Former Deutsche Telekom board chair to head NGN Fiber Network

Former Deutsche Telekom board chair to head NGN Fiber Network

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Niek Jan van Damme, who left Deutsche Telekom in 2017, is to chair the supervisory board of rival dark fibre wholesale operator NGN Fiber Network.

His target will be is expand the business following its partnership with the Eurofiber group.

Van Damme (pictured) was the member of the board of management at Deutsche Telekom responsible for Germany, and chaired the managing board of Telekom Deutschland, the operating company for Germany, from April 2010.

Now, he has joined two other senior recruits to NGN Fiber Network, CFO Robert Jelinek-Nacke and chief commercial officer Helge Weiss, whose appointments were announced last month.

NGN Fiber Network is a German dark fibre provider with extensive long-haul and metropolitan networks in 52 cities, including Munich, Leipzig, Halle, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Erfurt and Berlin.

In June 2021, the company announced a long-term partnership with Eurofiber, a Netherlands-based provider of open digital infrastructure in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.

Together, NGN and Eurofiber say they are accelerating the expansion of NGN’s already extensive network in order to address “increasing demand for fibre infrastructure with a nationwide network” to be accessible to all network operators as well as enterprises in what it calls “an open and non-discriminatory manner”.

Robert Jelinek-Nacke is a former colleague of van Damme, having worked at the Deutsche Telekom group since 2009. He was CFO of T-Mobile Netherlands until December 2020.

Weiss is a former Vodafone executive, where he worked alongside Andrea Kraus, now chief revenue officer and chief customer officer at Eurofiber. Krause wrote: “[ At Vodafone] I learned to appreciate [Weiss’s] enthusiastic commitment and his ability to put the customer in the centre at any time!”

NGN’s CEO, Christoph Klein, said: ‘I am very excited to welcome Robert and Helge in our team. Both bring a lot of IT and telecom experience to the table, which is crucial now that we are expanding rapidly.”

 

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