Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Vodafone in Germany, has called on the Government in Germany to prioritise fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and 5G network technology or risk losing its global competitiveness.
“A country that prefers to extract the last remnants of capacity out of copper networks rather than investing in a future-safe fibre optic infrastructure is jeopardising its international competitiveness as a business and industry location,” he warned.
Ametsreiter argued that fibre and 5G networks were vital in order to support modern and emerging technologies such as self-driving cars. He wrote: “Google’s self-driving car generates around one gigabyte of data for every second of driving time. This example makes it clear that we need higher capacity infrastructures for the intelligent networking of raw data. Not just for our daily drive to work, but for our entire economy and society.”
FTTH uptake has been increasing over the past couple of years. Germany, along with the United Kingdom, continue to lag behind when it comes to FTTH availability however. Other European countries, such as Bulgaria and Sweden boast high levels of coverage, with some countries even seeing 100% availability for all homes and businesses. At present, most providers in the UK prioritise fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connections, although some smaller providers have started to specialise in FTTH or FTTP (fibre-to-the-premise) connections. Connecting everybody in the UK with FTTH connections remains obscenely expensive, especially when some areas of the country struggle to get even basic broadband connectivity.