Press Releases Telefónica Germany

Telefónica Deutschland is seeking legal clarity on the auction design for the upcoming 5G mobile communications standard with an urgent court application for the forthcoming auction procedure. This has no influence on the timetable for the network expansion of the technology.

Telefónica Deutschland massively expanded its LTE network in all German states in 2018. In total, the company expanded the O₂ network with more than 6,700 additional LTE stations throughout Germany. Telefónica Deutschland has thus enabled millions of people, even in rural areas, to use mobile high-speed Internet and modern digital applications and to make calls with top sound quality thanks to Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Telefónica Deutschland is setting the stage for the company’s participation in the planned frequency auction for the next generation of mobile service (5G). As a first step, the complete documents were submitted to the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in a timely manner. Telefónica Deutschland sees major business opportunities in 5G, particularly in the context of Industry 4.0.

In 2019, the O₂ brand will continue its successful freedom campaign and start the new year with innovations for retail customers. A new highlight of the revised O₂ portfolio is the convergent O₂ my All in One XL tariff. From 5 February, customers will receive mobile, fixed and Internet services from a single provider at an outstanding value for money. For only EUR 59.99 a month, they can surf at high speed both on the move and at home.

Germans surf in the same way on the move as at home: Six out of ten consumers no longer distinguish whether they use the Internet while mobile or in their own home – they move without compromise in the digital world, anywhere, any time. That is the result of a representative study conducted by Telefónica Deutschland.

Nokia and Telefónica Germany have completed building their joint “Early 5G Innovation Cluster” in Berlin. The “Early 5G Innovation Cluster” incorporates five sites in Telefónica’s cellular network in Berlin-Friedrichshain. These sites, equipped with Nokia 5G Airscale radio and Wavence Microwave technology, will be used in the next months primarily to test and measure the performance and coverage of first 5G services in a dense urban area.

A clear rating improvement and a rise of an impressive 127 points in the 2018 connect network test serve as confirmation that Telefónica Deutschland has massively improved the quality of its O₂ network throughout Germany this year. This leap forward for the O₂ network would have been even more substantial without the more stringent measurement criteria applied this year. The company is the only German operator to have improved its result. Thanks to extensive quality improvements, the O₂ network significantly reduced the gap to the competitors in this year’s network test. It recently received a “good” rating in the network test by specialist magazine CHIP, which described the O₂ network as having made a “quantum leap”. The continued expansion of the network is already in full swing.

A clear “good” rating for the O₂ network, leaping up almost an entire point in comparison to the previous year (from 3.1 to 2.2): The results of the current, Germany-wide CHIP network test clearly show that Telefónica Deutschland has made huge improvements to network quality for its customers thanks to its extensive network measures. The specialist magazine CHIP even referred to it as a “quantum leap”. The O₂ network was also rated as good to very good in the sub-categories Internet, voice and LTE network as well as in multiple major cities. At the same time, Telefónica Deutschland announced more improvements to network quality in the year to come.

Telefónica Deutschland successfully moved ahead with the modernisation and expansion of its O₂ mobile network in 2018. The network integration of O₂ and E-Plus has made particularly good progress, with network quality improving in many areas. This has been confirmed by current measurements from network testing specialist P3 for major cities such as Cologne and Leipzig. Customers in increasing numbers of cities and regions can now benefit from a new and improved O₂ network thanks to the network integration, which is now in its final stages across all of Germany.

Telefónica Deutschland is having more than 1,500 mobile base stations connected to GasLINE’s high-performance network infrastructure in order to prepare it for the future technology 5G and for new digital applications. The two companies have already been cooperating successfully for several years on fibre-optic connections for mobile base stations and in the backbone field, and they have now signed a contract for another extensive expansion programme.

SZ-Interview with Markus Haas in the edition from 12.11.2018 CEO Markus Haas spoke with Süddeutsche Zeitung about the next 5G wireless communications generation, areas without coverage, and the lack of a European digitalisation policy. This post contains excerpts of that interview. The full text appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 12 November 2018.[…]

Telefónica Deutschland is launching a partnership with vitroconnect GmbH. As a first step, Telefónica Deutschland will use the network-operator-independent platform of vitroconnect GmbH to gain access to EWE TEL GmbH’s access network. EWE TEL GmbH has a particularly strong presence in Lower Saxony, with high-performance broadband connections. With this partnership, Telefónica Deutschland is continuing to expand its position as a national fixed network provider in Germany and will be able to offer potential new customers fast VDSL connections of up to 100 Mbit/s in even more areas. It will also give many existing o2 DSL customers the option to switch to faster VDSL tariffs. The first customers have already been connected successfully.

We are currently having a lively debate, and rightly so, about the 5G frequency awards and the expansion of wireless networks in Germany. The demands for equal treatment of urban and rural areas are also legitimate. However, what matters is that we look very closely at needs, possibilities, and goals. Only if we carefully consider the frequency awards and infrastructure expansion, and provide a framework that promotes investment, can Germany be a global leader in 5G. Telefónica Deutschland is making a specific proposal for this.

