Other technologies such as Cable, FTTH and FTTB (fiber), Satellite, UMTS/HSDPA (mobile) and LTE are available as alternatives.
[4] Beginning in August 2014, vectored VDSL2 service with data rates of up to 100 Mbit/s downlink and 40 Mbit/s uplink is available from Deutsche Telekom.
Internet via cable is offered by Kabel Deutschland and Unitymedia (separated geographically), both of which are now owned by Vodafone.
Vodafone plans the first field tests of DOCSIS 4.0 (with support for up to 10 Gbit/s downstream and 6 Gbit/s upstream) as soon as the new hardware generation becomes available.
[10][11] Regional providers also offer FTTH/FTTB services, e.g. M-Net in Munich, wilhelm.tel in Hamburg, NetCologne in Cologne, and NetAachen [de] in Aachen.
[12] Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone offer fixed location internet service on their UMTS and LTE networks.
[15] A typical 2-year contract with 2 GB of LTE speed, unlimited minutes and texts costs around €40 per month.
[20] Bildschirmtext (BTX) was an early data network service offered by Deutsche Bundespost starting in 1983.
[22] DSL was introduced in Germany by Deutsche Telekom on July 1, 1999, under the brand name T-DSL, with 768 kbit/s downstream and 128 kbit/s upstream.
[5] In 1998, the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) established regulations for local loop unbundling, enabling providers such as Vodafone, Telefónica Germany (O2), QSC, and Versatel to rent the local loop from the incumbent Deutsche Telekom and to operate their own access networks, placing their DSLAMs either in their own central offices (CO) or co-located with the incumbent's.
[28] G.vector is not compatible with local loop unbundling, because G.vector can only be feasibly deployed by one provider per serving area interface.
[29] Cable internet access in Germany began with pilot projects in December 2003 and wide deployment followed in late 2004.
[30] A number of political reasons prevented an earlier market adoption of cable internet in Germany.
[31] Until 2001, Deutsche Telekom was the monopoly owner of the German coax cable network, and had no intention to offer in-house competition to its DSL service.
[32] For the purpose of land-line broadband replacement, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone introduced fixed location LTE service.
One example is a 2009 court order, forbidding German Wikipedia to disclose the identity of Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, two criminals convicted of the murder of the Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr.
In another case, Wikipedia.de (an Internet domain run by Wikimedia Deutschland) was prohibited from pointing to the actual Wikipedia content.