BONN (dpa-AFX) - Deutsche Telekom (DTEGY.PK) said it installed around 60,000 kilometers of optical fiber in 2018, topping last year's figure by 50 percent. The total length of the company's fiber-optic network is now 500,000 kilometers. Deutsche Telekom made 8.8 million households faster this year. 26 million households can now book a rate plan with 100 megabits per second or MBit/s or more.
Deutsche Telekom noted that it has installed 23,000 new street cabinets in the past twelve months. It equipped them with active technology and connected them to the network via optical fiber. That's the equivalent of 2.6 cabinets every hour. The total number of street cabinets in the network has now increased to 177,600.
Deutsche Telekom noted that it will have largely completed its FTTC (fiber to the curb) upgrade by the end of 2020. This will be followed by the large-scale buildout of FTTH (fiber to the home), in which Deutsche Telekom will equip up to two million households with FTTH every year.
Deutsche Telekom noted that it is also maintaining its momentum in upgrading business parks: it has connected a hundred parks with optical fiber, benefitting nearly 45,000 businesses in total. By the end of 2022, Deutsche Telekom plans to connect a total of 3,000 business parks throughout Germany with optical fiber. Speeds range from asymmetric 100 Mbit/s to up to 100 gigabits per second (GBit/s).
The company noted that it has built over a thousand new mobile base stations this year, increasing their total number to 27,000. Deutsche Telekom's mobile network covers 99.8 percent of the population and 97.6 percent of its area.
Deutsche Telekom already has all the components needed for 5G at its disposal. The company operates a 5G test cluster in the heart of Berlin, which gives it important insights as to the future 5G infrastructure. Transmission speeds of up to 2 GBit/s are reached in the Schöneberg and Mitte boroughs, with latency of 3 milliseconds, the company said.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX