Media News - Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Germany catches up in broadband penetration

Germany has considerably caught up in the share of households using broadband lines to surf the net. Almost four out of five households (78 percent) now use high-speed access to go online, according to German industry association BITKOM. The number of broadband subscriptions has more than quadrupled since 2004 and now amounts to 31 million. This puts Germanyinto rank 6 among European countries. "The government's broadband strategy and network operators' billion euro investments have made it possible for Germany to climb to one of the top positions in broadband usage," BITKOM CEO Bernhard Rohleder said in Berlin. "Also contributing to the increased usage were decreasing prices while bandwidths went up." According to Germany's Federal Network Agency Bundesnetzagentur, the country's telecommunications providers invested more than EUR 93bn between 1998 and 2010 into the expansion and upgrading of their networks. Fast internet lines with a data rate of at least 1 Mbps are now available to more than 99 percent of German households. Through the upgrading of mobile networks with the new LTE standard, the last gaps in the broadband coverage are to be closed. The second step will see the development towards higher speeds being enforced. In 2014, 75 percent of all German households are expected to have access to a data rate of least 50 Mbps. (Rapidtvnews)

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