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Term and price will remain the same, Vodafone assures on the info page
Photo: Vodafone
Four million German cable customers get an upgrade: As the provider Vodafone announced on Wednesday at the telecommunications trade fair "Anga Com", it will increase the bandwidth of their connections.
This is an advantage especially for old customers who have not adjusted their contract for years: in future they will surf and stream at a download speed of up to 50 Mbit per second.
For many customers, this step leads to a doubling of their bandwidth.
The improvement comes without a catch, assures Vodafone.
Neither the price nor the contract period increases, nor do the modems have to be replaced.
However, the upgrade can take some time: Half a million customers have already been upgraded in the past few weeks.
However, the changeover will not be completed until 2023.
Those who already have a fast Internet connection should also benefit: For example, an Internet connection with previously 400 Mbit / s becomes a 500 Mbit / s tariff.
Meanwhile, customers of the discounter brand »eazy« are excluded.
A bet on the future
One of the reasons for the change is the new version of the Telecommunications Act, which was passed by the Bundestag in April: In future, landlords will no longer be able to simply transfer cable contracts to their tenants as they did before. In place of the old regulation, there is, among other things, a »fiber optic provision fee«, which landlords can charge if they provide a modernized Internet connection. The catch for Vodafone: Although the company lays fiber optics in many streets, the last few meters to the modem are mostly made of copper.
With the expiry of the transition period in 2024, the group is in danger of losing customers: On the one hand, many landlords have to renegotiate their flat-rate contracts with cable providers. On the other hand, the legislature requires that tenants have free choice of provider in future. For this, the providers would also have to make their lines available to competitors. Both are reasons to get on good terms with customers.
In his keynote at the provider fair, Hannes Ametsreiter, the head of Vodafone Germany, appealed to politicians and regulators to protect the business model of cable providers.
These already provided a good connection today.
"To do this, it is necessary that a gigabit network is not built over with fiber optics," warned the manager.
Instead, the federal government should concentrate on households that still do not have a high-performance Internet connection.
tmk
