Germany’s broadband market shifts as fiber gains ground

Germany enters the second half of the decade with a fixed broadband market in transition. Fiber finally has momentum, with 13.2 million homes passed by Deutsche Telekom alone and 48.9% of households passed nationally at the end of 2025. Yet DSL, not fiber, still carries a majority of Germany’s 39.2 million fixed lines and the country’s fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) coverage remains roughly half the EU average.

To understand what this means for the experience households actually get, we analyzed Speedtest Intelligence® data across all 400 German districts from Q1 2021 through Q1 2026, joined it with official statistics on income, social conditions, population density and broadband availability, and examined not just the last-mile access network but the in-home Wi-Fi layer that sits between the wall socket and the screen. District comparisons use the full year from Q2 2025 to Q1 2026, which we call the year to Q1 2026.

Key Takeaways:

• German fixed performance nearly doubled in five years, and the biggest gains went to the places that were furthest behind. The national median download speed rose from 56.49 Mbps in Q1 2021 to 103.69 Mbps in Q1 2026. The most sparsely populated rural districts grew 89%, against 59% for the big cities, and the East grew 93% against the West’s 72%. Big cities were 43% faster than the sparsest rural districts in 2021; today they are only 21% faster.
• Wealth no longer predicts broadband speed in Germany, and the gap that once existed has closed. In 2021, the most disadvantaged fifth of districts trailed the least disadvantaged by 16% on median download speed. Over the year to Q1 2026 that gap narrowed to 5%. Sorting districts by average income instead leaves a spread of under 3%, and the poorest fifth grew fastest.
• Where fiber is available, Germans are slow to buy it. Districts where gigabit service can be ordered do record faster speeds, but the link is much stronger for cable areas than for fiber areas, because cable customers are put on fast plans by default while fiber customers have to choose one. In a belt of heavily fibered rural districts, more than 80% of households can order a gigabit connection and the typical speed is still below 90 Mbps.
• The in-home network is now the biggest bottleneck in the German broadband experience. In the same household, Wi-Fi typically delivers about 31% less than the ethernet connection on the same line, and the faster the line, the more it loses. Deutsche Glasfaser customers lose half their speed over Wi-Fi, while customers on slower DSL lines lose only about 18%, because a 100 Mbps line fits comfortably inside what an ageing router can carry.
• Six in ten German Wi-Fi connections are still based on Wi-Fi 5 or older. Half of the Speedtest samples from 6 GHz-capable flagship Android devices connect via Wi-Fi 5 or below. Where those same phones do get a modern Wi-Fi link, median download speeds more than double, from 80.67 Mbps to 176.89 Mbps.

Speeds nearly doubled, but Germany still runs on copper and coax
The direction of travel is clear. The German fixed market median download speed rose ~84% in five years, the median upload speed more than doubled from 14.56 Mbps to 37.87 Mbps, and the share of users experiencing at least 100 Mbps crossed half of the market for the first time in Q1 2026, at 53%, up from 29% in early 2021. The floor moved too. The share of users below 50 Mbps download speed fell from 44% to 23%, and the slowest tenth of connections improved from 10.97 Mbps to 21.69 Mbps.

The Bundesnetzagentur’s latest annual report counts 58.5% of fixed lines still on DSL, and its market data through 2025 show 44% of all German subscribers are on plans rated below 100 Mbps. Only about 4% of German users actually record gigabit speeds in our data, against the roughly 7% of lines on gigabit tariffs in the regulator’s figures. This means Germany’s experienced floor is increasingly a contract choice rather than an infrastructure constraint.

Fiber leads, cable is close behind, and the resellers trail on copper
The speed rank profile of German ISPs in Q1 2026 reflects different access technology positions. Deutsche Glasfaser, the full-fiber challenger to Deutsche Telekom, leads on median download speed at 246.23 Mbps (with the strongest upload at 153.68 Mbps too), roughly four times what the cable and DSL bases deliver. The cable brands occupy the next tier, with PYUR’s median download speed at 233.11 Mbps and Vodafone at 187.58 Mbps on the back of widely available gigabit tiers. Deutsche Telekom sits at 92.28 Mbps, the signature of a retail base still dominated by VDSL at 50 to 250 Mbps, although its median has nearly doubled since 2021 as fiber take-up scales.