Telefónica Deutschland continued the positive development of the first half of the year during the third quarter. Adjusted for special and regulatory effects, operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA) rose by 6 percent in the first nine months to EUR 1.42 billion. This was primarily due to synergies from the E-Plus merger and the continued positive development of the company’s mobile service revenue. Before regulatory effects, it increased by 0.5 percent year-on-year to EUR 3.97 billion. Overall, revenue remained stable. Mobile data consumption increased by half in the first nine months, mainly due to strong demand for O₂ Free tariffs with large data volumes and the acquisition of 233,000 additional contract customers in the third quarter. Because of the positive business development and due to the faster-than-expected realization of synergies from network consolidation, the company is narrowing its outlook for 2018 and now expects a slightly positive development of adjusted OIBDA. In line with its dividend promise, Telefónica Deutschland is also proposing to increase shareholder remuneration for the current fiscal year by one cent to EUR 0.27 per share.

Telefónica Deutschland is consistently continuing the comprehensive expansion of its LTE network. In the third quarter of 2018 alone, Telefónica Deutschland installed nearly 2,000 new LTE stations and upgraded existing locations with additional LTE capacities. In total, the O₂ network has already been expanded by around 5,000 LTE stations this year. By way of comparison, the area newly supplied with LTE is significantly larger than the federal state of Hesse. The company is thus fulfilling its announcement not only to further densify its LTE network in cities, but also to rapidly expand its LTE network in rural areas so that more and more customers can surf the O₂ network in more and more locations at faster speeds.

In the course of digitization, companies are generating great amounts of data. At the same time, the importance of data protection is rising as a result of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This raises the question of how companies can use Big Data in a legally compliant manner and in the interests of their customers. Telefónica NEXT sees the anonymization of data as an opportunity for the data economy. Therefore, the corporate start-up developed a TÜV-certified anonymization process. Analyses from anonymized mobile network data currently support traffic planning in Germany among others. Telefónica NEXT now also offers this procedure to other companies for their data, for example from the banking or insurance sector.

Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica Deutschland are joining forces to accelerate the expansion of their mobile networks. The two companies have agreed to connect at least 5,000 Telefónica Deutschland mobile network sites in total to Telekom’s high-performance fibre-optic infrastructure in the long term. In turn, Deutsche Telekom can directly leverage the synergy effects from this to expand its own network. This cooperation is not just remarkable because of its size. It is also ground-breaking in terms of the future 5G communication standard and new digital applications.

Fixed Wireless Access enables rapid broadband development | Trials with 20 households will start in November 2018

In an interview with the German newspaper "Tagesspiegel", Telefónica Deutschland CEO Markus Haas talks about the challenges of the digital infrastructure in Germany as well as the planned allocation rules for the new mobile standard 5G.

Telefónica Deutschland has successfully implemented the voice standard Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) within its national LTE network. Technically speaking, the new voice standard is a further development of AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband): O₂ customers in the LTE network can now make calls in excellent Full HD voice quality. With EVS, telephone calls are transmitted much more clearly and naturally than before – EVS transmits the audible frequency range at up to 16,000 Hertz instead of up to 7,000 Hertz as used to be the case. As a result, EVS means conversations are perceived as clearer, more understandable and therefore more natural. Another advantage is that the new codec allows background noise to be suppressed better than before. EVS significantly improves the sound image compared to previous mobile calls.

Unlimited browsing at home and on the go with O₂ my All in One

Effective 1 January 2019, Telefónica Deutschland and MediaMarktSaturn Deutschland will extend their successful sales cooperation by another five years. In addition, both partners intend to expand their existing cooperation, in particular in the online segment. The two companies have now signed the corresponding agreement.

No other network operator is better than O₂ when it comes to providing customers in Munich with LTE - this is the result of a recent network test for mobile communications coverage in the Bavarian state capital by specialist magazine connect. Overall, the new O₂ network in Munich achieved a “good” rating (830 points), having significantly improved in terms of network quality compared to the last nationwide network test in 2017 (result “sufficient”).

Telefónica Deutschland is currently pushing the nationwide LTE expansion on a massive scale. In order to enhance its customers’ network experience, the company is constructing several new LTE stations in both urban and rural areas and increasing existing capacities. In the first half of 2018, the telecommunications provider already installed more than 3,000 additional LTE stations or upgraded existing LTE sites. This corresponds to approx. 120 LTE upgrades per week – at peak times even 200 per week. Thanks to this comprehensive network expansion, even more customers can browse the web at high speed in more and more places, stream videos smoothly, share their pictures with other people within seconds and make calls in the best HD voice quality thanks to voice telephony via LTE (Voice over LTE; VoLTE).

After growth in the first half of the year, Telefónica Deutschland is on track to meet its targets for 2018. From January to June, the company increased its operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA) adjusted for exceptional and regulatory effects by 6.1% to EUR 927 million. This was driven mainly by further synergies from the merger with E-Plus as well as the cost-efficient acquisition of new customers. Adjusted for regulatory effects, revenues increased by 0.3% to EUR 3.55 billion in the first half of the year. Revenues from devices and mobile services had a positive effect here. The number of mobile contract customers rose by 333,000 in the second quarter thanks to attractive new tariffs. Mobile data use grew particularly sharply in this period with an increase of 54%, with the new O₂ Free tariffs with extra-large data packages playing a crucial role.