The Hessian district of Fulda in the north-east of the Rhine-Main region was able to invest significantly in its future last year with the help of the federal funding program for broadband expansion from the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI).
To ensure that the 23 municipalities remain innovative and competitive in the long term, they need to be provided with fast broadband access. To this end, the district with its more than 220,000 inhabitants received a total of around 10.1 million euros in funding from the BMVI’s federal broadband funding program. The expansion of the broadband network in the district of Fulda is currently on the home straight. After the ground-breaking ceremony on March 10, 2017, the expansion was carried out in 18 expansion clusters as part of a profitability gap model. In the project, which is nearing completion, 150 kilometers of civil engineering work was carried out and 245 kilometers of empty conduit and 572 kilometers of fibre optic cable were laid.
With the help of funding from the BMVI, 10,500 households, over a thousand companies and a total of 68 schools in the district of Fulda will be connected to high-speed Internet. The six local authorities of Ebersburg, Ehrenberg, Gersfeld, Nüsttal, Rasdorf and Tann/Rhön as well as hospitals and community facilities will also benefit from the expansion of the broadband network. As part of the federal funding, the district placed a particular focus on connecting commercial areas, so that businesses based in the Fulda region now have access to faster data transfer rates.
In future, these businesses will be able to receive symmetrical bandwidths of up to 1 GBit/s. SIMONMETALL GmbH & Co KG, a trade company based in Tann (Rhön), will also benefit from the broadband expansion in the district of Fulda this year. The family business has been manufacturing individual and high-quality staircases and balconies, railings, roofing, canopies, carports, fences and gates in the town to the east of Fulda since 1919. Individuality and made-to-measure products are the focus here, meaning that the company’s portfolio also includes the production of raised beds and works of art. The team works with customers to develop individual pieces made of steel, stainless steel, aluminum or glass, for example.
Managing Director Christian Simon explains that digital applications are now a natural part of the day-to-day work of the more than 30 employees: “Without computers, the work process would be inconceivable today.” Technical drawings are created digitally, materials are purchased online and smartphones are used to quickly and easily document progress on the construction site for the customer and the archive. Wearables and smart glasses, which are currently used in many industrial sectors to make work processes easier, can only be used to a limited extent for SIMONMETALL’s individual parts. The company is therefore investing primarily in its own servers, PCs, smartphones, software and, above all, in IT security. SIMONMETALL will benefit from the forthcoming connection to the high-speed Internet in Fulda, particularly with regard to daily data transfer.
With a high-performance Internet connection, higher upload speeds are possible and the company will use secure and uninterrupted IP telephony in future. Christian Simon is confident about the future of the business location in the district of Fulda, which he associates with a high quality of life and more freedom: “The Fulda economic region will expand even further, so that SMEs and the skilled trades will be even more strongly represented and thus enrich this interesting business location.”
As a state-recognized climatic health resort, the Rhön is important for domestic and international tourism. There was therefore great interest in finding suitable solutions for connecting to the high-speed Internet, as special installation methods must be observed for the approximately 1,500 square kilometers of mountainous terrain. The empty conduits required for the fiber optic cables have now been laid using, among other things, the flush drilling method. With this environmentally friendly method, only the surface between the starting and target pits is used. This means that further excavations can be avoided, eliminating the need for large-scale barriers. Thanks to this installation method in the challenging terrain of the low mountain range, businesses and residents in Tann (Rhön) will be able to use the local broadband network in the near future.
Photo above: Company building SIMONMETALL GmbH & Co. KG.
Photo credit: Leonhard Feuerstein.
First photo below: From left to right: Berthold Vogt (local mayor), Christof Erb (district coordinator for broadband expansion), Günther Frenz (for aconium GmbH as project sponsor of the federal broadband funding program), Michael Brand (MP), Marion Frohnapfel (mayor of the municipality of Nüsttal), District Administrator Bernd Woide, Mr. Bothe (representative of the telecommunications company), Georg Matzner (Hessian Ministry of Economics, Transport and Regional Development) at the symbolic ground-breaking ceremony.
Photo credit: aconium GmbH / Florian Schuh.
Second photo below: Yvonne Simon with husband Christian Simon, Managing Director at SIMONMETALL, Tann (Rhön), 07.03.15.
Photo credit: Tim Wegner.