Vodafone Germany will focus future investments on improving its LTE network at the expense of its fixed-line infrastructure. Vodafone Germany CEO Friedrich Joussen said that LTE provides better growth potential and has the capability to be a viable alternative to fixed-line services.
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Joussen |
"If we have a euro to spare, we'd prefer to invest it in mobile communications instead of fixed-line," Joussen told journalists, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
The company confirmed that it will the marketing efforts for its fixed-line offerings due to an increasingly harsh regulatory environment and fees it's charged for "last mile" connections. Joussen added that it had already stopped sales of its fixed service via third party providers such as the Metro Media Markt retail chain. LTE is "a much healthier market," he said.
This move away from promoting its fixed-line services comes after the German regulatory body, Bundesnetzagentur, reduced the fees that the owners of the last mile connections (normally Deutsche Telekom) could charge from €10.20 a month to €10.08.
But Joussen maintains that these monthly fees are still too high. Vodafone Germany presently pays Deutsche Telekom around €500 million each year to connect 4 million fixed-line customers--a sizeable percentage of the units' €2.1 billion revenues.
For more:
- see this Dow Jones Newswire article
- see this Bloomberg article
- see this Teltarif article (translated via Google Translate)
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