Telecommunications Annual Report 2022
Year of issue 2023
Date of issue 2023.06.02
The Bundesnetzagentur has today published its annual report on activities and regulatory decisions in the telecommunications sector. The report includes up-to-date figures reflecting the development of the telecommunications market.
Investments in fixed assets
Investments in the telecommunications market were up again in 2022. At €13.1bn, they were €1.6bn higher than the previous year. The companies were mostly investing in new broadband network infrastructure. In the fixed-network segment, investments were devoted primarily to rolling out optical fibre networks. In mobile networks, the focus was on rolling out 5G networks.
Fibre connections
The number of active fibre connections with FTTH or FTTB expanded to 3.4mn at the end of 2022, around 800,000 more than at the end of the previous year. Around 71% (2.4mn) of the connections were FTTH and about 29% (1.0mn) were FTTB connections. According to the Bundesnetzagentur's calculations, the number of homes passed by FTTH / FTTB grew from 8.9mn in 2021 to 13.1mn in 2022.
The growth in demand drove up the share of homes activated among total active broadband connections from 7.1% in 2021 to 9.1% by the end of 2022. However, the prevalence of these connections is still low, largely due to the high level of existing coverage with capable infrastructure (VDSL vectoring and HFC networks). The FTTH / FTTB share of broadband connections is expected to grow sharply in the coming years.
Call minutes in fixed and mobile networks
Up until 2019 the volume of calls from landlines had been decreasing. In 2020, the first year affected by the coronavirus pandemic, call minutes rose to about 104bn, and in the second year of the pandemic (2021) they fell to around 93bn. Call minutes fell again in 2022 to about 80bn, continuing the steady decline that was interrupted by the pandemic.
Outgoing mobile calls within Germany totalled around 159bn minutes. In other words, around 126 minutes of calls a month were made with each SIM card. For the first time, nearly twice as many call minutes were generated through mobile terminal devices as were generated through landlines. Reasons for this include improved voice quality and network coverage, flat rates and the fact that younger generations tend not to use landlines. The slight decline (around 2%) in mobile call minutes in 2022 may indicate a return to the usage pattern that was present before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Overall the importance of traditional telecommunications services is being displaced by messaging and video calling services.
Messaging and video calling services
For the first time this year, providers submitted data on market developments in number-independent interpersonal communications services, including messaging and video calling services. In 2022, users in Germany generated at least 121bn voice telephony minutes and 143bn video telephony minutes through these services, which means that the volume in each of these areas was larger than the volume in landline network calling.
The popularity of these services is reflected not only in the call minutes but also in the number of users. Messaging and video calling service providers reported around 225mn monthly active users in Germany in 2022, which equates to each user using around 3.5 services.
More data volume in the fixed and mobile networks
In 2022, a total of 121bn GB of data was transmitted in fixed networks in Germany. Since 2019 data volume has increased each year by around 20bn GB.
Mobile data volumes are also continuing to increase steeply. Current data collected by the Bundesnetzagentur suggests that 6,714mn GB of data were transmitted in 2022, up from 5,457mn GB in 2021. This corresponds to an increase of 23%. The vast majority (94%) of data traffic took place via long term evolution (LTE).
The Telecommunications Annual Report 2022 is available on the Bundesnetzagentur website at: www.bundesnetzagentur.de/berichte (in German).