1&1 will market fibre connections built by GlasfaserPlus, the joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and IFM Investors, at prices noticeably below the incumbent's, Golem reported on 16 October.
The deal makes 1&1 a wholesale customer of a network owned by its largest rival's joint venture — a familiar shape in German broadband, where competitors rent access to Telekom infrastructure rather than dig their own. GlasfaserPlus was set up to build fibre where it would otherwise not pay off, with a target in the low millions of connections, and it sells access to third parties on wholesale terms.
For 1&1, the appeal is straightforward: it can offer high-speed fibre where it has no network of its own. For Telekom's joint venture, a large tenant improves the utilisation of a build that is expensive to finance. The tension is that the same group is wholesaler to its competitor and the retail incumbent that the competitor undercuts, which is exactly the arrangement Germany's regulator has spent years refereeing.
Whether the discount translates into durable competition or into a marketing wedge that narrows once the fibre build matures is the question regulators will keep an eye on.
