Politicians are calling for a legal ban on double fiber optic expansion
Double and triple? Glass fiber construction site in Duisburg
Quelle: picture alliance / Rupert Oberhäuser
The expansion of fiber optic networks is progressing slowly. This is also due to the fact that Telekom and its competitors sometimes lay cables twice and deny each other access. Now the call for an anti-superstructure law is getting louder.
WDue to the uncoordinated fiber optic expansion, Germany is in danger of missing the federal government’s target of being able to connect every household to the high-speed network by 2030. This emerges from a report by WELT AM SONNTAG, which refers, among other things, to a fire letter from the Federal Association for Fiber Optic Connections (Buglas) to Digital Minister Volker Wissing.
According to the report, half of the association’s fiber optic expansion companies reported superstructure activities or corresponding plans by Deutsche Telekom in their respective network area. “We are currently observing superstructure activities in Cologne, near Augsburg, in Munich, but also in numerous other areas of Germany,” it says.
Superstructure refers to the construction of a fiber optic network in an area where such a network already exists. The companies in Germany actually wanted to give each other access to their fiber optic networks so that the nationwide expansion can progress quickly and the scarce capacities in civil engineering can be used as sensibly as possible. Such mutual access is called Open Access.
According to the report, disputes are becoming more common here. “The strategic superstructure of Telekom in particular is not only damaging to the goals of the gigabit strategy due to the scarce resources,” said Maximilian Funke-Kaiser, digital policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, to WELT AM SONNTAG. “Often the mere announcement of an overbuild destroys a fiber provider’s rollout plans, as the overbuilt portions of a network are critical to the overall profitability of a rollout plan.”
Make “cherry picking” harder
Reinhard Brandl, digital policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, is now calling for a tougher approach: “We should supplement the Telecommunications Act so that the municipalities will be able to refrain from approving the superstructure of an existing fiber optic network until the entire municipality has not been connected to fiber optics at least once is,” he told WELT AM SONNTAG. This is intended to make it more difficult to “cherry pick” where companies in rural areas only supply fiber optics to houses that are not too expensive to develop.
The digital policy group spokeswoman for Die Linke, Anke Domscheit-Berg, made a similar statement: “The superstructure of fiber optics where there is already a fiber optic network with open access for all competitors should be banned, at least until the gigabit target for all households in Germany.” A legal basis must be created for this.
Reinhard Sager, President of the German District Association, also wants the telecommunications law to be changed. “In this way it could be ensured that fiber optic cables, once laid, can also be used by other providers, of course for a reasonable usage fee,” he said. It must be prevented that fiber optic networks are subsequently built over uncontrolled.
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