Telekom wants money for VDSL from home owners - MD

Telekom Deutschland will not be paying alone for the continuing VDSL network expansion, according to managing director Niek-Jan van Damme in an interview with German magazine Focus. The expansion is supported by the federal government and van Damme wants to negotiate with its competitors like Vodafone Germany and Telefonica Germany about a possible co-investment structure as they will be using the infrastructure as well. He also said that a possibiltiy to demand financial contributions from home owners that want tob e connected to the network as they already pay to be connected to the electricity and water network. Van Damme said that experts have calculated that expanding VDSL to all households in Germany would cost up to EUR 50 billion until 2014, which is too much to pay alone.He also said that the deployment of FTTH is going according to the plan to connect ten cities during this year and that the operator will add Braunschweig and Hennigsdorf. The expansion of LTE is also going crescendo with the goal of 100 cities having LTE by the end of this year with Augsburg and Hamburg being the next cities to deploy LTE.