Depends on what state you live in, and what provider you have. Two neighboring towns can have two different providers with very different rates and speeds.

I pay $45 for 30Mb/s from Charter but if I lived in the next city to the south, I'd have Comcast.

It would be interesting to hear how much cheaper we are talking here about. E.g. here in Lithuania (Eastern Europe) I pay about 15$ for 100Mb/s (for 30$ I could get 300Mb/s).

Here in the Netherlands we have 100MB/s internet, TV with DVR settop box and cheap landline phonecalls for a little over 50 euros, and that's not even the cheapest option. It really surprises me, my friends live a stone's throw away from the German border (in Enschede), and they have cheap fiberglass internet there...

I had similar internet when I was living for 3 years in Poland (Gdansk). 125mbit for ~50 PLN (which was around EUR 15).

Now I'm back in Germany and have fabulous 16mbit for nearly 50 Euros. (Fastest internet I can get here.)

Also it's ridiculous that my internet access in Poland was set up within 2 days and here I had to wait 6 weeks for everything to work properly.

First of all, I moved to Berlin 9 months ago and in general I'm pretty happy with the service uptime and promised speed etc.

BUT the activation time of your connection is something unacceptable in Germany. Four weeks seems to be the normal case for a landline connection to be up and running. FOUR WEEKS, are you kidding me?

And the same problem is ahead of you if you're moving to another flat.

As I did. I moved one month ago. And I didn't know the new address until 1 week before the end of month. As soon as I knew about it I went to the ISP & asked them to make the switch to the new address.

I had to pay extra (which was ok) and WAIT ANOTHER FOUR WEEKS (which was not ok at all).

So in effect I was without internet for 3 weeks while paying the connection to my old address at the same time.

Someone was saying that here the bottleneck is on Telekom's end. And maybe so? The guy who eventually came after 4 weeks was from Telekom - he basically came around for max 10 minutes (probably 5) and made some magic tricks and voilà - internet working.

EDIT: Wild guess #1: the problem is just too few people at Telekom.

Wild guess #2: If Telekom would offer a service that you pay 100EUR extra to get the connection in two days, they 1) could do it, 2) have loads of customers wanting that service and 3) give jobs to more people and 4) have more money in the pocket

The last 3 cable connections i ordered in germany where set up in under a week, one even on the same day! For DSL ist different yeah, but its not a general thing in germany.

I pay Unitymedia about 54 € / month for 20 MBit/s Cable, which includes landline phone flatrate, digital cable tv and a rented PVR.

Next month, I'll switch to a 16MBit/s DSL connection including a phone flatrate (who needs tv, anyway?), which will be about 25 € / month.

I live in Darmstadt (which is about 50km from Frankfurt).

15 bucks for 100 MBit/s sounds rather nice though!

not "that" cheap, my father currently pays 40 euros (~$50) for TV service and a 50/10 Mb/s connection in southern Germany. In comparison I pay $80 for 20/2 Mb/s Internet only. For me to add basic cable TV it would go up to $120

I had 5 yrs. Telekom with 350 kb/s. Frankfurt is a huge city, game is different than outside these kind of cities.

this. I have had a minimum of 16Mbit in germany since 2006 and in the meantime have moved 4-5 times to different regions/cities.