Germany beats Britain at broadband

While BT and Oftel continue to squabble over the pace of local loop unbundling, Deutsche Telekom (DT) has revealed that it has unbundled 400,000 local loop lines since beginning the process in 1998.

Speaking at the iDate Telecoms, Media and Internet 2001 conference in Montpelier, Jan Geldmacher, executive vice president of international networking at DT, said he "feared no competition" in the market.

"Maybe we would like to still have a monopoly, but monopolies are not realistic any more, as you know," he told 700 delegates.

Geldmacher said one reason for DT's broadband success was that it had not invested much in ISDN, and so it could move quickly to using digital subscriber line (DSL) as the main platform for internet access.

He said because DT had not offered unmetered access through narrowband, as in the UK, customers had moved quickly to take advantage of the unmetered access that broadband brings.

BT cites the low price of narrowband unlimited access in the UK as one reason for the poor take-up of broadband.

The telco now has 1.2 million German DSL subscribers, he said - around 20 times the level of BTopenworld.

Two-thirds of Germany's 250 broadband ISPs now have their own technology in DT's exchanges, compared to a handful of firms in the UK. ADSL for home users is also quicker in Germany, allowing download speeds of 748Kbps compared to the 512Kbps offered in the UK.

Self-installation accounts for 90 per cent of DSL connections in Germany, while in the UK, BT is preparing to trial a self-installation version of ADSL before a January 2002 launch.

Geldmacher said stability of equipment was still a major challenge in deployment, as is equipment maintenance.