Governance

Network reliability is essential for telecommunications services to ensure a secure network and thus the best customer experience. A stable network without failures is the basis for this. Deutsche Telekom AG measures various factors in order to constantly monitor, control and optimize the reliability of its networks. We focus on every aspect that can have a direct impact on our customers. The following parameters are determined annually for Deutsche Telekom's entire network in Europe:

• “Average network interruption frequency” (Total number of customer interruptions/total number of customers served)
• “Average network interruption duration” (Total duration of customer interruption/total number of customers served).

These parameters are calculated for all technologies and all Deutsche Telekom networks in Europe. In 2021, the average network interruption frequency was 0.16 and the average network interruption duration was 120.99.

The analogue transmission of phone-calls through PSTN-Technology is past tense. We have migrated all lines - in Germany as well as in European NatCos - to IP-Technology and with that created the basis for fast internet-connections and more complex applications.

Together with satellite company Inmarsat, Deutsche Telekom is offering the fastest inflight broadband service for European travelers.

The European Aviation Network (EAN) has been developed by Inmarsat and Deutsche Telekom in partnership with leading European companies such as Thales, Nokia, Airbus, and Cobham. It marks a paradigm shift in the airline passenger experience, with incomparable speeds, uninterrupted coverage and significantly lower latency than any other inflight Wi-Fi network in the continent.

The award-winning connectivity solution has been available to over 85 million passengers to date, travelling on more than 650.000 flights throughout Europe, covering key destinations such as London, Madrid, Barcelona, Geneva and Rome. EAN has now been activated in 275 aircraft and is currently available with British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and Aegean Airlines.

Since the the Computerhilfe Plus service launch in 2016, the demand for support in matters related to digital security has continued to grow. That’s why we introduced the Digital Schutzpaket (Digital Protection Package) in 2018 and added the Digital Schutzpaket Business (Business Digital Protection Package) to this product at the end of 2019. The Digital Protection Package combines all relevant security services in one product and offers a central point of contact for all topics related to home networks and Wi-Fi, internet, and social media. A service number provides access to Deutsche Telekom experts for support on protecting the home network from external attacks, or help on the secure use of the internet, social networks, and passwords. In the event of data loss, we look after recovering files where possible. Other service components include financial protection from fraudulent use of bank details, fraud in private online trading, and protection and effective countermeasures against cyberbullying or insults on the internet. For business customers, reputation protection is also included, which supports the deletion of unstable negative ratings and provides tips on maintaining online reputation. ID-Alarm helps customers protect their digital identity and alerts them when stolen login data is found.

With our global data privacy organization, we are constantly working to provide a transparent and high level of data privacy in all our companies. As far as legally possible, the companies of the Deutsche Telekom Group have also committed themselves to the Binding Corporate Rules Privacy (BCRP), which are intended to ensure a uniformly high level of data privacy for our products and services. Violations of behavioral requirements, legal provisions, internal guidelines (such as the Binding Corporate Rules Privacy BCRP) and regulations can have serious consequences not only for individuals personally, but also for Deutsche Telekom. Therefore, on the basis of the Deutsche Telekom Code of Conduct, reproachable deliberate misconduct will not be tolerated. Deutsche Telekom sanctions such misconduct and violations consistently and without exception within the framework of the legal provisions, without taking into account the rank and position of the acting and affected person.

Machines and products are constantly becoming smarter. The technologies that make these developments possible are bundled under the term Internet of Things, or IoT.
IoT can help ideally coordinate the processes of various devices, vehicles, and entire industrial facilities. This increases industrial productivity and ensures efficient logistics, thus helping reduce energy consumption and conserve resources.
We also support the German federal government’s Industry 4.0 initiative through our involvement in IoT. The initiative’s objective is to maintain Germany’s competitive edge in the technology sector.

T-Systems has been developing and operating Daimler’s Connected Car platform (Daimler vehicle backend) worldwide since 2013. The platform is the technical basis for the Live Traffic service, which provides drivers with real-time traffic information, Live Traffic prevents about 30 percent of traffic jams per vehicle. This means the approximately 24 million vehicles equipped with Live Traffic consumed about 26 million liters less fuel. This translates into CO2 savings of around 65,000 metric tons.

