Is Deutsche Telekom Throttling Your Internet?
If you're a Telekom customer in Germany and websites have been loading slowly, you're not imagining it. And no, it's probably not your router.
Several digital rights organizations just filed a complaint against Deutsche Telekom with Germany's Federal Network Agency. The accusation: Telekom deliberately throttles connections to services that don't pay for priority access.
What's in the complaint
Epicenter.works, the Society for Civil Rights, and Germany's Federation of Consumer Organizations allege that Telekom creates artificial bottlenecks at their network access points. Services that pay get fast connections. Everyone else gets what's left.
The complaint cites EU net neutrality rules, which prohibit ISPs from discriminating between services based on commercial agreements.
What users are reporting
Telekom customers have been documenting connection problems in support forums for months. Some examples:
A researcher reported that downloads from German university servers crawl at 30 KB/s. "Telekom is sabotaging the entire German research and university landscape with their peering behavior," he wrote.
Another user measured 33% packet loss to Cloudflare. That's a third of all data packets to one of the world's largest CDNs just disappearing.
Others describe YouTube stuck at 480p in the evenings, Steam downloads taking hours, and online games with constant lag. All on connections advertised as "up to 250 Mbit/s."
Why this affects you (even outside Germany)
About 40% of German internet users are on Telekom. If you run an online service, that's a lot of potential customers who might blame your product for being slow when the problem is their ISP.
Using Cloudflare, AWS, or Google Cloud doesn't help. The throttling happens at Telekom's peering points, before traffic reaches any of those providers.
The underlying problem: this creates a two-tier internet where companies with money can buy fast connections and everyone else gets deprioritized. Small businesses and open source projects can't compete on equal footing.
What happens next
The Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) will review the complaint. They're the regulator responsible for enforcing EU net neutrality in Germany.
Whether anything comes of it is unclear. But the involvement of major consumer protection organizations means this probably won't disappear quietly.
What you can do
If you run services with German users, netzbremse.de has tools to test Telekom connections specifically. At least you'll know whether user complaints are about your service or their ISP.
If you're a frustrated Telekom customer, you can add your data to the complaint at netzbremse.de.
We run servers in multiple regions specifically so connection quality doesn't depend on a single provider's peering arrangements. More about our infrastructure.