Antennas: Telefónica allegedly averted LTE expansion penalty

Telefónica claims to have reached the missing LTE locations before the deadline. This would avert a penalty payment threatened by the Federal Network Agency, a Telefónica spokesman for the news agency dpa announced on July 27, 2020. The other deadlines – 5,000 new LTE stations by the end of September and all 7,600 missing by the end of the year – would be met, the spokesman said.

The Federal Network Agency had threatened the company with a penalty payment of EUR 600,000 if the required LTE expansion did not progress by the end of July.

In the allocation of the frequencies auctioned in 2015, the Federal Network Agency had imposed that from the beginning of the current year 98 percent of households nationwide and 97 percent of households in each state must be supplied with a minimum data rate of 50 Mbit / s per antenna sector. The main traffic routes should be fully supplied.

All three mobile network operators were given a deadline to remedy the missed coverage requirements after non-compliance, the Federal Network Agency said in April. The authority asked companies to fully meet the requirements by December 31, 2020 at the latest. Partial deadlines were set for milestones in June and September. A further deadline was set for the missing LTE masts of Telefónica until the end of July 2020, as the regulatory authority announced on July 9, 2020 in Bonn.

Negligence in the expansion of LTE “no trivial offense”

The Federal Network Agency’s Nadine Schön (CDU) demanded that the Federal Network Agency should issue sanctions against network operators who did not meet the 4G supply requirements: “Violations of the coverage requirements are not a trivial offense. If we want to achieve the goals of our mobile communications strategy, the mobile network operators must meet the requirements. That is why the Federal Network Agency must now use the sanction options that we have made available to it.” This includes imposing fines on companies.