Vodafone Germany on Thursday announced a deal with local fixed line operator Deutsche Telekom that will see Vodafone offering high speed fixed line broadband and IPTV nationwide.
Online powerhouse Amazon is stepping up its European cloud presence with the creation of a development centre in Germany. The new entity, based in Berlin and Dresden, will create 70 new engineering jobs and will focus on developing technologies to support the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing business, including hypervisors, operating systems, management tools and other applications as well as the development of machine learning technologies for use across all of Amazon’s platforms.
Operator group Deutsche Telekom has become the latest firm to offer the GSMA’s Joyn messaging platform to its users. The operator has rolled out the service to customers in its native Germany.
In the eternal chess match that is the German telecoms market, Vodafone may be readying a move to take its king out of check, by buying cable player Kabel Deutschland (KDG). If press reports are accurate, and Vodafone really does buy up Germany’s largest cable provider, it could break out of the fixed-broadband stalemate it finds itself in currently while jumping far ahead of incumbent Deutsche Telekom in the increasingly important TV market.
Spanish operator group Telefónica has succesfully demonstrated voice call continuity when handing over from LTE to 3G. The handover was achieved in Germany, through local subsidiary Telefónica Deutschland, in a test laboratory environment that the operator claims accurately simulates that of a real mobile network.
Swedish firm iZettle has launched its mobile payment card reader service in Germany. The payment solutions provider has teamed up with financial institutions DZ Bank and Deutsche Telekom to provide small businesses with the ability to accept payments via Android and iOS smartphones.
Dutch operator group KPN has seen its quarterly net profit fall by 32 per cent year on year, and has blamed increased competition in the German market as a key factor for its poor performance. The operator recorded net profit of €250m for 3Q12, compared with the €368m it made in 3Q11. This was despite revenue falling by a comparatively modest 6.5 per cent year on year, from €3,256m to €3,044m.
Spanish operator group Telefónica plans to sell shares in its German business on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The company is offering 258,750,000 shares to the market, representing approximately 23.17 per cent of Telefónica Deutschland’s share capital.
After some intense detective work we are ready to revisit the regulatory issues with regard to rollouts of VDSL vectoring. This is a hugely important issue: Rene Obermann, Deutsche Telekom CEO, has indicated that the operator will increase its superfast broadband coverage in Germany to 24 million homes by 2016, double the current 12 million VDSL homes passed, if it is allowed to deploy vectoring. The technology would allow download speeds for these households of 100Mbps. This could entail billions of Euros in spending for vendors and has the ability to reshape the German fixed broadband market, Europe’s largest, where the incumbent has been losing out to cable operators’ aggressively priced high speed offers.
Vodafone D2, the German arm of the UK-based carrier, has revealed that it will soon have an LTE ready smartphone from Taiwanese handset maker HTC available on its network. German publication Computer Week has said that the Vodafone press office in Germany has confirmed that the HTC Velocity 4G will soon be coming to market, though the exact launch date and pricing has not been confirmed.
Philippe Keryer, executive vice president of the networks operating segment at vendor Alcatel-Lucent revealed that in a recent study 84 per cent of Germans admitted that they would rather give up their cars or their partner, rather than be deprived of their internet connection.
Apple has won a case in Germany to prohibit the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet device in the country.
The Düsseldorf court upheld the preliminary injunction secured by Apple, which claims that Samsung had infringed its intellectual property and copied the iPad.
Right now it seems like operators are falling over themselves to establish direct carrier billing functionality. Telefónica, which already signed up Boku earlier this week, seems to be spreading its bets through a secondary deal with PaymentOne.
Vodafone Germany has become the latest European LTE cheerleader, having accomplished the impressive feat of launching LTE service on December 1, 2010, a mere seven months after acquiring the relevant spectrum under auction. Ahead of his appearance as one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming LTE World Summit 2011, Hartmut Kremling, Vodafone Germany’s chief technology officer talked to Telecoms.com about the deployment.
German operator E-Plus has claimed a first for a mature market, setting up an off grid base station powered by a combination of sun and wind.
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