Netzbremse: How Telekom Throttles the Internet

I pay €70/month for Deutsche Telekom’s fastest consumer fiber product. 1 Gbit/s down, 600 Mbit/s up. Yet every evening, half the internet becomes unusable. Cloudflare-hosted sites crawl. Downloads stall. Streams buffer.

Cloudflare serves roughly 20% of all web traffic. If you’re on Telekom, you’re getting a degraded experience on a fifth of the internet. This isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a business decision.

The Highway Analogy

Imagine paying €70/month for an unlimited Autobahn pass. You expect to reach any destination quickly. But the highway operator refuses to build proper exits to major destinations unless those destinations pay for the privilege.

Want to reach that shopping center? Sorry, no direct exit. Take the detour through Poland.

The shopping center offered to build the exit themselves. The highway operator said no — pay us or your customers take the long way.

That’s what Deutsche Telekom does with internet peering.

The Monopoly They Inherited

Deutsche Telekom didn’t build Germany’s telecommunications infrastructure. They inherited it. When the state-owned Deutsche Bundespost was privatized in 1995, Telekom got the entire national telephone and data network handed to them.

Every copper line, every exchange, every right-of-way — built with taxpayer money over decades, gifted to a private company. And now they use that inherited monopoly position to extract rent from both sides: customers pay for access, content providers pay for delivery.

They can pull this off because they’re a Tier 1 provider with massive market share. Telekom doesn’t buy transit from anyone — they ARE the backbone for millions of German households. Content providers need to reach those customers, and Telekom knows it.

What’s Actually Happening

Deutsche Telekom (AS3320) and Cloudflare (AS13335) are both present at DE-CIX Frankfurt, one of the largest internet exchanges in the world. They could exchange traffic directly with minimal latency. They don’t.

Instead, my traffic to Cloudflare goes through congested transit providers like GTT (AS3257). During peak hours — typically starting around 17:00 — latency spikes from 10ms to 180ms+. Packet loss increases. Connections time out.

Here’s how Germany’s major ISPs compare on peering (source: PeeringDB):

O2 and 1&1 have significantly more peering capacity than Telekom. Note that 1&1 consumer connections often use Telekom’s last-mile infrastructure, so your mileage may vary.

Cloudflare themselves have an open peering policy and peer at 355+ exchanges worldwide. The barrier isn’t technical. Telekom just refuses unless they get paid.

Now Vodafone Is Following

As if one broken ISP wasn’t enough, Vodafone announced in November 2025 that they’re withdrawing from public internet exchanges entirely.

No more presence at DE-CIX Frankfurt. No more settlement-free peering. Instead, all peering goes through Inter.link GmbH with volume-based fees.

Vodafone’s spin: “lower latencies and increased resilience.” The reality: they saw Telekom extracting money from content providers and wanted in.

Germany’s two largest ISPs are now both running protection rackets. Pay up or your customers get the slow lane.

The Netzbremse Campaign

This issue has gotten so bad that consumer advocacy groups launched netzbremse.de (“network brake”) and filed a formal complaint with the Bundesnetzagentur. The campaign made the front page of Hacker News.

The coalition — including Epicenter.works, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, and Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick — accuses Telekom of violating European net neutrality rules by creating artificial bottlenecks.

From the campaign:

“Deutsche Telekom is the only Internet provider in Germany that artificially reduces and increases the cost of interconnecting its network with the rest of the Internet to maximize profits. The prices announced by Telekom for interconnection are many times higher than the market price.”

Meta reportedly paid around €5.8 million annually for peering. When they tried to renegotiate, Telekom refused and let the agreement expire. The message is clear: pay up or your users suffer.

Why Should Cloudflare Pay?

This is the part that infuriates me.

I’m the customer. I pay Telekom €70/month to access the internet. The whole internet. Not “the internet except for parts that won’t pay Telekom’s ransom.”

Cloudflare doesn’t owe Telekom anything. Cloudflare’s customers pay Cloudflare to serve content. My payment to Telekom covers delivering that content to me. The transaction is complete.

Here’s the kicker: according to Cloudflare, 99.99% of internet traffic globally is exchanged settlement-free between ISPs. And IP transit in Europe costs around $0.06 per Mbit/s monthly for 100GbE connections. Telekom isn’t asking for market rates — they’re demanding multiples of what everyone else charges.

But Telekom wants to double-dip — the industry calls this “double paid traffic.” They want payment from both sides. When content providers refuse, Telekom lets the pipes congest. Then they blame the content providers.

Meanwhile, I’m paying premium prices for a degraded product.

The Scale of the Problem

This isn’t just Cloudflare. Telekom has had public disputes with multiple networks:

• Cogent — sued Telekom in 2015 alleging they “blocked the free flow of Internet traffic” by refusing to expand interconnection ports
• Level 3 — accused Telekom of demanding above-market rates over a decade ago
• Meta — peering agreement expired in 2021 after payment disputes
• German Research Network (DFN) — university connections reportedly crawl at 29 kB/s with 20% packet loss
• Magyar Telekom — Telekom’s Hungarian subsidiary had the same congestion issues with Cloudflare via Level3 in 2022, particularly between 4 PM and midnight

There’s even a CCC talk titled “Slow network, fast money: How Deutsche Telekom breaks the internet.”

Telekom’s Defense

Telekom claims they’re not violating net neutrality and that network access isn’t being impaired. They argue that companies like Cloudflare and Meta should pay for the infrastructure used to deliver their services.

But here’s the thing: I already paid for that infrastructure. That’s what my €70/month is for. And they didn’t even build it — taxpayers did.

If Telekom can’t afford to maintain adequate peering capacity on my subscription fee, maybe they shouldn’t advertise “1 Gbit/s” when they can’t deliver it to 20% of the internet.

What Can You Do?

Switch ISPs — If you can. Telefónica and regional providers generally have better peering. Though with Vodafone joining the racket, options are shrinking.

Use a VPN with better peering — Route your traffic through a VPS at a provider with good Telekom connectivity. Hetzner set up direct DTAG peering in 2020 after customer complaints. Caveat: datacenter IPs aren’t residential, so Netflix and other streaming services may block you. Yes, you’re paying twice for internet access. That’s the point.

Route Cloudflare traffic specifically — If you already have a VPS with Tailscale, you can advertise Cloudflare’s IP ranges and route only that traffic through it. Less overhead than a full VPN.

Document the issues — Run mtr or traceroute during peak hours. Use RIPE Atlas probes to get independent measurements. File complaints with both Telekom and the Bundesnetzagentur.

Support netzbremse.de — The formal complaint process might actually lead somewhere. The more documented cases, the better.

Vote with your wallet — If enough customers leave citing peering issues, maybe Telekom will reconsider. Probably not, but it’s the only language monopolists understand.

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This is the state of German broadband in 2026. The largest ISPs actively degrade service to extract payments from content providers, while customers pay premium prices for an internet that only works properly for the sites that paid protection money.