Broadband internet for schools: Berlin well supplied, Leipzig needs to catch up

Internet coverage in German schools still varies greatly. This is according to the web hosting provider Hostinger, following an analysis of data from the Federal Network Agency's Gigabit Basic Directory. According to the analysis, schools in Berlin or Düsseldorf are already well supplied with a bandwidth of 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s), while some schools in Leipzig or Dortmund are still far from having such a network connection.

Very different from region to region

Hostinger's assessment is based on data from December 2023 and is limited to 20 major cities. Both older and more recent data for the whole of Germany can be viewed via the land register. There is already a report as of June 2024, among others. When asked, Hostinger explained that they had focused on the data from the end of 2023, however, as this had already been adjusted by subsequent reports and corrections and was therefore more reliable.

According to the web hosting provider, only just under two thirds (67.67%) of schools in major German cities had sufficient internet coverage on average in December 2023.
Leipzig performed the worst of the 20 largest German cities in the comparison. Only 47.99% of schools there are said to have an internet connection of at least 1 Gbit/s. The situation is similar in Dortmund. There, 49.46 percent of schools have a connection with at least 1 Gbit/s. At 52.21 percent, Wuppertal is also just over the 50 percent mark.

Unusual, but true: according to the figures from the end of 2023, Berlin is in the lead with a coverage rate of 93.88%. Düsseldorf follows with 89.73 percent. In the Hanover region, schools already have to make do with 82.99% – However, this is also a district and not just the city of Hanover, which makes comparison difficult. The city of Hanover is still behind the region with 79.87%. In Munich, the coverage rate is 82.76%. Bonn has 78.81%, Hamburg 74.77% and Bochum 73.39%.

In the more recent Gigabit Baseline Report from June 2024, Berlin only has a coverage rate of 81.19%. According to Hostinger, various factors can interact here: New or previously unrecorded schools were included in the report, or new buildings and temporary container schools may not yet have a high-performance internet connection. “This reduces the average coverage, although the existing schools may have remained the same or even have better coverage.”

The company also points out that there is apparently a “bottleneck at 200 to 400 Mbit/s”. While an average of 83.2% of schools would achieve at least 200 Mbit/s, this figure drops to 67.76% at 400 Mbit/s – almost identical to 1 Gbit coverage (67.67%).

1 Gbit/s as minimum coverage

The Federal Ministry of Research and Education had already formulated the provision of broadband to schools as a necessity in 2018 as part of the Digital Pact for Schools.
Subsequent handouts from the federal states, such as the Lower Saxony Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, state the following about the requirements and target values: “Experience from schools shows that the bandwidth requirement for a school without a connection to a data center is at least 500 Mbps. For schools that are connected to a data center, it is assumed that bandwidths of a similar specification (>1 Gbit/s) are available.”

(kbe)