Vodafone asks more help to Germany for the deployment of broadband – Welt am Sonntag

BERLIN (Reuters) – Vodafone wants the German government to facilitate the deployment of high-speed fiber-optic broadband connections to homes and businesses by investing in the "last mile" of networks, said the head of the German company , quoted by the agency.

Germany has been slow to expand its fiber optic network, raising fears that its vital export industry will lose its competitiveness, as the slow pace of the Internet could hamper computer-aided manufacturing.

"The last kilometer to the house represents an extraordinary challenge," said Hannes Ametsreiter, director of Vodafone in Germany, to the newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

"It's extremely expensive to tear the road down on your own," said Ametsreiter. "It would be better to do it like the Spanish and Portuguese, for example, the state is laying empty pipes, just as it builds highways – that is, state investment in infrastructure.

"Each supplier could then pull its cables through these pipes, which is more efficient and it would fuel the competition."

Asked about the government's response to Vodafone's proposal, Ametsreiter said, "I'm not aware of anything, but it can still happen."

According to Ametsreiter, Vodafone aims to increase the number of German households with ultra-fast Gigabit connections from 11 million to 9 million over the next 12 months.

If Vodafone were allowed to take over Unitymedia, a Liberty Global unit, the number of connections would reach 25 million gigabits by 2022, said Ametsreiter.

Vodafone, the world's second-largest mobile phone company, agreed last May to pay $ 22 billion for Liberty Global's cable networks in the German and East European markets to challenge the dominance of former monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom.

The European Union has not raised any major concerns about the impact on the cable market in Germany of Vodafone's purchase of Liberty Global's badets, informed sources said. directly about it last month, thus improving the chances of carrying out the operation.

(Written by Paul Carrel, edited by David Holmes)