Telefonica Germany announced plans to begin its Germany-wide consolidation of the UMTS and GSM networks of O2 and E-Plus in January. In parallel, the company continues to rapidly expand its LTE network and also plans to enable joint LTE use from mid-2016. The network integration in 2016 will focus on the densely populated urban areas. In the first year of the network integration, Telefonica Deutschland already aims to reach more than 60 percent of the population with its new, integrated network. The network integration is expected to take five years to complete.
For the combined network, the team selected the best transmitter sites with the optimal geographical distribution. State-of-the-art network equipment will be used to considerably increase capacity, giving the company an extremely powerful and at the same time highly efficient network, Telefonica said. The consolidation has been planned so that there will be as little service disruption as possible for customers during the technical work in each area. In the last few months, the first localised test runs delivered important findings for the further preparation of the integration. Telefonica Deutschland said it is able to convert individual transmitter stations within a few hours and fully implement the network merger in a given area within a week.
