Niek Jan van Damme, CEO of Deutsche Telekom's German operations, has used an interview with 'Die Welt' to again defend the company's plans to impose bandwidth throttling on its fixed-line DSL customers. He insisted it was unfair for 97 percent of its broadband customers to pay for the remaining 3 percent to use excessive data. He said he did not really expect the proposals to have any impact before 2016, adding that Telekom Deutschland would develop special products for heavy data users. He declined to say how much additional data packs might cost, insisting that it was impossible to predict tariffs in three years. However, he did stress that mobile phone customers can double their data speeds for an extra EUR 5 per month.
He also defended claims that Telekom was threatening net neutrality by excluding the company's own Entertain TV service from the data allowances, arguing that it does not view Entertain as an internet service. He said that Entertain was a separate TV and media platform and should be compared with cable or satellite TV services, and that customers pay a EUR 10 per month premium for the service. He added that Telekom was also willing to negotiate with operators of film streaming services such as Maxdome and LoveFilm about integrating their services with Entertain or agreeing new co-operation models, like its current mobile deal with digital music service Spotify. Telekom would then invest some of the proceeds from these agreements in its network expansion.
