Overview

• Regulators now view the EU’s 2030 deadline for copper network retirement as unachievable for Germany due to slow and uneven fiber rollout.
• The Bundesnetzagentur’s three-phase plan began with an impulse paper to guide industry debate and will establish procedures for copper retirement and competition oversight.
• Deutsche Telekom has assured that it holds no immediate plans to retire its copper network and must submit formal shutdown requests for each affected region.
• Pilot projects in Bad Salzungen and Wiesbaden are trialing voluntary migrations from DSL to fiber to identify best practices for broader network transitions.
• Only about 25% of households with fiber access have activated connections so far, highlighting persistent adoption hurdles and a growing rural digital divide.