There are considerably more providers than actual carriers in Germany. The way frequencies are assigned in Germany probably plays into this, but in a nutshell: many if not most people don't have contracts with the actual network operators (i.e. carriers) but with companies that are merely service providers. There are a lot of spin-off companies offering discounted monthly or pre-paid plans contracts compared to the expensive 2 year plans offered by their parent companies (e.g. Congstar is a subsidiary of Telekom Deutschland).
What you say about subsidized phones is patently false. I don't recall unsubsidized phones being a thing at all in Germany when mobile phones first became popular. Even today many if not most Germans seem to prefer subsidized phones -- in my experience buying your phone separately is only common in the more tech savvy or higher end markets, although the growing popularity of discounted month-to-month mobile plans may be changing that.
AFAIK tethering and jailbreaking/rooting is, generally speaking, always legal in Germany. For subsidized phones things can be different if you're not actually purchasing the phone but only leasing it (because it isn't your property and therefore you're not allowed to modify it), but I think these days most contracts have you actually purchase the phone. Not sure whether this is due to market demand, but I think there's also a decline in carrier branded phones, so it might simply be that.
Except for pre-paid/post-paid (i.e. no fixed plan, pay-as-you-go) contracts, I think all German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data. As far as I can tell, most if not all providers these days offer their fastest speeds as "high-speed" on all contracts with only the amount of data being the difference, not tiered speed caps (this definitely used to be different).
So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date. At least with regard to Germany -- I don't know enough about other EU countries to say anything about them.
Just to clarify the "spin-off" companies are called mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). We have a lot of them in the UK too, but in our case they are usually seperate companies (e.g. the Tesco supermarket has its own mobile brand which runs on the O2 network). Strangely they are usually cheaper than the parent companies too - anyone know how the financials of that work?
In Germany we have supermarket mobile brands, too. They're usually just white-label services provided by other brands (e.g. ALDI Talk is owned by E-Plus, which is an actual carrier).
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.
>What you say about subsidized phones is patently false
You are most likely talking about carriers allowing people to finance their phones in europe. Where you can pay an additional 20 euros a month to get the new iphone or whatever.
This is not at all what i'm talking about.
In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price. You sign a contract and you get to choose from the carriers selection of phones, older phones being completely free, newest phones costing 200 dollars.
The rest of the cost of the phone is hidden inside of the cost of the plan itself. There is no line item for how much you are paying for the phone each month, it is simply part of the pricing of the service itself. When your phone has been completely paid off, you will never know because your plans price will not change.
In europe, you finance phones, when they are paid off you stop paying for the phone and you then own the phone. your bill goes down. This is not at all the same behavior as the subsidized phone system in the US.
>German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data
This is what im talking about, this does not exist in the US. There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
There is some subversion by carriers using 'throttling' where they slow certain lines down to a crawl when the carrier decides they've used too much data for the month, but that is by no means a part of how plans are priced.
>So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date
admittedly so, i haven't been in europe for more than a week since 2013 - and have never spent much time in germany
It is also throttling in the EU (At least in NL). If I pay for an 'unlimited' data plan it's usually something like 2GB at 4G and then "2G" speeds (64kbps) after that. It's just throttling, as your phone remains connected at "4G".
Now many providers have dropped the "unlimited 2G" data claim and just stating the rate limit after you use your high-speed bucket.
Maybe Finland is an exception here, but they are definitely tiered by speed, with no 'buckets' of data - Finland is the only country I've personally purchased an actual plan in, I've only used prepaid plans elsewhere in europe.
> In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price.
This has definitely been a thing in Germany in the past. In fact, I don't think I've seen ever the "pay $(x+y)/month for 24 months for the plan and phone, then pay only $x/month" model. Usually after 24 months you'd be offered a new phone (again for "free" or a radically "discounted" price). This may have changed since I stopped paying attention to long-term plans but you're wrong in thinking we never had what you have in the US.
> There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
We also had hard data caps very early on. We just replaced that with "unlimited" plans with a cap on "high-speed" data at some point.
That said, the low-speed data might as well not be available at all -- most people I know buy extra if they hit their high-speed cap. It's barely sufficient for checking your e-mail.
What you say about subsidized phones is patently false. I don't recall unsubsidized phones being a thing at all in Germany when mobile phones first became popular. Even today many if not most Germans seem to prefer subsidized phones -- in my experience buying your phone separately is only common in the more tech savvy or higher end markets, although the growing popularity of discounted month-to-month mobile plans may be changing that.
AFAIK tethering and jailbreaking/rooting is, generally speaking, always legal in Germany. For subsidized phones things can be different if you're not actually purchasing the phone but only leasing it (because it isn't your property and therefore you're not allowed to modify it), but I think these days most contracts have you actually purchase the phone. Not sure whether this is due to market demand, but I think there's also a decline in carrier branded phones, so it might simply be that.
Except for pre-paid/post-paid (i.e. no fixed plan, pay-as-you-go) contracts, I think all German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data. As far as I can tell, most if not all providers these days offer their fastest speeds as "high-speed" on all contracts with only the amount of data being the difference, not tiered speed caps (this definitely used to be different).
So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date. At least with regard to Germany -- I don't know enough about other EU countries to say anything about them.