After the competitors Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica (O2), Vodafone is now the third German network operator to achieve 5G coverage of more than 90 percent. Vodafone announced a corresponding value on Sunday. It refers to the proportion of households that are within the Düsseldorf company’s 5G network. “We’re making good progress and have already upgraded 14,200 locations to 5G,” said the head of technology at Vodafone Germany, Tanja Richter, of the dpa in Düsseldorf. The company has around 26,000 cellphone sites in Germany.
Vodafone has recently increased its pace of expansion significantly. At the end of July 2022, the company was only at 66 percent household coverage, now it is 24 percentage points more. However, the value is only moderately meaningful, after all, people want a good network everywhere and not just where many people live, i.e. where households are. Vodafone’s area share is only more than 75 percent – so no 5G can be received on about a quarter of the area, but often 4G.
The competition is already ahead with the very fast transmission standard. According to its own statements, Deutsche Telekom is more than 95 percent. Telefónica with its O2 brand is only a hair’s breadth ahead of Vodafone when it comes to 5G coverage and broke the 90 percent mark at the end of June, just a month ahead of the Düsseldorf competitor.
Demand for nationwide 5G coverage
Politicians repeatedly demand comprehensive 5G coverage – i.e. “down to the last milk can”. Richter emphasized that this goal was “extremely challenging”. First of all, it is “the ambition to make 5G available to the entire population in the medium term”.
“But we have to overcome a few hurdles to do this – permits are sometimes difficult to obtain. Locations that are suggested to us by municipalities do not always fit in with optimal network planning. And the access routes to the locations for traffic and electricity are very long,” said Richter . “Sometimes we would have to bring kilometers of power and fiber optic cables to one location in order to bring 5G to rural regions where almost no people are out and about with their smartphones.”
Cooperation with the federal states is therefore important when developing remote locations. “Funding projects and other partnerships help with network expansion.” In Hesse and Bavaria, for example, this is already working very well. Financial support from the state is necessary.
5G has become a mass phenomenon
Richter emphasized that the expansion of the remaining ten percentage points in household coverage would be complex and expensive. Accordingly, it is urgent to relieve the network operators elsewhere. She substantiated her company’s demand not to hold a mobile phone auction in the coming year and instead to extend the use of frequencies.
At the 2019 auction, Vodafone committed to paying around 1.9 billion euros. “A new auction eats up a lot of money, which then cannot flow into the expansion,” said Richter. “Another solution would make sense so that the investment power of companies is not reduced.” In the event of an extension, Vodafone could “invest heavily in new masts instead of in new frequency licenses”. An extension of frequency usage rights is currently the subject of political discussion, whereby the companies would only pay very low fees, but in return they would undertake to fulfill expansion requirements.
When the 5G network started in the summer of 2019, the radio standard was still something for specialists, also because the predecessor 4G was sufficient for most consumer applications. In the meantime, however, 5G has become a mass phenomenon. 43 percent of the smartphones that are connected to the Vodafone network every day are 5G cell phones. A year earlier it was only 26 percent. Data traffic continues to grow significantly. If a 5G customer used two gigabytes per month in mid-2022, by mid-2023 it was already three gigabytes.
