DT partners Ericsson for rural broadband project

Swedish vendor Ericsson has announced it has signed a deal with German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom (DT) to bring broadband to rural areas of the federal state of Baden-Wurttemberg. The town of Grosserlach will serve as a pilot for the project, which aims to provide around 4,200 households with high speed internet with bandwidth of up to 16Mbps download by the end of 2009. DT and Ericsson will roll out both fibre-optic and wireless broadband to the underserved area, where three quarters of targeted homes are still without data rates of above 1Mbps. According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, the German telco had a broadband subscriber base of 10.98 million at the end of March 2009.