Deutsche Telekom starts project work for T-City Friedrichshafen

Only two months after launching the broadband infrastructure roll-out at T-City Friedrichshafen, Deutsche Telekom has started further preparations to fulfill its competition promise. In seven workshops, joint projects are being defined that focus on building the broadband infrastructure and that will be starting in the coming months.



For two weeks, experts from Deutsche Telekom, the city of Friedrichshafen and various partner companies will exchange, discuss, and further develop joint ideas on Zeppelin University campus. Afterwards, it will be clear which projects can be started as soon as possible, who the individual implementation partners should be, and when the people of Friedrichshafen can take advantage of the new products and services. Clear objective: “To launch the first solutions this year,” promised Jörg Bollow, T-City Project Manager at Deutsche Telekom.



In five of the subject areas suggested by the city of Friedrichshafen (Tourism & Mobility, Business & Services, Citizen & State, Lifelong Learning & Research, and Health,) 28 project proposals will be discussed. Common goal of all of the projects: quality of life, quality of the location and enhanced degree of networking, thus turning Friedrichshafen into a premier locality for citizens in terms of broadband usage and benefits for the citizens over the project term, which runs until 2012.



“By combining Deutsche Telekom’s competency, ideas submitted to the Friedrichshafen competition, and the resources of the participating project partners, these first projects are identified. We are moving on from the stage of pure consideration to actually putting things into practice,” said Ferdinand Tempel, T-City’s on-site Deutsche Telekom representative.



Deutsche Telekom launched the T-City competition last May for cities with 25,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. After two rounds, Friedrichshafen was named the winner by an independent jury on February 21, 2007. This earned the city an ultra-modern broadband infrastructure in the fixed and mobile network (HSDPA and VDSL.) In Friedrichshafen, Deutsche Telekom will also implement project ideas chosen from the competition, as well as further innovative projects. Deutsche Telekom is prepared to invest up to EUR 80 million in the implementation of the T-City project. This will take the form of internal investments, participation in joint investments with project partners and sponsoring in Friedrichshafen.



The roll-out of the broadband mobile and fixed networks was started following a short planning phase. In mid-April, just under two months following the announcement of the winning city, Friedrichshafen’s mayor, Josef Büchelmeier, and Timotheus Höttges, member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom AG, celebrated the launch of the first mobile communications mast for high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), and the first V-DSL fixed network connection.