The Blind Spot in Fiber-Optic Statistics

08.07.2026

7 min read

42.9 % of German households now have or can soon access a fibre-optic connection. There is no comparable figure for commercial and industrial parks-the Federal Network Agency counts households, not production halls. If a CIO waits for the publicly funded roll-out to reach their own site, they are waiting for a statistic that does not even include their location.

Key Takeaways

Success is measured in households. By 2025 fibre will reach more than 40 % of homes nationwide, yet there is no equally granular, publicly available metric for commercial sites.
The pain is real and documented. Almost two-thirds of industrial companies report regular disruptions caused by their own communications infrastructure.
Waiting is not a strategy. If you do not actively negotiate connectivity for your site, you leave the location decision to the random timetable of a network operator’s expansion plan.

The success metric is aimed at the wrong address

What is the commercial-site blind spot? Public roll-out statistics such as the Federal Network Agency’s Gigabit Grundbuch almost exclusively track residential connections. Production, storage and distribution sites in industrial parks do not appear as their own, reliably measured category-decision-makers only learn the connectivity quality of their site once they contact the network operator directly.

The household roll-out numbers look impressive at first glance. According to the 2025 BREKO market analysis, 52.8 % of German households were reachable by fibre at mid-year, with 27.3 % actually activated. Using a stricter methodology, the Federal Network Agency reports 42.9 % of FTTB/FTTH connections available in the same period-an increase of 7.2 percentage points year-on-year. Under the BREKO counting method (“homes passed”), the interim target of the Gigabit Strategy-50 % availability by the end of 2025-has been met, though not yet under the stricter BNetzA definition.

Yet none of these statistics answer a single question about the connectivity of a logistics centre on the city outskirts or a production hall in an industrial park. The expansion has historically been household-centric because funding logic is tied to residential units. A company site with ten employees does not register in either metric.

The figure CIOs underestimate

64.5 %. That is the share of industrial companies-according to an IW Köln survey of more than 1,000 firms-that report regular disruptions to business operations caused by their own communications-network infrastructure; for 30.7 % of respondents the disruptions are distinctly noticeable.

Why Waiting at Commercial Sites Costs More Than Negotiating

According to BREKO, expansion momentum in rural areas is slowing down. High construction costs, a shortage of skilled workers in civil engineering teams, permitting processes, and parallel overbuilding in high-demand locations are tying up resources where network operators expect the quickest returns-more often in dense residential areas than in commercial parks on the outskirts. Industry insiders already consider the nationwide gigabit target for 2030 at risk if expansion speeds don’t improve.

For a site with high, predictable bandwidth needs, this means: relying on the general expansion plan hands control over a key location factor to someone else’s investment timeline. The alternative isn’t an exotic workaround-it’s an active procurement discussion: dedicated fiber-optic connectivity outside the regular rollout sequence, negotiated and often co-financed directly with the network operator or a regional municipal utility carrier.

Where bandwidth alone isn’t enough-because the site itself runs highly automated, latency-sensitive processes-private local wireless networks become a complementary option. The article on the 5G campus-network frequency allocation by the Federal Network Agency already outlines the current status and limits of this approach.

What Site Managers Can Specifically Negotiate

Network operators prioritize expansion order by expected take-up rate. A commercial site with a single but extremely data-intensive tenant doesn’t register on their calculations-unless that tenant makes itself visible. In practice, this means filing a formal demand notice with the regional network operator, often accompanied by an upfront subsidy or minimum-take commitment that lowers the operator’s investment risk.

A second lever is bundling. Multiple companies in the same industrial park submitting a joint request can shift the economics of an expansion project-from a single case to a full-site buildout. Local economic-development agencies are a natural point of contact for such group requests, since developed commercial land itself becomes a competitive location factor in site-selection contests.

A third point, often overlooked: redundancy. A site with only one physical feed path goes dark if that line is damaged, no matter how premium the connection itself may be. Anyone negotiating a dedicated line should, according to network planners, also secure a second, physically separate route at the same time-adding a second route later usually means a brand-new civil-engineering project instead of a shared trench.

The Counterpoint: Not Every Site Needs a Special Deal

Weak connectivity doesn’t always justify its own negotiation. A small sales office with standard office and e-mail traffic usually gets by with a solid cable or mobile connection-no extra effort required. The negotiation effort for a dedicated line only pays off when bandwidth, latency, or uptime are truly business-critical: cloud-heavy ERP processes, video-heavy team calls, or connected production lines.

Equally mistaken is the belief that a dedicated line solves every problem permanently. Without that second redundant route, the site remains a single point of failure despite its premium link. The investment only pays off when both bandwidth demand and outage risk are assessed together-not just raw throughput speed.

What to Do in the Next 90 Days

First: conduct an honest audit of each site against the Federal Network Agency’s broadband atlas-where public data offers no reliable answer for your specific plot, ask the network operator directly, not third parties. Second: for every site showing noticeable impairment, file a formal demand notice and check whether neighboring businesses in the same park would join a joint application. Third: for any site with real outage risk, explicitly raise redundancy in negotiations before the first contract is signed-a second route is cheaper in the initial bid than in a later change order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why aren’t there official expansion figures for commercial zones?

Because the funding logic and expansion statistics have historically been tied to residential units. The Federal Network Agency’s Gigabit Land Register records household connections in granular detail, while commercial sites are only logged indirectly-and far less accurately.

What is a demand registration with the network operator?

A formal request in which a company signals to a network operator that there is concrete, predictable bandwidth demand at a specific location-often accompanied by a minimum-take or seed-funding commitment that lowers the operator’s expansion risk.

Is a dedicated fibre-optic line without redundancy sufficient?

Only for sites with no meaningful failure-risk profile. For business-critical processes, a single physical route turns the site into a single point of failure-even at high bandwidth. A second, physically separate route should be part of the same negotiation.

When does a private 5G campus network pay off instead of a fibre-optic connection?

When the site itself runs highly automated, latency-sensitive processes-such as AGV fleets or robotics. For pure site-to-internet connectivity, fibre remains the foundational building block; the campus network serves as an add-on for internal networking.