Bavaria’s finance minister Markus Soeder announced free WLAN in rural areas in Bavaria next summer, Teltarif.de reports. The plan sees free access at 60 locations from next year. In a second step, all authorities in Bavaria are due to be equipped with Wi-Fi access from 2016. In a final step, communities will be connected to the extended Bavaria network so that all rural areas are covered by 2020. The opposition criticised the plan, saying WLAN is needed in town centres as opposed to castles.

Soeder also announced eight IT centres dubbed ‘BayernLabs’ with access of 150 Mbps for the disposition of the communal authorities, companies and schools. The minister sparked a debate about his plans to grant greater freedom for the development of companies, as Greens and SPD worry about the dying out of town centres; unused industrial sites have increased tenfold since 2010.