T-Mobile Poland is accelerating its timeline for shutting down its 3G network and now expects to meet this target by April 2023.
Speaking to Telko.in, CEO Andreas Maierhofer said: “We communicated the plan to turn off 3G by the end of 2023, but the experience with refarming so far, including customer feedback, has prompted us to accelerate this process. We plan to complete the shutdown of 3G nationwide in April.”
Maierhofer further clarified that the operator is not planning to divest any of its passive tower infrastructure, nor construct a fixed fibre access network. On the latter point, the executive noted that while T-Mobile owns 27,000km of fibre backbone infrastructure, it uses this for enterprise rather than commercial services.
“T-Mobile builds its own network for B2B services and relies on wholesale access when it comes to the B2C market”, said Maierhofer. He noted that the deployment of 5G networks would “enable access to homes and provide a full range of telecommunications services in areas where no one will ever try to lay optical fibre.”