The resellers cluster at the copper floor, with 1&1 at 83.10 Mbps and o2 at 74.00 Mbps, both renting significant parts of their footprint from the incumbent’s copper plant. These are medians of what households actually experience, so they reflect the plans people buy as much as the technology in the ground. Deutsche Glasfaser leads partly because its base chose fiber and tends to buy a fast tier with it, while cable ranks high partly because its operators put customers on gigabit-capable tiers by default.

Latency tells a similar story here. M-net’s Munich fiber concentration delivers the lowest median multi-server latency in our data at 11 ms, Telekom at 17 ms, and the cable networks in the 20 to 22 ms range.

Loaded latency, measured while the connection is saturated (key for interactive applications like video calling), separates the technologies more sharply. Vodafone’s cable base shows a median loaded latency of 124 ms against 73 ms for Deutsche Glasfaser, reflecting the familiar higher-latency signature of DOCSIS that persists even as headline speeds climb.

Across the twenty German cities with the most Speedtest samples, Telekom’s median download speed sits in a narrow 84 to 100 Mbps band in every single one, while the fastest big-city experiences belong to the cable and fiber overlays. Vodafone ranges from 116 to 208 Mbps across the same cities, and where Deutsche Glasfaser has a substantial big-city presence it posts 210 to 330 Mbps.

The map is filling in: the East and the countryside close in
Where the rollout actually happened is the most underappreciated development in German broadband. Between 2021 and the year to Q1 2026, median download speeds grew 59% in the big cities, 76% in urban districts, 87% in denser rural districts and 89% in the most sparsely populated rural districts. The East grew 93% against the West’s 72%, nearly doubling its median download speed and cutting the East-West gap from 27% to 13%. Meanwhile, the slowest tenth of rural connections nearly doubled too.

Our animated district map makes this mechanism visible. The darkest patches in the year to Q1 2026 are not Munich or Frankfurt but Schleswig-Holstein, which built fiber early through municipal utilities and regional players and now posts the highest state median in Germany at 134.30 Mbps, ahead of every city state. The fastest single district in the country is Neumünster, a small Schleswig-Holstein city, at 180.16 Mbps median download speed. Meanwhile the federal subsidy programs that committed roughly €21 billion ($23.8 billion) since 2015 concentrated builds in exactly the districts that drive the catch-up we see here.

Analysis of the official availability data tells the same story from the supply side. By end-2024, fiber homes-passed coverage was nearly equal between urban and rural Germany, at 35.9% and 33.3% respectively, and most of the households still waiting for fiber are urban (i.e., where multi-dwelling economics make the build slower and more expensive than wiring single-family homes). In simple terms, this means the classic assumption that rural Germany is the broadband problem is roughly five years out of date.

Wealth no longer predicts speed
By combining the district data with the Robert Koch Institute’s German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation and official income statistics across 400 districts, we discovered that there is no correlation between network speeds and wealth. In 2021, the most disadvantaged fifth of districts ran 16% behind the least disadvantaged in Speedtest data. Over the year to Q1 2026 the gap was 5%. By area income, the spread is under 3%, and the poorest fifth of districts grew fastest.

Modern Wi-Fi adoption is just as flat socially, sitting between 37% and 40% in every income and disadvantage group. The in-home upgrade cycle follows router replacement and contract churn, which do not discriminate by area wealth. What does predict speed is how densely people live and what has been built there. Population density and gigabit availability track district speeds closely, while income and social disadvantage barely register here.

Built but not bought: the take-up gap is now measurable
The industry knows it has a take-up problem. Germany’s fiber take-up runs around 27% of homes passed against rates near 34% for the alternative fiber operators and near 15% for the incumbent, and BREKO projects that by 2030 fiber will pass up to 92% of homes while connecting barely two thirds of them. What has been harder to see, until now, is what that gap does to the measured broadband experience in the real world.

District-level gigabit availability from the Breitbandatlas correlates strongly with experienced median download speeds in our data. Broken down by technology, however, cable availability is a far better predictor of experience than FTTH availability, because a cable footprint converts to fast contracts by default in Germany while a fiber footprint must be sold home by home.

