Mobile phone reception is said to have further improved for telecom customers along the German rail network. Deutsche Bahn announced that at least 200 Mbit/s bandwidth is available on 99 percent of the 7,800 kilometers of main routes on which ICEs and ICs travel. This is 12 percentage points more than at the start of cooperation with Deutsche Telekom in 2021. The partners have now achieved the goals agreed upon two years ago as planned. For this purpose, 470 cell phone masts were newly built and 1,900 were modernized.
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Bluetooth speaker Marshall Emberton III in the test: rich sound and retro vibesOne says 300 Mbit/s and more are available on 95 percent of main routes Announcement from Deutsche BahnCoverage on 13,800 km route with more than 2,000 passengers per day has increased from 73 to 94 percent with 200 Mbit/s.
Vodafone and Telefónica
Deutsche Bahn is also operating a similar cooperation with Vodafone from April 2022. Vodafone wants to provide at least 225 Mbit/s LTE network to 7,800 kilometers of core routes by mid-2025. By then, Vodafone wants a bandwidth of at least 125 Mbit/s on routes with high passenger numbers. To this end, Vodafone said in April 2022 it wanted to build 160 additional mobile phone stations and modernize around 1,000 existing stations.
83 percent of main routes now have at least 225 Mbit/s and 90 percent of busiest routes have at least 125 Mbit/s. Vodafone announced online that 95 percent of branch routes are supplied with 100 Mbit/s.
Deutsche Bahn is working with O2/Telefónica on the GINT project to improve mobile phone reception for the company’s customers. Radio mast operator Vantage Towers is building a new type of radio mast. In April this year, those involved were satisfied with the progress of the project so far.
Network operators are obliged to provide network coverage with at least 100 megabits per second on railway lines and motorways. However, according to the specifications of the Federal Network Agency, expansion must be legally and actually possible. 50 Mbps is required for secondary railway lines. On these 12,000 km routes, coverage for telecom customers with 100 Mbit/s was recently 96 percent, compared to 83 percent three years ago.
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