Deutsche Telekom (DT), which provides fixed and mobile services in Germany through its subsidiary Telekom Deutschland, has announced that coverage of its 5G network has reached 16 million people. The company now supplies more than 1,000 towns and communities via over 12,000 5G antennas and by mid-July this is set to increase to half of the German population, corresponding to 40 million people. Telekom’s acceleration in network rollout was made possible by the utilisation of 15MHz of spectrum in the 2100MHz band for LTE and 5G, of which 5MHz was previously used for 3G services and 10MHz was acquired from another operator ahead of schedule. The firm is also using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to enable the parallel operation of two mobile communications standards in one frequency band.
In rural areas, Telekom claims that customers can now surf at speeds of up to 225Mbps, while in urban areas peak speeds are up to 800Mbps and in large cities, such as Berlin or Cologne, 3.6GHz 5G antennas support data rates of up to 1Gbps and higher.