Project goal:

SHOW aims to support the deployment of shared, connected     and electrified automation in urban transport, to advance sustainable urban mobility.

- Demonstrations in 20 cities across Europe

- Integration of automated fleets in Public Transport

- Including 69 partners from 13 EU-countries

- International cooperation with organizations from the US, South Korea, Australia and China

Benefits:

- Reduction of 20% energy consumption and 10% emissions

 - Reduction of overall number of private vehicles through intelligent combination of smart Public Transport solutions

 - Improved traffic flow

- Establish new business models and improve virtual validation

DT does not tolerate any irregular behavior.

The case in SA is not new. We are dealing with it since 2017 and it has been the subject of several public reports in Germany and South Africa. Most recently in the German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche (2021) or in the “Welt” (2022).

The case has been consistently and thoroughly investigated by T-Systems South Africa. Two years ago, we divested ourselves of the South African business.

A state commission has examined the events in great detail. So far, it has not made any recommendation to investigate or prosecute the TSSA itself or individual TSSA employees.

As a matter of principle, we do not comment on ongoing proceedings; this also applies to those of the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office.

With the internal policy “Binding Corporate Rules Privacy (BCRP)”, the Deutsche Telekom Group is creating a standardized and high level of data privacy worldwide, applicable to the processing of personal data. Any breaches of rules, legal obligations, or of internal policies (like the Binding Corporate Rules Privacy BCRP) and regulations may have serious consequences not only for the individuals committing them, but also for Deutsche Telekom. Therefore based on the “Code of Conduct of Deutsche Telekom, deliberate misconduct will not be tolerated. Without any exception, Deutsche Telekom will severely sanction any such misconduct or violation against legal provisions. In doing so Deutsche Telekom will take no account of the employee’s rank or position within the company.

Every two years we conduct our employee survey in order to obtain feedback from our employees, discover weaknesses, and implement suitable actions to eliminate those weaknesses. The analysis on team level and of other criteria (e.g. function, executives vs. leader vs. employee, gender, age group) support the derivation of fitting concrete improvement actions on all levels. Around 80% of all employees participated in the last employee survey, the share of men and woman - where gender was specified - complies approximately with gender proportion in the group (participation rate man around 65%, women around 31% and diverse around 1%).

In addition to the employee survey, we also gauge employee satisfaction every six months through a pulse survey. This helps us obtain a current snapshot of the mood at the company and verify whether the introduced actions have been successful. This lets us make quick adjustments if necessary. The pulse survey in May 2021 saw a 77% response rate among the group.

How can international corporations put sustainability strategies into practice across borders? Deutsche Telekom employs CR managers for the relevant business segments and national companies to reach this goal. They use the CR Manager Network to regularly share best practices and discuss new challenges, thereby jointly promoting essential CR issues. The central Group Corporate Responsibility (GCR) department is responsible for managing the network. In the year 2021, the CR Manager Network encompassed more than 100 CR Manager from 34 subsidiaries based in 20 countries across the globe. 

The participants are regularly invited to virtual meetings and capacity building calls by Group Corporate Responsibility. In 2021, content and likely implications of the EU Green Deal were discussed as well as progress within the #GreenMagenta programs and the new strategic stream "Positive impact on society" defined by the EU segment. Furthermore, the network members could gain insights into issues like Impact measurement and the future of a greener mobility.

Stakeholder dialogues within Deutsche Telekom have to adhere to the “Guide to successful stakeholder management”: following the definition of the targets of the engagement (1) and the scope and boundaries for influence (2), relevant stakeholders are selected based on the assessment of their respective affectedness and influence (3) on the project/ issue in question. Basis of this selection is Deutsche Telekom’s stakeholder universe. Timing (4) and format (5) of the engagement have to be selected in accordance with the aforementioned targets, scopes and needs of the stakeholders affected. A check for risk and opportunity is integrated in each of these five steps. 

There is a strong need to predict and prepare for long term risks that could occur in the future. Although these risks are difficult to spot, they can have a significant impact on our company. It is therefore necessary to effectively identify and evaluate such adverse events early and develop mitigation strategies to protect our business and our customers against such risks. Having a comprehensive view of emerging risks for Deutsche Telekom is part of our risk management system, which systematically identifies, assesses, and manages relevant risks.

