Six years following the commencement of a multi-billion-euro 5G frequency auction, the rollout of the new mobile standard in Germany is lagging behind key expectations. An analysis conducted by industry specialists Opensignal and reported by “Handelsblatt”, reveals that none of the country’s three major network operators – Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica – are consistently achieving latency times below ten milliseconds, a benchmark widely considered crucial for real-time communication internationally.
The analysis indicates that average latency stands at approximately 23 milliseconds within the Telekom network, while Vodafone and Telefónica networks show averages of 29 milliseconds each. While download speeds have demonstrably increased compared to the previous 4G network, these latency figures pose a significant impediment to applications requiring near-instantaneous responsiveness.
Concerns are being voiced by industry representatives. Marcus Bollig, Managing Director of the VDA (German Association of the Automotive Industry), stated that the continued high latency times restrict applications heavily reliant on real-time communication. Similarly, Frank Fitzek, Professor of Communication Networks at the Technical University of Dresden, commented that a true real-time mobile network currently does not exist in Germany, emphasizing that operators have yet to sufficiently expand the network infrastructure.