Mobile phone calls overtake landlines for first time in Germany

That’s right - for the first time in history, people in Germany are making more calls with their mobile phones than with landlines. It is 2019, after all.

“Traditional” landline calls declining in Germany

Published this Thursday, the Federal Network Agency’s annual report confirmed that landline telephony has continued its rapid decline - from 163 billion call minutes in 2013 to only 107 billion minutes in 2018, an average reduction of 52 hours per connection per year. For the first time ever, mobile telephony overtook traditional landlines, with over 119 billion calls being made on mobile phones in Germany last year.

However, the report also found that the growth in mobile minutes has been much slower than the decline in landline telephony. Although the number of calls made from mobile phones increased by 9 billion between 2013 and 2018, this growth has stagnated. Texts have also fallen dramatically out of favour: in the peak year of 2012, Germans sent almost 60 billion of them; in 2018, it was only 8.9 billion, a decrease of 85 percent.

Dramatic increase in mobile data in Germany

Rather than causing an increase in mobile phone use, the decline of landlines has clearly been accompanied by an enormous rise in internet use as customers increasingly favour messenger apps like Whatsapp and Skype. While the number of connections and speeds offered by internet providers continues to rise, mobile data consumption also increased by more than 40 percent last year, with German customers using a total of 2 billion gigabytes.

On average, each customer used around 1.2 gigabytes per month, almost twice as much as two years previously and more than 10 times as much as in 2012. Experts say that the abolition of roaming charges in the EU in 2017 has had a big impact on data consumption, with customers of German mobile service providers using a total of 66.4 million gigabytes abroad last year, almost twice as much as in the previous year.