit per second, through the accelerated adoption of DOCSIS 3.1 technology. 

The cable network will now be enabled for DOCSIS 3.1 services over two years compared to the previous four-year rollout plan. This will meet the growing customer demand for speed, enhancing our competitive advantage compared to copper-based technologies; in Q1 17/18, more than half of our new broadband users opted for cable connections of up to 200 or 400 Mbps. This initiative will cost approximately €0.2 billion (excluding CPEs). 

Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO, Vodafone Germany
The project is consistent with our strategic goal to become a leading converged communications operator in Germany, enabled by a best-in-class Gigabit network infrastructure. 

Jinsoo Jeong, SVP an Head of Dmomestic Business Marketing, Samsung Electronics 
As a strategic partner, we provided KT with NB-IoT features complying with all the latest enhancements in 3GPP standard specification in a short period of time to support KT’s pioneering work.

Author

Ray is a news editor at The Fast Mode, bringing with him more than 10 years of experience in the wireless industry.

For tips and feedback, email Ray at ray.sharma(at)thefastmode.com, or reach him on LinkedIn @raysharma10, Facebook @1RaySharma

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