Deutsche Telekom said it plans to bring VDSL2 services to 44 cities in Germany, reports FOCUS Magazine.
This latest rollout plan follows an announcement the telco made last December to invest about €6 billion ($7.7 billion) to roll out VDSL2 with vectoring over a Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) architecture, enabling it to deliver up to 100 Mbps download speeds over existing copper in Germany.
Niek Jan van Damme, managing director of Deutsche Telekom, said the company will "close this year with 44 more cities connected to the new fiber-optic network, in addition to [serving an] existing 50 cities with VDSL speed."
The new investments in VDSL2 and vectoring, two technologies that can enable traditional telcos to get more bandwidth out of existing copper, are being driven to address growing competitive threats from Vodafone, which reached a deal to acquire German cable operator Kabel Deutschland for $10 billion in June.
While more traditional wireline operators figure out ways to quickly and economically increase their broadband speeds over existing network infrastructure, Europe has become a big market for VDSL2 and vectoring. Besides DT, other European telcos including Belgacom, OTE, TDC Denmark and Telekom Austria A1 are all in one stage or another of deploying a mix of VDSL2 with vectoring in their serving areas.
For more:
- FOCUS Magazine has this article
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