A rural idyll: half-timbered houses line the path, horse tournaments and shooting festivals are advertised on the streets. A cat walks calmly across the street. But the relaxed atmosphere came at a price: until recently there was still a large dead zone in Mehren in the Westerwald (Rhineland-Palatinate). There was no 4G reception in an area of three by two kilometers. The three network operators have now reported that the dead zone is history. The Federal Network Agency sent a measuring vehicle to check this, and today the head of the agency, Klaus Müller, is taking care of it himself.
“Trust is good, control is better,” says Müller, referring to the information from Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica Deutschland (O2). They had the obligation to close 500 4G dead spots by the beginning of this year. The village of Mehren is one of them. Only some of the 500 dead spots were closed; in others, the companies cited legal or factual difficulties – for example, that no property owner was willing to rent out an area. In Mehren, however, it worked: the dead zone is a thing of the past, supposedly.
The exam lasts four days
Measurement engineer Markus Busch has been checking this with a colleague in a van for four days. It’s not just on roads, but also on field and forest paths. “Anywhere we can drive, we drive.” There are several antennas on the roof of the car. The interior is full of technology, whether scanners, laptops or special measuring instruments. The transporter drives slowly through the hilly landscape – several times each route so that the measurements are clear.
A download rate of at least 100 megabits per second should also be possible in the 500 previous 4G dead spots (“white spots”), the providers have committed to this. However, this is an ideal value – if several people are in one radio cell, they share the network capacity. To a certain extent this is not a problem. “Many people are still satisfied with two megabits per second today,” says expert Busch. At events where many people come, things can still go wrong, even if the expansion requirement has been met.
“There is always a discrepancy between the subjective user experience and the transmission power of a radio station,” says head of the authority Müller. Expectations among the population are increasing – “Streaming films, playing cell phone games and downloading or uploading large files is something people want to do on the go – no matter where.”
According to the Federal Network Agency, in April 2023 only 2.6 percent of the area was white spots; a year earlier the value was 3.7 percent – so none of the three network operators had broadcast there. So-called gray spots – where only one or two of the network operators were transmitting – covered 16.7 percent of the country’s area in April 2023, compared to 24.7 percent a year earlier. The numbers show that things are getting better. The telecommunications companies also emphasize this. Since the 2019 auction, around 2,900 new radio stations and more than 3,800 upgrades to LTE technology have been initiated, according to Vodafone, for example.