North-Rhine Westphalia takes Gigabit pole position in Germany

Over half of homes in North-Rhine Westphalia now have access to Gigabit broadband, according to data compiled by the government of Germany’s most populous state.

The NRW state ministry of economics, innovation, digitisation and energy said that 52% of the 8.5 million homes in the state were covered as of June 30, up from 9% in 2018. It said that 75% of homes had access to 400Mbps speeds, and 91% had access to 100Mbps.

Vodafone Deutschland claimed the lion’s share of Gigabit homes for its DOCSIS cable network. The company counted 3.9 million homes able to access Gigabit broadband speeds as of June 30, the date of the government update, with a further 600,000 Gigabit homes being added to its footprint since, taking its total to 4.5 million.

North-Rhine Westphalia is the leading German state for Gigabit broadband coverage, followed by Bavaria and Baden-Württemburg, each with 3.1 million homes covered, and Lower Saxony with 2.3 million. Hesse, Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate each have around one million homes connected to Gigabit-capable networks.

Vodafone says it aims to provide 5.6 million homes across North-Rhine Westphalia with Gigabit broadband by 2022

Vodafone said it was preparing to conduct field tests of the next-generation DOCSIS 4.0 specification, recently released by CableLabs, in Düsseldorf within the next two years.

“Düsseldorf is the beating heart of Germany. From here we have brought Gigabit speeds to the country on a large scale over the last two years and within just a few months we have catapulted North Rhine-Westphalia to the front in a national comparison. Our gigabit launch in North Rhine-Westphalia was only seven months ago and we will have upgraded all local fibre connections well before our originally planned target date,” said Hannes Ametsreiter, Vodafone Deutschland’s CEO.