Start of school in Lower Saxony: No figures available for fiber optic connections

The new school year starts in Lower Saxony on Thursday. However, it remains unclear whether children and young people will return to schools that have a fiber optic connection. The Ministry of Culture does not have exact figures on this, a spokesman said. In Lower Saxony, the cities and municipalities are responsible for the expansion.

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Only information on gigabit capability

In fact, the state of Lower Saxony had already set itself the goal in its 2018 digitization master plan that “all schools will be equipped with fiber optic gigabit internet connections by the 2021/22 school year”.

Although the Ministry of Culture does not publish any exact figures for fiber optic connections for the 2023/2024 school year, it can at least explain something about gigabit-capable connections. 74.7 percent of the school locations are currently provided with gigabit-capable connections, around 22.6 percent are currently still being expanded. In the foreseeable future, a total of 97.3 percent of the locations would be equipped with gigabit. According to the Ministry of Education, some funding applications are being prepared for the remaining 2.7 percent of the locations.

Basically, the school authorities are responsible for the (digital) equipment of the schools in Lower Saxony. However, the state supported them with a subsidy for the federal DigitalPakt school. The funds from the DigitalPakt are topped up with a ten percent state share. According to the Ministry of Education, the school authorities were also very active here. “In the meantime, all available funds have been exhausted,” said the spokesman. In April, the Ministry of Education had announced a first-come-first-served procedure for the last DigitalPakt funds, which began on July 1st.

What is actually happening in schools?

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While the Ministry of Culture refers to the gigabit capability of the connections, two survey results pour water into the wine. A recent Bitkom survey of German schoolchildren made it clear that they particularly complain about the poor or non-existent WiFi coverage in schools. As Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst explained in the press conference, internet expansion often fails over the last mile. On the one hand, it must therefore be questioned which type of connection actually made it to the school gate with what power and, on the other hand, whether the school authorities were also able to bring the Internet connections into the school building – for example with sufficient WLAN repeaters.

The Association of Providers of Telecommunications and Value-Added Services (VATM) also presented sobering figures on Internet expansion in the summer of this year. According to VATM, it is still the cable network operators who ensure that 71 percent of households can book gigabit-capable connections – at the end of 2022 the figure was 68.4 percent. It must also be clear that two-thirds of the broadband connections used are still based on Telekom’s copper cable network. The growth rates for fiber optic expansion to homes or end customers are as follows: by the end of June 2023, the number of these connections had risen to 15.1 million.

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