The ongoing network congestion issues affecting Telefónica's O2 customers in Germany will be resolved within weeks, according to O2 Germany CEO René Schuster. In an interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, Schuster confirmed that the company is busily working to have the problems, which are mainly impacting high-density locations, fixed by year-end.
The network slowdowns, according to Schuster, are due to the fact that over the past five quarters 90 percent of the devices the operator has sold have been smartphones. This has "led to capacity bottlenecks in hotspots such as train stations or in the centre of big cities. We have been working since August to provide better coverage in these hotspot areas. It should be completed in December."
However, a report carried by Teltarif.de outlines information O2 Germany sent in a newsletter to its dealer network, which stated that network capacity is under stress in certain locations and would lead to decreased performance in both telephony and mobile data.
While the O2 newsletter claimed that the telephony issues would be overcome by year-end, fixing the mobile data bottleneck is more complicated. "Further capacity improvements for mobile data require a significant expansion in the transport network and are thus more expensive," the report quoted an O2 Germany newsletter as saying. "O2 is investing hundreds of millions over the next year, and improvements are set to happen in the coming months," said the dealer update.
For more:
- see this Berliner Zeitung article (translated via Google Translate)
- see this Teltarif.de article (translated via Google Translate)
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