Cellular
5G usage in German cell phone networks is increasing
A new mobile communications standard comes out every 10 years. Seen in this way, 5G is now halfway through; the technology has been used commercially in Germany since 2019. The niche existence is now over.
Germany’s cell phone users are increasingly surfing the 5G mobile communications standard. As the network operator Vodafone announced, almost 20 percent of all data traffic in its network was transmitted using this technology in October. A year earlier the proportion was around ten percent and two years before that it was five percent – so every year it doubled.
The competitor Telefónica Deutschland (O2) also reports a significantly higher 5G share, where it also doubled within a year. The company does not provide a specific figure for this. “5G has now become part of smartphone users’ everyday lives,” says O2 head of technology Mallik Rao. “Especially in major German cities, 5G is now a mainstay of digital networking for consumers.”
The different radio standards
The largest share of the mobile phone network continues to be the previous standard 4G, also known as LTE. The 2G used for telephony only plays a minor role and 3G has already been switched off in Germany. The data transmission of 5G is up to ten times faster than LTE, gigabit speed is possible in the most modern cell phone network technology. The connections are also more stable – if there are many users in one radio cell, the transmission speed drops significantly with 4G, but it is better with 5G.
“LTE is still ahead when it comes to mobile data traffic in Germany because there are still many older cell phones in use that do not support 5G,” says Vodafone Germany boss Marcel de Groot. “But we are seeing more and more clearly that more and more people are now using 5G with their cell phones.”
The 5G share in the mobile phone network will continue to increase. The Vodafone manager justifies this by saying that customers are increasingly having 5G-compatible smartphones and that 5G is increasingly being included in tariffs automatically and at no additional cost. “And finally, we are all using more and more apps and services where high bandwidths provide the best quality – for example to share high-resolution videos with our friends,” says de Groot.
dpa
Source: Stern