These emerging risks are categorized into political, economic, social, technological, environmental and regulatory/legal events that could occur. The assessment factors considered include velocity and novelty of the risk and relevance for our industry and business in the years ahead.The following emerging risks are on the rise:

Technological: Cybercrime is exploding. Digital transformation, expanding device adoption, machine learning and other applications of exponential increase in computing power are trying to outpace current security protection. As the number of entry points into organizations grows, and cybercrime becomes ever-more profitable, the number of cyberattacks will continue to rise.
Risks include hackers deploying ransomware that can block access to data and key systems (either by exploiting security holes in companies’ networks or using phishing emails to harvest credentials and gain entry), AI-powered cyber-attacks will become more autonomous and self-propagating, learning the target’s network environment rather than relying on known or common vulnerabilities.
Ongoing mitigation measures include creating a more robust IT control environment to increase prevention of these common attacks; deploying (Artificial Intelligence) machine learning techniques into network intrusion detection and strong effective reaction capabilities to defend against detected attacks; improving malware detection and secure user authentication and raising cyber awareness to reduce potential cyber breaches.

Economic: A pandemic crisis is impossible to predict, but historical data shows that in the past decades regional and global pandemics have been occurred more rapidly. A new pandemic can drastically reduce economic growth globally affecting multiple industries, supply chains and how we live and work.
Relating risks could be higher payment delays and defaults of our business and consumer customers increasing our bad debt. Possible lockdowns would force shops to close and travel restrictions would reduce our subscriber growth and the volume of roaming traffic. Additionally, companies could reduce their IT orders. Social distancing and homeschooling could lower overall efficiency or in the case of a severe pandemic temporarily or even permanently reduce our workforce. All of this could in turn, lead to a decline in revenue.
Our Group Situation Center monitors the development of any emerging pandemic. As part of our crisis management, they communicate pandemic guidelines and provide hygiene and safety equipment to all shops, offices and infrastructure sites to protect customers and employees. Other group wide mitigation measures include ramping up and stabilizing our networks to ensure our network can handle additional surges in voice and data traffic. To minimize the spread of a possible outbreak, employees may work from home and our sales and service teams can reallocate to meet changing demands.

Environmental: Natural Disasters such as flooding, severe storms, hail, heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes and earthquakes are occurring more often. The physical effects of our changing climate are leading to ocean warming, heat and humidity increase and increasing average temperatures and humidity levels. Therefore, these extreme weather scenarios are likely to intensify in the future.
As more natural disasters occur, specific areas will become more vulnerable to flooding, storms, or heat and could increase the number of network outages of our network infrastructure (direct damage) or affecting the relevant supply of power or water (indirect damage). This in turn could lead to loss of revenues or lower customer satisfaction.
Mitigation to reduce such network outages include analysis of previous and forecasting of possible future disasters to identify weak spots in areas that are more prone to stronger and more frequent disasters. Any identified weak spots in our network equipment would be upgraded to increase robustness against such disasters. Furthermore, detailed business continuity and disaster recovery plans are in place in case such events should occur.

We are helping shape the digital health care system with numerous pilot projects.
• We are involved as a project partner in developing a solution for antibiotic treatment consultation at the St. Georg Hospital in Leipzig. The primary goal is to enable fast, secure data exchange between doctors, patients, and health insurers. The State of Saxony sponsored the project with over 1.2 million euros at the beginning of 2017. It will initially run until mid-2019.
• The main objective of the “Psychological Trauma Telehealth Network for Saxony (Tele-NePS)” project is to sustainably improve the integrated treatment chain for post-traumatic stress disorders. The goal is to enable those affected to access the treatment network, make expertise universally available, and guarantee cross-institution documentation and coordination. The EU and the State of Saxony will be funding the project, which will run until 2020, with 1.4 million euros.
• Under the auspices of a 10-year partnership, we are helping Kliniken Essen-Mitte (KEM) to drive forward the digitalization of its hospitals. By January 1, 2019, we had replaced the existing hospital information system with our iMedOne solution at two of the clinic’s locations.