Text from the Indicator Report 2022
The indicator measures the availability of broadband to households in Germany at downstream speeds of at least 1,000 Mbps, or one gigabit per second, using wired technology – fibre optics (FTTB/H) and cable television (CATV). The figures are collated on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure and published on the Government’s Broadband Atlas.
As of the middle of 2021, fully fibre-optic internet connections (FTTB/H) capable of more than 1,000 Mbps were available in 15.4 % of households in Germany. Between 2015 and 2021, the availability of 1,000 Mbps FTTB/H broadband rose by 8.7 percentage points. In other words, it more than doubled, increasing by + 130 %. From the end of 2018 to the middle of 2021, the proportion of households with equally rapid connections using CATV grew from 23.7 % to 56.5 %. This is also more than double, equating to a + 138 % increase. Altogether, 62.1 % of households had gigabit-capable connections available as of mid-2021.
For all technologies, the provision of gigabit broadband is concentrated particularly in urban areas, where some 78.4 % of households had gigabit-speed internet access as of 2021. That figure is markedly lower for areas of a rural character, at 22.9 % in 2021. To consider the distribution of the different technologies, 75.1 % of urban and 12.8 % of rural households had gigabit connections via CATV in mid-2021, while gigabit-capable fibre broadband was available to 18.6 % of households in urban areas and 11.3 % of those in rural areas.
Differences in availability between urban and more rural areas are also discernible among the Länder. Of all the Länder that are not city states, Schleswig-Holstein has the highest level of gigabit-speed provision using any technology in 2021, at 79.7 % of all households, followed by Lower Saxony on 66.8 %. At the other end of the scale, 26 % of households in Saxony-Anhalt can say the same, with Brandenburg the next-lowest at 29.4 %. In contrast, provision of gigabit-speed broadband is markedly higher than 90 % in the three city states, Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg.
The foundation for the distinction between urban and rural areas is solely the population density for this indicator. The information about gigabit broadband are collected from more than 150 telecommunications companies in Germany. They are asked about their current provision. To preserve the companies’ business and trade secrets, the resultant data are aggregated into a grid of 250-metre by 250-metre cells (from 2022: 100x100 metre) and grouped according to seven classes of broadband. Although full-fibre networks with speeds of over 1,000 Mbps have been included in observations since the end of 2015, that class has only been studied in detail since the end of 2018 in light of the latest technological advances.
Methodologically, it should be noted that the telecom companies provide their data on broadband availability on a voluntary basis until the revision of the Telecommunications Act on 1 December 2021. Furthermore, the figures for availability refer to the technology that telecom companies have installed, as opposed to the actually usable broadband capacity in the area. Additional information on broadband measurement can be found in the annual report of the Bundesnetzagentur, Germany’s federal networks agency.
