The operator says 5G is ahead of schedule, available to 25 million people, and it is building 4,000 new LTE sites.
Vodafone Deutschland says its 5G build-out is ahead of schedule and its accelerated expansion continues.
This calendar year it has embarked on 7,000 mobile network construction projects, including 3,000 sites to activate 9,000 5G antennas.
5G alone
It said that increasingly 5G is deployed independently of LTE infrastructure and linked directly to the Standalone core network – this applies to about 1,000 antennas currently.
The operator has also reallocated frequencies formerly used for 3G and over the summer Vodafone intends to install 18,000 more LTE base stations that will use the spectrum.
Vodafone Deutschland was given special mention by Group CEO, Nick Read, earlier this month when he the presented the group’s annual results.
He said, “I am pleased that we achieved full year results in line with our guidance and we exited the year with accelerating service revenue growth across the business, with a particularly good performance in our largest market, Germany”.
More voice
Vodafone Deutschland’s CEO, Hannes Ametsreiter (pictured), said, “Stable networks are more important than ever before in order to stay in contact with our loved ones and with our work colleagues.
A look at our network shows that people are taking more time to make calls again. Each call lasts more than three minutes on average – 35 seconds longer than a year ago. Video calls and streaming caused almost 40% more data to rush through our network.”
He added, “We are the first provider in Germany to turn 5G into a commercial real-time network in more and more places – completely independent of the existing LTE infrastructure.”
Vodafone said its LTE covers more than 99% of German homes.
The operator’s CTO, Gerhard Mack, comments, “For the first time in Europe, 5G is available at full power. For us, 5G brings high bandwidths, low latencies and network slicing”.
The operator’s digitization group intends to quadruple the number of 5G standalone antennas by the end of the year and more 5G data centres will be activated to achieve latency of around 10 milliseconds in future.