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addendum:

O2 (an example of ISP I used during my stay in Germany) has currently offers of 25 or 20 GB per month.
At currently simulated 490Mbps (roughly 60MB/s) it would take between 300s (5 min) to 400ms to max it out, around 10x more that the above 30s example.
Also, once the limit is hit, the device isn't cut off internet, the speed is simply degraded to 1Mbps.

There are other countries in Europe where it's not even customary to have data limits : Switzerland is an example thereof (on most non-pre-paid-plans, only speed is limited (together with minimal guaranteed speed), not total download volume)

I'm too lazy to do a systematic check but lots of European countries are likely to be in similar situation.

And that's today's number. By the time 5G finishes getting deployed to customers, the various plans will be adapted to it (probably with data limits in the 100GB range and higher speed limits / minimal guarantee).

Meanwhile, US custommers will probably have their monthly limits increased from 1GB to 2GB.

Maybe these 26.000 moved and while waiting for their DSL-Connection, used an "O2 surfstick" as advertised by the german part of the company here

A half-gig-capped connection doesn't seem to be such a good replacement for broadband, especially when you just moved to a new city and fill your caches with local pages and you visit ebay and ikea a lot.

I just moved to Germany and had to solve the same problem... You have only one choice, O2. All the others require a long-term contract (usually 2 years) to obtain. They wave their hands about getting out of the contract if you have a "good enough" reason, but you have to grovel before them and provide documentation. The prepaid plans of all other companies do not offer data at all. A "subscription" requires a residence and a German bank account so they can automatically debit (Lastschrift) and don't worry, they never make mistakes when debiting your account! And organizations doing Lastschrift never get hacked because they employ magic warrior fairies.

O2 has several packs you can add to your prepaid, the most interesting being "InternetM" which is 10 euro for 200 MB/month. When you go over it still works but you're kicked down to about 6kb/s. The "InternetL" pack provides 5GB for 25 euro/month, but they refused to add it to my prepaid plan. Apparently it's only available with a subscription.

The O2 network is kind of a joke. It cuts out for ~minutes about once an hour, and ping times often exceed 30s. My ssh and IMAP connections are regularly broken, and my IP gets reassigned very frequently. I looked online at their accounting of my usage, and it's about 100 pages of crap. They record every stupid packet. (I suspect this is the reason it cuts out every hour -- they're running some program at the base station which sums your usage for the last hour)

http://www.t-mobile.de/funkversorgung/inland

http://www.vodafone.de/hilfe-support/netz-uebertragung-netzabdeckung/108099.html

http://shop2.o2online.de/nw/produkte/beratung/abdeckung/popup/pageframe.html

http://eis03sn1.eplus-online.de/evportal/portal/umts

Cheers,

Ethelred

http://www.q-dsl-home.de/

True, there has to be a physical line installed in your house. (Though it hasn't to be in active use) But show me a building in Germany without a phone line installed.

Also you can have phone from one company (like http://www.nordcom.net/) and DSL from another. Or just use the installed landline for DSL with QSC like I do and have a mobile phone from o2 http://www.o2online.de/o2/index.html like I do. o2 has the Genion option where at home your mobile acts like a normal landline phone, meaning you are reachable through the local area code for the usual rates and are able to phine out for cheap. This so called "HomeZone" often has a diameter of a few kilometers! Like in my case :) I can go inlineskating being still reachable through the "Landline" number :)

Old lady Telekom isn't your only option, you know ...

The fact is that both Canadian and American phone companies have to fund phones to make them cheaper for consumers so they can get 'em at decent prices.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. What do you think we're doing over here, paying 400$ for a friggin cell phone? Subventions are absolutely normal over here, too, for phones coming with prepaid cards (to a lesser extent) as well as for phones coming with service plans. Take a look over here for example, these are prices for phones coming with a 2 year contract.

If he got the phones simply bundled with a prepaid card, well then it's of course okay for them to be locked, since no one guarantees the provider that your going to bring them any revenue in the future. But if he got them with some kind of service plan (couldn't figure that out from the article), than this is an outrage ..