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The company made the announcement at Fibre Optic Partner Day in Bonn, Germany
This week, German incumbent telecoms operator Deutsche Telekom has joined the German Federal Association for Fiber Optic Connections (BUGLAS), an industry association focussed on promoting and expanding fibre infrastructure throughout Germany.
While this move may seem outwardly benign, it has been met with trepidation by much of the German fibre industry, with BUGLAS having historically represented the interests of smaller fibre players and municipalities fighting against Deutsche Telekom’s market dominance.
Deutsche Telekom itself says that its membership will be beneficial for the country, helping them to cooperate more closely with rivals to ensure efficient national coverage.
“Deutsche Telekom and BUGLAS share a long-term investment horizon for fiber optic expansion,” said Srini Gopalan, who is responsible for business in Germany on the Telekom board in a press release.
“We want to further intensify our collaboration with regional providers and enter into even more FTTH partnerships for future-proof digitisation. In this way, we are accelerating fiber optic expansion together with our partners. And we are doing this with open networks that offer all customers a wide range of providers,” he continued.
Thilo Höllen, Telekom’s Head of Fibre Optic Cooperation, added that the company will use its membership to help jointly campaign around industry-wide issues.
“[We are] continuing to campaign for faster approvals and alternative installation methods,” he said. “These issues affect our entire industry and we see significant potential for improvement here.”
But while Deutsche Telekom argues that its membership is beneficial to the wider fibre industry, not all of the market agrees.
German telecoms industry group VATM has notably criticised BUGLAS for accepting Deutche Telekom as a member, with Managing Director Dr. Frederic Ufer released a statement saying the move would “slow down” the nation’s fibre rollout.
“It sounds good – to jointly drive forward the expansion of fiber optics, use cooperations and negotiate on an equal footing. The reality is much more sober and it is not surprising that Telekom has chosen small regional partners who are rarely sufficiently viable on their own in the long term,” he said, in the translated letter.
“The large investors in Germany are clearly to be further weakened by the continued strategic over-arching and the widespread refusal to purchase higher-quality wholesale products via bitstream. Of the small cooperation partners, Telekom generally only uses fiber optics, preferring to manage operations itself and thus strategically depriving the market of the added value that investors need for large-scale expansion.”
He added that Deutsche Telekom uses construction workers paid for by local municipalities to save money on its fibre expansion, and uses this money to reinvest in the American market (via T-Mobile) where returns are higher. Furthermore, the investors in the Germany market will be weakened by the “strategic over-arching and the widespread refusal to purchase higher-quality wholesale products via bitstream,” he concluded.
BUGLAS itself had previously been a long-term critic of Deutsche Telekom’s approach to network expansion –particularly overbuild – and had written letters to the German government on the topic as recently as last year.
Dr. Frederic Ufer is speaking at this year’s Connected Germany, 5-6 November in Munich. Get discounted tickets here!
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