The unification of eastern and western Germany confronted Deutsche Telekom (DT) virtually overnight with what is probably the greatest challenge in the history of telecommunications in Germany: to bring the telecommunications networks in eastern Germany out of the technological stone age and up to the standard of a western industrialized country with state-of-the-art technology and services as quickly as possible. DT must optimize the integration of the various generations of technical systems into all areas of the telecommunications network and develop strategies for launching products and services to rapidly achieve advantages in productivity. Because of the interaction of growing process and product innovation and the resulting synergy, this will rapidly improve the performance of the network and lead to reduced costs in years to come. This article gives an overview of the general conditions under which DT is implementing fiber-in-the-loop (FITL) and describes the technology used. It also presents DT's complementary strategy for the use of SDH technology in the access area.