Vodafone Germany CEO Hannes Ametsreiter on the Gigabit Society

We see ourselves as an enabler for a gigabit society. We believe it's extremely important to start the discussion about what is needed for the future: what networks do we need, what kind of cooperation needs to move into a prosperous future. That was the reason for us to start the discussion, to think about what it means. Gigabit: data volume is doubling every 18 months. We see that machine-to-machine is already bigger than SIM cards with people. So there's a lot going on. How can we be spearheading development, how can we be ahead, how can we place Europe and Germany at the forefront of development? That is something we would like to work on. That's why we bring people together: universities, excellent researchers, companies, politics. And that's how we would like to move forward, to focus on that and make the vision of a gigabit society come true.

A lot. We really believe the digital revolution will be the biggest revolution in humanity. It's lots of opportunities. We will see growth with things connected to the internet. There was once a discussion when Obama visited Germany, and there was somebody saying, 'The US is having the internet, and you Europe are having the things.' I think we should not be happy to just have the things; we want to have more. We want to have connected things, we want to have services which are deriving opportunities out of that. That's where we would like to focus. That's why I really believe it is ambitious to think about such a vision and future, but we are absolutely positive towards technology. We are positive that this technology can support people. We also think that some things we can't imagine. What does it mean to have one millisecond latency? You can guess several services, but we don't know until it's put out there into the market. Then all the app developers start developing. It's a really fascinating future and a fascinating point of time where we are at the moment. The Vodafone Institute has just performed a study where we can see a highly statistically significant correlation between GDP and network expansion.

At the end of the day, it's just a proof for the gigabit society. It proves that if you invest in FTTH, then you will see growth. What this study found out is that if you increase FTTH in Germany, which is pretty low at 1.3 percent, if you increase by 1 percent, that means around 1 billion euros, so it's between 0.6 and 1.2 billion increase in GDP. If you then make the calculation that Germany's FTTH is 1.3 percent and Korea's is 70 percent, if you move Germany to the level of Korea, this would mean 70 billion. I mean, it depends if there's any degression or not, but let's say between 50 and 70 billion of additional GDP. That would mean an increase of 12.1 percentage points on GDP, which is fantastic. That is the biggest growth engine you could imagine for an economy. Therefore, it really makes sense discussing it and deploying it, just doing it and moving forward in enabling business and enabling new opportunities of life for people.

Openness. I think it should be benefited if you're investing in infrastructure. I believe it could be much more sharing because there are lots of ducts that are either empty or filled with old copper. I believe if you really focus on how to get fiber to the base stations, how to get fiber to the people, then you will find ways to do that. We're still missing a little bit of creativity and openness to get there, because everybody would believe that this is the future-proof infrastructure. If you want to be the leading industrial nation or region as European Union, then you need to be ahead in infrastructure. Therefore, I think it really makes sense to get things done, how to bring in fiber. If you have subsidies, subsidies at the moment in Germany are being used for copper. If you use subsidies, then you should invest them and steer them and manage them into the new infrastructure, which is the fiber infrastructure.