Deutsche Telekom has previously said that 5G technology would reach 99% of Germany’s population by the end of 2025.
German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom has announced that a total of 12,500 5G antennas in 940 cities and municipalities are now operating in the 3.6GHz frequency band.
Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that it has expanded mobile service to 747 locations across the country over the past five weeks. Some 102 of these locations are new and now broadcast on LTE and 5G frequencies, the company said.
In addition, mobile network capacity has been expanded at 645 existing locations, of which 105 are now operational with 5G technology for the first time, according to Deutsche Telekom.
Around 97% of households already have access to Deutsche Telekom’s 5G network, and LTE coverage now reaches 99% of homes across Germany.
Telekom Deutschland’s CTO Abdou Mudesir previously said the company’s 5G technology would reach 99% of the population by the end of 2025.
Deutsche Telekom is set to launch 5G Standalone (5G SA) services in Germany this year. In a previous roundup of network achievements for 2023, Srinivasan Gopalan, CEO of Telekom Deutschland, Deutsche Telekom’s national operator, said the company aims to offer 5G SA to residential customers.
The executive noted that Deutsche Telekom’s enterprise customers are already using the technology with features such as network slicing for media’s live TV transmissions and 5G campus networks for industry and research.
The company previously stressed that 5G antennas in the 3.6 GHz frequency band are particularly powerful as they are almost exclusively connected to transport networks with 10 Gbps connections via optical fiber. The company noted that the 3.6 GHz frequency band complements the 700 MHz and 2.1 GHz 5G frequencies already in use nationwide in Deutsche Telekom’s network. The 3.6 GHz frequency band ensures particularly fast download speeds and smooth mobile coverage, especially in densely populated areas, the company said.
Deutsche Telekom recently became the first in Germany to make private 5G available on its 26 GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum, which the company claims will deliver round-trip latency of 3-4 milliseconds and download and upload data speeds of over 4 gigabits per second and 2 gigabits per second, respectively. The company is offering mmWave support as part of its “Campus Network” service, which has previously used dedicated 3.7-3.8 GHz mid-band spectrum in Germany.
The higher band mmWave spectrum has shorter coverage but higher bandwidth and speeds. In Germany, the 26 GHz band is exclusively allocated to businesses by the country’s telecommunications regulator, BNetzA, for local applications by the Federal Network Agency. Currently it can only be used for local applications. Deutsche Telekom has announced that it has tested 5G frequencies in the 26 GHz mmWave range with industrial customers.
