Only five German cities are fully covered by the fast 4G mobile radio standard, also known as LTE, reports "Die Welt" and relies on an investigation by the measurement and consulting company Umlaut. According to this, the network operators in Dortmund, Offenbach am Main, Erlangen, Frankenthal and Ludwigshafen get a complete supply. In these cities, 100 percent of the households and the entire area are supplied.
For the analysis, Umlaut collected anonymized data from mobile phone users, which are automatically recorded by apps. This includes, for example, information about signal quality, network operator, position determination and transmission speeds. In total, more than two billion samples from the period from April to September were evaluated.
Brandenburg bottom
The city states of Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin are at the top of the federal states. In contrast to the cities mentioned, their coverage is not 100 percent, but between 99.3 and 99.8 percent.
The states of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia followed. Thuringia, Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Saarland and Hesse came in ninth to thirteenth place. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate and Brandenburg came in last.
Other studies also show that there are still large gaps in the 4G network. The supply is often poor, especially along ICE routes and federal highways, measurements on behalf of the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. (You can read more about this here.) The providers had committed to complete coverage.
So far, the penalties for providers who do not meet such requirements have been low at up to EUR 100,000. A planned amendment to the Telecommunications Act provides for severe penalties - from one million euros to two percent of the world's annual turnover.