Broadband in Germany: promoting fiber optics

German technology is symbol of reliability, quality, innovation and high technology. We analyze the Broadband Society in Germany in collaboration with Natalie Barresi, from UPF. As it refers to high-speed internet broadband, Germany is certainly at the head of the group, right? Wrong, actually Germany scrambles to merely cover large cities with broadband and has consistently missed the dates agreed by both government and telecom companies to build a digital infrastructure that matches their European neighbors’. 

According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a research center composed of the world’s most developed economies, Germany’s adoption of fiber-optic cable stands at just 1.8 percent of Internet users, putting it fifth from the bottom in the list of the OECD’s 35 members. In contrast both Japan and South Korea have more than 70 percent of subscribers on super-fast fiber-optic cable.

The development of the Broadband in Germany

We analyze the German broadband case in collaboration with Sophie Fuchs. In 1989 ISDN went into the practice service and was expanded with high investment costs. The “Integrated Services Digital Network” or “Integrated Voice and Data Network” is an international standard for a digital telecommunications network. The German term “Integriertes Sprach- und Datennetzwerk” was the original term, it was equal (sometimes even preferred) in addition to the English-language term, which was also introduced in German-speaking countries, to take into account the internationality of the system.

Until the 2000's, ISDN was widely available in Germany, with the spread of IP technology for telephony (VOIP), but ISDN quickly became a discontinued model. In the course of the All-IP conversion, probably the last ISDN connections in 2019 or 2020 are likely to go off the net. ISDN was originally developed for high-quality telephony and quickly became a DSL predecessor with "rapid" transmission rates at that time. A single base channel offered up to 64 Kbps. By cascading a maximum of 6 channels, peak values ​​of 384 Kbit / s were feasible. So-called ISDN primary multiplex connections in the business area even reached summation bit rates of 2 Mbit / s. But such additions were practically priceless at the time.