Contents
No more boundaries

How fast
is too fast?

Anytime, anywhere, ever faster

That meeting with colleagues from the US? We’ll be there at 9 o’clock in the evening, live from our living room. Big weekly shop coming up? Quick! Book a shared car. In the mornings we do our important banking before heading into the office. After we leave it, we book our next train journey. We are “always on”, connecting with others and sharing adventures, experiences and products with one another. Even machines are learning to talk to each other, which is making industrial processes more efficient and sustainable. Boundaries in time and space are dissolving. That’s great because it means an end to standing in line, boredom and clocking in. But a lack of boundaries in the digital world can be over­whelming if we are always available and can never switch off. It doesn’t just break down the boundaries that have hemmed us in. It also affects the ones that protect us. It’s all about finding the right balance between immense freedom and clear rules.

Focusing
on people

  • Digitalization makes the world simpler, faster, more diverse, and more efficient: in short, it makes it better. More sustainable cities, less traffic, better medical care, sharing platforms for sharing instead of owning - the possibilities are endless. Here at Deutsche Telekom, we want to drive this development: by expanding networks, with new innovative applications and through partnerships, we are helping to make the most of the opportunities offered by digitalization and using them to help people. Digitalization is not an end in itself: it should make life easier, promote prosperity and equal opportunities, and connect people without being limited by borders. But we also know that there are reservations, and we take these seriously. That’s why we are asking for dialog and making sure that in everything we do, digital change happens responsibly - and puts people first. For example, in our Smart City projects we are working closely with municipal authorities and public utility companies to meet city dwellers’ needs.

Sustainable
city living

  • If machines learn how to talk to one another, city life can improve. And cities are getting bigger all the time. Every week, some 1.3 million people are moving from rural areas to cities across the globe. This creates more traffic, more waste and more demand for energy and drinking water. We are helping cities like Hamburg and Bucharest to become more sustainable through digital solutions - an important sustainability goal in the United Nations 2030 Agenda (SDG 11). The newest Smart City project has been running in Bonn since 2017. The themes there are saving energy, increasing efficiency, and improving air quality. Dimmable street lamps automatically become brighter when pedestrians approach with the help of motion sensors. Recycling containers fitted with sensors check waste levels. The municipal garbage collection service need not come for the container until it is actually full. And in the city center, we are using another sensor on a street light to record different environmental data. Software developed by Deutsche Telekom checks air quality using this data.

Improved traffic flow –
less CO₂

  • Fewer traffic jams means arriving faster - digital technology is making it possible. One example is our “Park and Joy” app, which drivers have been able to use in Hamburg since 2017. Sensors have been installed in the first parking lots in the Hanseatic city. From the summer of 2018, these sensors will tell app users which parking spots are available. Drivers using “Park and Joy” can then navigate directly there. In 2018, cities planning to introduce the parking app include Bonn, Duisburg, Dortmund, Darmstadt and Moers. Another example is real-time traffic information: we operate the Daimler AG technical platform worldwide for its “Live Traffic” service. This gives Mercedes drivers traffic jam information and recommendations for alternative routes. In 2017 alone, 5 million vehicles used “Live Traffic” on the road: in one year, this allowed savings of some 6.2 million liters of fuel and about 15,000 tonnes of CO₂.

Share, trade, borrow

  • Studies show that a privately owned passenger vehicle sits around unused for an average of 23 hours a day. A drill only runs for about 13 minutes before it gets thrown out with the electrical waste. The numbers are clear. If we were to purchase fewer products ourselves and share more products with each other, we could save both a lot of money as well as valuable resources. Ever more sharing platforms are being developed for just this reason. For them to work, they need an Internet that is fast and that really works. This is right where Deutsche Telekom comes in: we invest more than 5 billion euros a year in Germany alone, mainly in expanding our networks. It’s only when sharing services like city bikes or car sharing are available to the maximum that they’ll reach their full potential. And the best is that sharing is useful, fun and lets us meet other people.

    Sharing is caring

Birgit Klesper, Senior Vice President GCR

Our current way of doing business is not only detrimental to future generations but to people in poorer countries as well. That’s why we urgently need to come up with something, if we want to maintain a good lifestyle in the long term. We have to move away from the throwaway society and towards a circular economy.

Better medical care everywhere

  • Does living in a rural or remote area mean traversing long distances to obtain good medical care? Not necessarily! Thanks to digitalization, physicians can provide good medical care to their patients even over long distances. Take Greece, for example, where a telemedicine network connects health care centers on the Aegean islands with the mainland.
  • Check-up results can be sent directly to hospitals in Piraeus via live stream, and patients only need to make the expensive trip to the mainland when a hospital visit is necessary. With these and other projects we are helping ensure broad access to high-quality health care, which is also one of the UN’s sustainability objectives (SDG 3).

Just take some time out

  • Is the first thing you do when you wake up, or the last thing you do at night is to look at your smartphone screen? Then you have to ask your­ self who’s really in charge. Are we in charge of our mobiles? Or are they in charge of us? If you can’t switch off, or your smartphone lighting up is stopping you from sleeping, that’s counter­ active. Deutsche Telekom wants to encourage the healthy, conscious and moderate use of digital media and technologies. That is why we are promoting media literacy and offering tips on how to switch off on our website www.telekom.com and our “We Care” magazine.

There for
our customers

  • We also offer digital services so that our customers can contact us with their concerns anywhere, anytime. For example, if the router is flashing strangely and not doing what it’s supposed to, a message to our Digital Service Assistant might help. The chatbot can now automatically answer questions about cables, installation and incidents with regard to telephony, Internet and TV. If the chatbot doesn’t know the answer, it will pass the customer to a customer adviser. Since the end of 2017, our customers have also been able to use the My Telekom Technician service. This tracks when their appointed Telekom technician will arrive so they can plan their day better. Our MagentaSERVICE app combines the entire service offering for mobile communications and landline customers, allowing our customers to do things such as check their data usage, manage their contracts, or organize for a line to be moved.