Our scatter plot shows a belt of districts, Nordfriesland, Lüchow-Dannenberg, Bernkastel-Wittlich and much of heavily subsidized rural Lower Saxony among them, where >80% of households can order gigabit service and the measured median download speed still sits between 57 and 90 Mbps. In other words, fiber passed the homes, but the homes have not yet followed on take-up.

Pricing explains part of the friction here. German gigabit list prices run from around €39.99 ($45.35) on cable to €64.99 ($73.70) to €89.99 ($102.05) on fiber, the regulator’s own benchmarking finds German gigabit tariffs expensive in EU comparison, and Germany still has no broadband social tariff. Where cable and fiber overlap, gigabit is cheap. Where fiber is the only gigabit option, it is expensive, and this pricing geography maps directly onto the take-up belt.

Importantly, the policy stakes are now also rising with the copper switch-off. The Bundesnetzagentur’s draft migration framework of January 2026 requires 80% FTTH coverage in an area before migration can begin. Every percentage point of take-up that lags makes this threshold harder to reach. It also pushes back the 2030s copper retirement that Telekom and the EU are circling, and which the European Commission has written into its proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA).

The last 50 meters: Wi-Fi takes back what the buildout delivers
Every speed discussed so far was measured at the device, which is where Germans actually live. Comparing households that tested both over ethernet and over Wi-Fi on the same connection isolates what the home network does to the delivered line, free of plan and user selection effects. Wi-Fi typically delivers about 31% less than the wired connection on the same line, and 37% of the households we tested lose more than half their speed on Wi-Fi.

The pattern across German ISPs is the inverse of the speed ranking we observed earlier. Deutsche Glasfaser households, with a leading median ethernet download speed of 407.70 Mbps in this paired population, keep just 50% of it on Wi-Fi. Vodafone cable households keep 65% of 383.94 Mbps. Telekom, 1&1 and o2 households keep 82% to 83% of their much slower lines, because a 100 Mbps VDSL connection fits comfortably inside almost any router’s wireless envelope while a 400 Mbps or gigabit line does not. The Wi-Fi penalty is, in effect, a tax on network quality, and it lands hardest on exactly the ISPs selling the fastest access.

CPE and router generation is the main driver. Across the market in the year to Q1 2026, median download speeds run 34.74 Mbps on Wi-Fi 4, 101.39 Mbps on Wi-Fi 5, 157.07 Mbps on Wi-Fi 6 and 251.83 Mbps on Wi-Fi 7. Loaded latency collapses from 361 ms on Wi-Fi 4 to 107 ms on Wi-Fi 7, and on Telekom and Deutsche Glasfaser lines Wi-Fi 7 users see roughly 60 to 65 ms, responsiveness that no access upgrade alone can deliver to a household on an old router.

Six in ten connections still ride yesterday’s Wi-Fi, and the router is the reason
For all the gigabit marketing, 61% of German Wi-Fi samples were still based on Wi-Fi 5 or older in Q1 2026 in Speedtest data. The modern share (i.e., Wi-Fi 6 and newer) has climbed steadily, from 9% of samples in early 2022 to 39%, but the installed base turns over slowly, and the end-user device is not the barrier. Among tests from phones that support the 6 GHz band, the clearest marker of a modern flagship, 50% still connect at Wi-Fi 5 or below and 24% sit on the more congested 2.4 GHz band. When those same devices get a modern link, their median download speed jumps from 80.67 Mbps to 176.89 Mbps.

Analysis of the ISP profile reveals significant differences within the German market. Cable bases lead modern Wi-Fi adoption, with Tele Columbus at 49%, PYUR at 44% and Vodafone at 43% in Q1 2026, a legacy of the DOCSIS 3.1 era that pushed Wi-Fi 6 boxes into cable homes from 2020. Starlink, meanwhile, jumped from 26% to 47% modern Wi-Fi share in a single year as its Wi-Fi 6 router generation spread through the base.

Telekom and Deutsche Glasfaser sit near the market average at 39%, and 1&1 trails at 33%, carrying the market’s heaviest legacy burden on a base of long-serving rented DSL routers. The router bottleneck league table runs the same way (and it carries an irony). The fiber-first ISP regionals with the most advanced access lines, M-net, NetCologne and EWE, also feature the highest shares of capable devices stuck on legacy links, while the cable operators’ younger CPE fleets actually do best.

