Mobile network significantly expanded for European Football Championship
The European Football Championship in Germany could “break records in streaming demand” according to Telefonica O2. Photo
© Christoph Dernbach/dpa
The European Football Championship will boost the business of mobile operators. The companies are also preparing for the onslaught with mobile data highways.
Before the European Football Championship in Germany, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefonica O2 are expanding their Mobile networks are significantly affected. From June 14, millions of fans are expected in stadiums and on fan miles in the ten host cities. The European Championship could “break records in streaming demand,” Telefonica O2 announced in Munich on Monday.
Dream goal, penalty, foul – the best and most controversial scenes are shared and discussed millions of times on social media. Games are streamed in beer gardens, at the swimming pool or on the go. Arriving guests read the current timetables on their smartphones and download the tickets. The mobile phone companies have therefore upgraded their 5G networks for extremely fast transmissions and large bandwidths.
Telekom plays a central role as a network supplier, national sponsor and TV rights holder and laid 50 kilometers of fiber optic cable in the ten European Championship stadiums. In these stadiums, the network operators work together: one takes the lead, the others join in with their technology. In Gelsenkirchen, Cologne and Leipzig, for example, Vodafone is taking over the management of the expansion, from which Telekom and O2 and their customers also benefit. In the other seven stadiums, the situation is the other way round: here Vodafone benefits from the project management by its competitors.
Advertising columns with 5G technology
On the fan miles at the match venues, at train stations and parking lots, but also at the training quarters of the national teams, the network operators are relying on their own mobile 5G transmitters as well as temporary masts that will be dismantled after the European Championships. O2, for example, wants to set up its own 5G transmitters in Munich’s Olympic Park, on Berlin’s Platz der Republik, on Hamburg’s Heiligengeistfeld, on Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz, Augustusplatz in Leipzig, Nordsternpark in Gelsenkirchen and on the Eiserner Steg in Frankfurt. Vodafone is setting up mobile base stations in Dortmund’s Westfalenpark, among other places, and is equipping advertising columns in Düsseldorf with 5G technology.
Deutsche Telekom says its 5G antennas already reach around 96 percent of households in Germany, O2 95 percent and Vodafone 91 percent. Vodafone wants to have strengthened its network with 650 construction projects at 50 locations by the time the European Championship kicks off. Telekom had announced that it would expand its mobile network to 430 locations.
Vodafone manager Tanja Richter expects particularly rapid growth in data traffic on the 5G network during the European Championship. According to O2, football is already a driving force for mobile data usage: “Last year, seven of the ten highest traffic values were due to Champions League games with German participation. This trend will continue in 2024: the semi-finals in the European premier class have also been a high point in terms of data usage by fans.”