Perhaps Bavaria’s most famous dead zone is in the far north, almost in Thuringia. The formerly divided village of Mödlareuth has around 50 inhabitants – and tens of thousands of visitors every year who follow the traces of the inner-German border in the German-German Museum and, thanks to the lack of reception, can feel as if they were once cut off from the rest of the world. But the latter should soon be over.
“Yes,” confirms Mayor Alexander Käppel on the phone: A network provider wants to build a mast on the outskirts. There is no exact date yet, but he hopes it will be this year. “Mödlareuth has been waiting for this for almost a decade,” says Käppel.
In fact, things seem to be progressing with the expansion of the mobile network in Bavaria. This is also suggested by new figures from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which will be presented this Thursday. According to this, 99 percent of all households nationwide are now supplied with LTE; 90 percent should even have access to 5G. And yet the efforts to improve reception remain an example of how long it can take in this country to translate declarations of intent into results.
Mödlareuth also waited a long time to be welcomed, for locals and guests alike. For example, there is usually a big festival in town on German Unity Day, and it would be “easier to communicate with one another” with cell phones, says Käppel, “also for the security service.” So far, you had to make do with such occasions in other ways. When the US Secretary of State stopped by around 2019, a temporary radio mast was set up – and dismantled shortly afterwards. But the new mast should be permanent.
The first masts from the Bavarian funding program are currently being erected
According to a Telekom blog entry from February, one of Bavaria’s probably biggest dead spots has already been plugged. Accordingly, the company erected a 50 meter high transmitter in the Deisenhofener Forst near Munich in order to open up a 4.3 kilometer “white spot”.
There are two simple reasons why progress is being made: On the one hand, the network operators are now penetrating deeper into previously mastless areas. On the other hand, the political efforts seem to be slowly having an effect. According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, not only has reception improved for many households, but recently also along motorways and ICE routes. There are still passages without a connection on just 280 kilometers – the unserviced sections have decreased by 73 percent since 2019.
“We have increased the pace of expansion, network coverage and quality enormously in recent years,” says Minister Hubert Aiwanger (FW). He wants to present details to the Economic Committee on Thursday. According to the ministry, the first masts from the Bavarian mobile phone funding program are currently being erected, and around 90 municipalities have received a corresponding notification. And 470 municipalities reported “commitments for a commercial expansion from the network operators”.
The subsidy program is considered an important building block in the efforts of the state government to bring reception to those corners of the country where it has not previously been worthwhile for network operators to build a mast. Put simply, it supports municipalities either to erect a mast themselves, which the operator then rents, or to tender a concession for its construction and operation. A total of 130 million euros is available for this until the end of 2022.
The municipal council initially rejected the project and preferred the federal program
Like the expansion of mobile communications itself, the program started with teething problems. Economics Minister Martin Zeil (FDP), who was in office until 2013, was already grappling with ideas for broadband funding. Under his successor Ilse Aigner (CSU), the whole thing took on the forms we know today, but only enjoyed limited popularity. In 2017, for example, the Bavarian Municipal Council flatly rejected the project with the reference: “What the state does not want to do itself, it pushes on to the municipalities.” The EU Commission then had to approve the project. The start then took place under Aiwanger in December 2018.
The community day has maintained its skepticism about the program. It is better to find a federal program that is now also running, in which the funds flow directly to the expanding companies – and the municipality therefore acts more as an intermediary than as a builder. There is a “considerable expansion activity” across Bavaria, says Stefan Graf, who is responsible for mobile communications at the association.
Above all, however, the search for a location in the communities continues to be “often a tedious business”. In fact, mayors regularly report how difficult it is to find suitable sites for radio masts. Sometimes the systems are visually disturbing, sometimes residents fear damage from radiation. The dispute over this has already split many places into two camps. Graf is therefore calling for more support and commitment from the Free State in order to help the mayors with “more local expertise”.
In principle, the opposition is also less enthusiastic than the state government about progress in mobile communications. The expansion hasn’t been going fast enough for her for a long time. Annette Karl, for example, economic policy spokeswoman for the SPD parliamentary group, draws one lesson from all of this: less hope for the market and more foresight than the state. From the outset, the latter had to take on “a planning function” and build infrastructure in a more targeted manner, instead of passing so much on to the municipalities. However, the federal government is also asked to do this, for example to speed up the approval process.
At least in Mödlareuth, the tiresome topic of mobile communications can hopefully be shelved soon. Finding a location was the lesser problem here; according to Mayor Käppel, a suitable area for the mast was soon found and mediated. The bigger problem was finding a network provider who wanted to build a museum or festival in the village. The deciding factor was a letter that Käppel sent directly to a network provider together with the Hof district administrator. What will he do on the first day once the mast is up and running? “Home office in Mödlareuth.”