The FRITZ!Box nation begins its Wi-Fi 7 refresh
Germany’s router market is unlike any other in Europe. Among routers broadcasting identifiable factory-default network names, AVM’s FRITZ! family accounts for roughly two thirds of the German base, including 95% at 1&1, 93% at Deutsche Glasfaser, 63% at Telekom (against 32% for its own Speedport line), and a 48/49 split at Vodafone. This is the legacy of Routerfreiheit, the 2016 router freedom law that the Bundesnetzagentur reaffirmed for fiber networks in January 2025 against an industry petition, with a YouGov survey for AVM putting a FRITZ!Box in more than half of German households.

The catch is age. The most common router family in our data is still the FRITZ!Box 7590, AVM’s Wi-Fi 5 flagship from 2017, and the 2013-era 7490 still ranks fourth. Three quarters of connections behind these DSL-era flagships still run on Wi-Fi 5 or older. The cable-focused 6660 and 6690 models, shipped widely by Vodafone and PYUR since 2020, connect on Wi-Fi 6 about 70% of the time, which explains why cable leads our modern Wi-Fi adoption table.

This installed base is now the target of the fastest CPE refresh the German market has seen. In the space of nine months, Vodafone launched its Wi-Fi 7 Ultra Hub for cable in August 2025, Telekom followed with the Speedport 7 in October 2025, Vodafone extended the Ultra Hub to fiber in April 2026, and o2 and 1&1 moved their default routers to Wi-Fi 7 in May 2026, with rental prices clustering between €4.99 ($5.66) and €7.95 ($9.02) per month and mesh extenders sold as €2 ($2.27) to €4 ($4.54) add-ons. AVM itself changed hands in 2024 and rebranded to FRITZ! as it pushes its own Wi-Fi 7 portfolio.

The commercial logic here is straightforward. Wi-Fi 7 carried 2.8% of German Wi-Fi samples in Q1 2026, more than four times its share a year earlier, which means the measured upside of converting the legacy base, two to four times the speed and a third of the loaded latency on identical lines, is still almost entirely unbanked. Like elsewhere in Europe, the home network has become a subscription product, and the operator that executes the refresh fastest will buy itself a visible experience advantage without laying a meter of new fiber.

Satellite joins the rural toolkit
One access technology is indifferent to all of this geography. Starlink delivers consistent performance across Germany’s districts, with median download speeds running from 113 Mbps in the big cities to 125 Mbps in the most sparsely populated rural areas, making it the only provider in this analysis that gets mildly faster as Germany empties out. In the weakest fixed broadband districts, it delivers roughly 64% more than the local fixed median, at around 117 Mbps against 72 Mbps.

After aggressive price tiering in February 2026 brought entry plans to €29 ($32.89), its German usage volumes surged in our data. Satellite is still a complement rather than a substitute at national scale. Its latency floor is about 30 ms, and it is the only provider in our analysis with a meaningful evening slowdown, easing from 129 Mbps in the daytime to 110 Mbps in the evening as demand concentrates on capacity shared across the whole coverage area. German fixed networks show no comparable evening dip. But in the specific districts where German fixed broadband is weakest, Starlink has become the benchmark to beat, and the copper-era assumption that remote means slow no longer holds.

What to watch in the coming year
Three numbers will define the next phase of the German fixed market. The first is fiber take-up, where every point of conversion now matters twice, once for operator economics and once for the copper switch-off thresholds the regulator has drafted (and the European Commission is proposing in the DNA).

The second is the legacy Wi-Fi share, because the gap between a 61% legacy installed base and a market where every major ISP ships Wi-Fi 7 as standard is the largest addressable experience uplift in German broadband, and the first operator to drive its base below 40% legacy will be able to demonstrate it in measured data.

The third is the rural-urban gap itself. If rural speeds keep growing faster than urban ones at the current rate, most of what remains would close within three to four years, completing a quiet equalization that policymakers have spent two decades and tens of billions of euros pursuing. Germany built its way out of one divide. The next one is sitting on the hallway shelf. Ookla