Deutsche Telekom has confirmed plans to deploy FTTH connections to up to 160,000 households in ten cities in 2011. Selected districts of the cities of Braunschweig, Bruehl, Hanover, Hennigsdorf, Neu-Isenburg, Kornwestheim, Mettmann, Offenburg, Potsdam and Rastatt will be wired with fibre in 2011. To meet increasing demand for bandwidth, Telekom is deploying a combination of technologies that matches fibre optics and copper lines with broadband wireless such as HSPA+, LTE and WLANs, to create a nationwide, broadband gigabit network. Pilot fibre projects were launched in Hennigsdorf and Braunschweig in 2010. In addition, a pilot household in Dresden was wired with FTTH with speeds of up to 1 Gbps. VDSL is available in 50 German cities and more than 60 percent of households in Germany can surf at transmission speeds of 6-16 Mbps. In August 2010, Telekom added the first LTE mobile base station in Germany to its network, in Kyritz in Brandenburg. In addition, in the past year the company boosted large parts of its HSPA/UMTS network to a top speed of 21 Mbps, while increasing coverage by over 10 percent, now reaching 83 percent of the population. Marketing of the matching data rates will begin in Q2 2011. Telekom also plans to expand its HSPA network again, doubling bandwidth in the entire network to up to 42 Mbps by end-2011. New LTE mobile broadband technology will be provided to selected business customers in early-summer 2011 as part of friendly-user tests. In addition, the city of Cologne will receive near-total LTE coverage. In 2011, Telekom expects to sign 700-800 co-operative agreements with local authorities to expand DSL services into rural areas.
