[usrusr]

The amount of regulator-enforced competition varies a lot between technology generations. The basic idea is that Telekom cannot deny renting out to resellers what they inherited from their government monopolist predecessor, but more recent infrastructure has no such strings attached (the details are slightly more complicated I think).

This was meant as an incentive for investment ("if you build new stuff it's all yours"), but it has cemented the usual premiums for higher bandwidth as a permanent fixture, instead of something that only hits early adopters before trickling down to entry levels. So now you have a situation where quite a few people would be able to upgrade to something like 50 mbps down, sticking to the 16 mbps contract that does the job as well (when you're not hooked to cloud services yet, something Germans might tend to be wary of anyways, given the data protection mindset). In a market where VDSL is widely rejected (because it would almost double the bill), who would invest in even faster infrastructure?