At the Mobile World Congress, Deutsche Telekom announced that the company is establising an IP-based European Network to integrate its services onto a single platform, investing more than 6 billion euros ($6.7 billion) over the next four years. The company also revealed that it has todate connected the first three of the ten countries involved in the initiative. The first three countries - Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia are now able to draw products and services from the standardized platform, added Deutsche Telekom.
- As part of the plan, Deutsche Telekom has made available an enterprise service for virtual private networks, the Cloud VPN. For retail consumers, television services and video game offerings will follow over the course of the year. According to Deutsche Telekom, by 2018, half of households connected to Deutsche Telekom’s network in Europe will be able to surf the Internet via broadband connections at speeds of at least 100 megabits per second. It also plans to have speeds in its fixed-line network to reach up to 500 megabits per second for around 12 percent of the households.
With our European network and the cross-border infrastructure, we will be able to set the tone and not just dance to the beat of drummers from the US and Asia. We are the first multinational telecommunications company to be able to truly make use of the synergies that arise when the national companies work together. This is our master plan for the digitization of Europe.
Claudia Nemat, Management Board Member
We are consistently pursuing this path and, in the meantime, are migrating up to 100,000 customer lines across Europe to IP technology each week. No other company is currently migrating more lines than Deutsche Telekom in Europe. More than eight million lines have already been migrated to IP technology across Europe, with five million in Germany alone. By the end of 2018, all Telekom networks will speak one language: IP. Accordingly, the Group will also be able to operate these networks centrally.
