Swisscom today said it made an investment of CHF 596 million (+8.6 percent) or $625 million focusing mainly in network expansion in the first quarter of 2016.

The Capex (capital expenditure) of Swisscom in Switzerland was CHF 425 million (+9.5 percent) due to the expansion of broadband networks. Swisscom connected more than 2.1 million lines with the fiber optic technology. Swisscom’s 3 million homes and businesses can benefit from broadband speeds of more than 50 Mbps.

Swisscom will be continuing its investment in 4G / LTE network to gain from mobile data traffic which is doubling every year.

Swisscom said it will be setting up a Swiss-wide additional network for the Internet of Things, with the initial stage ready by the end of 2016. The Low Power Network (LPN) forms the basis for (IoT) and thus for smart cities, energy-efficient buildings, machine-to-machine networking and new digital applications.

Investment towards capital expenditure will be in excess of CHF 2.3 billion or $2.4 billion during 2016, said Swisscom on Tuesday.

Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi said: “The market is becoming increasingly saturated and growth in areas such as mobile telecommunications is becoming more difficult. The expansion of the national infrastructure will continue to call for a very high level of investment.”

Swisscom’s revenue did not grow at CHF 2,885 million, while net income increased to CHF 364 million (+3.7 percent) in Q1 2016.

Revenue of Fastweb in Italy rose 2.6 percent to EUR 440 million due to customer growth. Fastweb’s broadband customer base grew 5.5 percent to 2.24 million. Revenue from residential customers grew 3.2 percent to EUR 223 million, while revenue from corporate customers increased 1.8 percent to EUR 171 million.

Fastweb had capital expenditure of EUR 154 million (+4.8 percent). Fastweb plans to provide half of all homes and businesses (around 13 million) with bandwidths of 200 Mbps by the end of 2020.