The telephone, the telephone, creates an acoustic closeness, a touch of familiarity, when there is no local closeness. This old idea has lost its meaning for years: people in Germany chatted less and less from listener to listener, a lot of communication shifted to emails or WhatsApp messages. It was not until the Corona crisis, including contact restrictions, that the number of telephone minutes increased again. This renaissance is likely to continue in 2021. This is forecast by VATM, an association of competitors of Deutsche Telekom, and the consulting company Dialog Consult in their new market study.
According to this, all people in this country are likely to telephone for 963 million minutes this year, four percent more than in 2020. This number is growing “not as strong as in the previous year,” admits study author Torsten Gerpott, professor of telecommunications at the University of Duisburg-Essen, but she is rising. And it is no longer just chatting over the cell phone or the call function of messenger services. No, landline telephones will also be kept to their ears and mouths longer for the second year in a row. This may surprise those supposedly progressive people who no longer screw a landline phone to their sockets. If no pig calls any more, that’s the assumption.
Now the many people who pay for their phone at a fixed monthly price know that one minute of conversation doesn’t make a telecommunications company rich for a long time. Rather, it is the many videos and pictures, the music and email attachments that require network expansion. After all, 230 gigabytes per month are now streaming over an average landline connection in this country, according to the study, 30 percent more than in the previous year. “Video is still the biggest driver,” says Gerpott: be it zoom meetings during the day or Netflix films in the evening. And the average data consumption is also increasing in mobile communications. Sometimes you ask yourself: Why is there so much of the month left at the end of the contractually agreed data volume?
The number of direct fiber optic connections will grow faster than ever before in 2021
It is therefore all the more important that the expansion of the high-speed network progresses. Germany relies on several technologies here: DSL connections equipped with fiber optics, most of which come from Telekom. Also pimped up TV cables, which in this country mainly operate Vodafone. As well as direct fiber optic lines to the house; According to experts, the future will belong to them.
By the end of 2021, 7.5 million households in Germany should have a fiber optic connection available, predict VATM and Dialog Consult. This corresponds to an – never before achieved – expansion of two million connections this year. Behind this are providers such as EWE from Northern Germany or M-Net from Munich; But Telekom is also building more and more direct fiber optic connections.
“We have no investment emergency in telecommunications networks,” says Gerpott. In fact, financial investors are investing billions of euros in companies such as Deutsche Glasfaser, and the federal and state governments are also providing billions in funding. Instead of increasing this further, the state should better simplify approval procedures and regulations and better equip building authorities, the scientist suggests. “It’s infrastructure business, that’s hard work,” says Gerpott. “We have a capacity shortage in construction companies.”
VATM President David Zimmer, founder of the fiber optic provider Inexio, confirms that the industry is working at the limit of available construction capacities. “More funding does not bring more skilled workers,” says Zimmer in a press conference, which of course did not take place over the phone, but as a video appointment.