O2 Telefónica now reaches more than 97 percent of the German population with its 5G service.
German carrier O2 Telefónica said it has deployed a total of 500 5G transmitters across Germany in the first quarter of the year, the telco said in a release. The firm, owned by Spanish telco Telefónica, also said it has completed around 1,600 expansion measures since the beginning of the year to improve its network infrastructure. The expansion focused on improving network coverage in previously underserved communities and installing additional capacity.
Alexander Seitz, director regional planning, delivery and optimization at O2 Telefónica, said: “We have big plans for the expansion year 2025. Because Germany needs strong networks. With the expansion program, we are ensuring that our customers across the country have even better network quality for their mobile telephony and data usage. We are setting up new sites to bring the fast O2 network to more households and communities. Better reception along traffic routes and railroad lines ensures that consumers and business customers always stay connected, even when they are on the move.”
As a result of the expansion measures, O2 Telefónica now reaches more than 97% of the German population with its 5G service. Its technicians have expanded the 5G network in numerous major cities such as Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Magdeburg.
In October 2023, O2 Telefónica announced the launch of its 5G Standalone (SA) network in the country under the 5G Plus brand. Until this launch, the German telco had been offering 5G services through the NonStandalone (NSA) 5G architecture partly via its LTE/4G core network. The carrier noted that the 5G SA network enables customers to have access to voice-over-new-radio (VoNR) technology, which enables them to make calls with even better voice quality over the 5G network.
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O2 Telefónica said it has already been using the 5G SA technology in 5G campus networks for companies and public authorities since 2020. With this new launch, the company noted that more companies in different sectors such as industry, healthcare and the public sector will have access to improved connectivity.
The carrier’s 5G Plus uses frequencies in the 700 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 3.6 GHz bands. The telco said it expects its 5G SA service to reach full coverage in Germany by the end of 2025. Telefónica Germany has recently selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider for network workloads.
The multi-year agreement, signed during Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025, builds on the previous deployment of O2 Telefónica’s 5G SA Core on AWS in July 2024. As part of this expansion, O2 Telefónica will extend its 5G core implementation on AWS, deploying the 5G core data plane within its data centers using AWS Outposts racks to support network-intensive workloads. Additionally, the company will begin deploying IMS voice services on AWS Graviton processors this year.
O2 Telefónica will also use a unified set of AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Amazon Managed Grafana, to monitor its entire 5G network.
