Today (24 April 2020), the Federal Network Agency published a decision that gives Deutsche Telekom’s copper connections priority over fiber-to-the-building (FTTB) connections.
The decision concerns, among other things, access to the telephone line from the basement of a building to the respective customer’s home – i.e. the building cabling. The decision gives Deutsche Telekom a quasi-monopoly over building cabling.
VDSL (vectoring, super vectoring) and fiber optic connections right into the building (FTTB) use the same copper cables in the building cabling over the last few meters and interfere with each other.
Instead of giving priority to fiber optic connections into buildings, which enable bandwidths in the gigabit range, the Federal Network Agency wants to grant Telekom’s copper connections, which have long since been written off, far-reaching protection against competitors’ fiber optic connections. This is despite the fact that competitors had offered to grant Telekom open network access to the fiber optic connections in line with market conditions so that it could continue to supply its customers with even higher bandwidths.
Telecommunications providers that bring future-proof fiber optic connections to buildings only have two options following the Federal Network Agency’s decision: Either they block out the frequency spectrum used by VDSL or VDSL vectoring or super vectoring, which, according to expert estimates, would only provide end customers with a maximum bandwidth of 600 Mbit/s in the worst case, which would thwart the expansion of fiber optics and the possibility of offering gigabit bandwidths to citizens and companies. Or they run the risk that their connections will be excluded by Deutsche Telekom from using the building cabling and thus switched off, even if this is not even owned by Deutsche Telekom.
“The Federal Network Agency’s decision thwarts the federal government’s gigabit target. At the same time, it sends a fatal signal to companies that have already built or are planning to build fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) connections,” criticizes BREKO Managing Director Dr. Stephan Albers. The decision is all the more irritating given that the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag recently accused the EU Commission of hindering the expansion of fiber optics in Germany (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-04/unionsfraktion-glasfasernetz-ausbau-schnelles-internet-eu-kommission-kritik). “This is paradoxical and cannot be explained to the people and companies in our country who want to use fast fiber optic connections: On the one hand, politicians are criticizing the fact that fibre-optic expansion in Germany is not going fast enough. On the other hand, the federal authority responsible for telecommunications regulation gives priority to Telekom’s copper connections over FTTB connections,” emphasizes Albers.