According to the information provided by the three German mobile network operators, travelers are now much better connected to the Internet than they used to be when driving on the Autobahn and ICE routes. As Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica (O2) announced on Tuesday, they all now meet a state requirement to supply these routes with a download speed of at least 50 megabits per second. The LTE (4G) radio standard is used for this. However, if many users dial into the network at the same time, the speed will decrease.

Expansion obligation Theoretically, it concerns all sections of motorways and ICE routes, but there is an exception: Where the installation of cell towers was “legally or actually” not possible, there will be dead spots in the future – for example if there is no property rent or buy or the route crosses a nature reserve, which makes a permit very difficult. According to industry circles, this is about a single-digit percentage of dead spots on these routes.

The conditions come from the LTE frequency auction from the year 2015. Originally, they should have been fulfilled at the beginning 2020, but no mobile network operator could do that completely. In addition to the expansion obligation for the traffic routes, there were requirements for the supply of households – 98 percent of all households in the national average and 97 Percent of households in each federal state should be able to connect to the very fast mobile network.

Latecomers Telefónica (O2) For a long time, Telefónica (O2) was far behind when it came to the requirements for household supplies, after a major expansion, the Munich-based company succeeded in 2020 but a leap forward. According to its own information, Telefónica now also complies with these requirements, Telekom and Vodafone had already achieved the target marks.

“With our network quality, we are now on a par with the competition,” explained Telefónica Germany boss Markus Haas. In terms of household coverage, you have 2020 a jump from 14 Percentage points made, within one year O2 reached seven million more people with 4G than before. With the “expansion offensive”, Telefónica mainly improved its network in the countryside.

Isn’t that right? Words of appreciation there was also from the Bonn regulatory authority. “All three mobile network operators have made great strides in the expansion of their mobile networks in the last year, and this applies in particular to Telefónica,” said a spokesman for the Federal Network Agency. The six-year-old catalog of requirements has not yet been completely ticked off, because the authority is now checking whether the information submitted to it by the mobile operators is correct. That should take a few weeks.

At an auction of frequencies per year 2019, which are used for the faster 5G mobile radio standard the Federal Network Agency tightened expansion requirements, this involves a minimum download speed of 100 Mbit per second. By the end 2022 each 98 percent of the households per federal state and all federal motorways, important federal highways and ICE routes are supplied with such a fast network, at the end of 2024 further expansion obligations apply.

Successes on paper The Green Bundestag member Oliver Krischer criticized that the network operators had formally fulfilled the requirements on paper, the experiences with telephoning and Internet use in trains and cars is anything but satisfactory. “Calls are often interrupted because the handover from one radio cell to another does not work or because too many users have to share a limited volume of data.” What is needed is a significantly denser network of cell phone masts along the road and rail, but this is often not economically feasible for the operator.

(kbe)