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Now that everything is over and the fight lost, Karina Ruf sits in her office in the town hall of Gablingen near Augsburg and takes care of things that are left undone: a few signatures, phone calls. It’s just before Christmas Eve, and Ruf, 53 years old and mayor of the 5,000-strong community since 2020, is not in the Christmas spirit. The CSU woman is still stunned at how relentlessly Deutsche Telekom is pursuing its plan and laying fiber optic cables in the coming months in the town where its competitor DeutscheOSS has just filled in its trenches: “How am I supposed to explain this madness to the public? “

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