As part of a new ad campaign, Deutsche Telekom recently touted its network’s position at the top in independent tests and customer surveys. Using the tagline, “Network is everything. We are the web,” the carrier publicized the progress of fiber connections to 83 percent of its 5G towers.
In addition, Deutsche Telekom has upgraded more than 10,000 5G mobile sites to a speed of 10 Gbps, which is about 40 percent of all the 5G towers connected with fiber. By 2026, Deutsche Telekom will equip more than 28,000 cell sites with 10 Gbps connections.
Fiber optic lines connect the radio sites with the central hubs in the transport network – the 900 central exchanges distributed throughout Germany. In order to achieve data rates of 10 Gbps, mobile phone gateways had to be upgraded. This enables faster data processing at the transition between the transport network and the tower sites. The prerequisite for this was a new aggregation platform for the nationwide network, which combines the data from more than 36,000 Deutsche Telekom cell phone sites in Germany.
The data is forwarded extremely quickly and efficiently via 24 higher-level nodes in the transport network. This enables higher bit rates and thus more and faster data traffic. The cell sites with 10 Gbps connections are also connected to two different central transport network nodes via separate fiber optics.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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