Telecoms Annual Report 2025

Year of issue 2026
Date of issue 2026.06.05

The Bundesnetzagentur has today published its telecommunications annual report for 2025. It details the developments on the German telecommunications market last year.

Investments in fixed assets

Telecommunications companies invested a total of about €15.3bn in fixed assets in 2025, about the same as in the previous year. The companies’ focus of investments – the rollout of optical fibre and mobile communications infrastructure – was largely unchanged in 2025 too.

Broadband connections

High and very high bandwidths were increasingly in demand for fixed internet connections in 2025. While the number of connections with maximum download speeds below 100 megabits per second (Mbps) fell from 17.1mn in 2024 to 15.2mn in 2025, the number of faster connections rose from 21.5mn to 23.6mn. Of these, three million connections even had a maximum bandwidth of at least 1,000 Mbps, up from 2.5mn in 2024.

Fibre connections continued to see strong growth in 2025, as in the year before. The number of active fibre connections (FTTH and FTTB Activated) was up by more than a million since the end of 2024, from 5.3mn to 6.4mn. The proportion of total active broadband connections in fixed networks accounted for by fibre also rose from 13.7% in 2024 to 16.5% by the end of 2025. By contrast, the proportion of DSL dropped from 61.1% to 58.5% in the same period.

Around 5.2mn active fibre connections came under the category of fibre to the home (FTTH), which means that the indoor cabling to the individual subscribers is also fibre. The other approximately 1.2mn were classed as fibre to the building (FTTB), as in the year before. These include connections for tenants where the fibre connection ends in the basement and there is only copper cable running from there into the apartment itself.

There was also a clear rise in the homes and buildings connected with fibre (FTTH and FTTB Connected) from 2024 to 2025. This figure, which includes the fibre connections that are not (yet) active as well as the ones that are, was 7.1mn for FTTH and 3.3mn for FTTB, up 1.6mn and 0.2mn respectively.

Telephony and video conferencing

Traditional telephony, measured by volume of calls, saw another clear drop in significance in 2025. The number of call minutes in the fixed network dropped from 57bn in 2024 to about 47bn, while the number of minutes of mobile communications was down from 148bn to 132bn.

By contrast, the upwards trend in number-independent services continued in Germany. In 2025, 19.6bn (2024: 17.7bn) outgoing voice telephony calls were placed through messaging and video calling services. This corresponded to an 11% year-on-year rise in the number of calls. The volume of calls also rose to a total of 198bn minutes (2024: 196.7bn).

In the same period, 9.5bn outgoing video calls were made as well, compared to 8.8bn in 2024, which is a 7% year-on-year increase. The volume of calls in video telephony also saw further growth to a total of 188.5bn minutes (2024: 183.7bn).

Instant messaging and SMS

A considerable number of SMS messages were still sent in 2025, even though there was a further clear drop to 2.9bn from 5.2bn the year before. Each active SIM was used to send an average of just two SMS a month.

Customers of messaging and video calling services, on the other hand, sent 913.5bn instant messages in the same period (2024: 901.9bn), the equivalent of 384 instant messages per user per month or about 13 a day.

Strong growth in data volume

In 2025, data totalling around 175bn gigabytes (GB) was transmitted on Germany’s fixed networks, which equates to an average data volume of around 376 GB per broadband line per month. The average monthly volume was about 54 GB higher than in 2024.

The average data volume used in mobile communications was up as well. It amounted to about 8.4 GB per month for each active SIM profile, around 13% more than in the previous year. The volume of data transmitted through mobile networks in Germany in 2025 amounted to 10.9bn GB (2024: 9.6bn).