To: Electronic Telegraph <et.letters@telegraph.co.uk>
Re: ADSL in Germany
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001
   
 
Dear Sir/Madam,

After reading the article in "Connected" about broadband Internet access in Britain, I thought you might be interested to hear about the situation, at least as far as I am aware of it, in Germany (UK in slow lane with high-speed Net access, 8 February 2001).

According to the Chairman of Deutsche Telekom, 700,000 customers are already connected to ADSL in Germany, and by the end of this year they expect to be able to offer ADSL to 90 percent of the population. The remaining 10%, who are too far away from an exchange, will be offered other means of obtaining a broadband connection.

My flat-rate ADSL internet connection cost me about £31 (100 DM) to have installed (almost one fifth of the £150 demanded by BT) and I pay £19 a month for rental and provider services, compared to the £40 a month charged my BT Openworld. My provider also seems offer a lot more. I have included a list of the services as an appendix, although  I probably haven't translated everything correctly, which is what comes of having lived in Germany since well before the internet with all its technical jargon came online. 

I've had ADSL since just before Christmas and am still over the Moon about it. It is so much better than the dial-in modem I had before that I find it difficult even to compare the two. It really is a quantum leap. It is not just the speed, but also the fact that you can be online all day without having to give a second thought to the cost. After years of surfing the Net always with the nagging awareness of metered costs and the stress of trying to keep them as low as possible, a permanent, flat-rate connection takes a bit of getting used to.  And not having to go through the long, noisy procedure of dialling-in every time you want check your mailbox, look for a piece of information or simply visit a website - it is almost like having the entire Internet on your own hard drive! It really is quite amazing.

Slowly the full scale of what the Internet revolution has in store for us is beginning to dawn on me - and I've been online for the past few years!

It is rather sad to think that in just a few years time it will be taken completely for granted: children will grow up knowing nothing other than permanent, flat-rate, broadband connectivity - and many times faster than what I'm in raptures about now.

Appendix: 

My provider (1&1 Homepage)

Services provided for total cost of about £19 (58 DM) a month (half goes to Deutsche Telekom)
 

T-DSL flat-rate access (max. 768/128 kbit/s) 
(1 GByte limit, above which, 0.09 DM/MByte)

Highspeed access via V.90 and ISDN 
(supports "channel bundling") 

Access via mobile phone 

International roaming

Own de domain:  1

Server space for homepage: 100 Mbyte

Free homepage traffic:  5 Gbyte

Basic CGIs, statistics, graphics archive

Email boxes (POP3): 50

Email size up to 10 MByte

POP3 mailbox size  50 MB, total 2 GByte

Email autoresponder

Email forwarding

Email to fax, fax to email

Email answering device

Emaill collection per Telephone

Free SMS-messages to mobile phones(D1/D2/E-Plus):  50/month
(above limit: 5 Pfennig per SMS)

Message to paper from email or fax

Message to mobile phone from email or fax 

Security Mail

VirtuDrive (for shared files): 100 Mbyte

VirtuSafe (for backups): 100 Mbyte

Software package

Hotline (8-24 Uhr) and free email support