According to a current ranking by the EU Commission, Germany comes in 11th in fast Internet access, thus remaining below the EU average. Only 10 percent of Germans have broadband access, compared (for instance) to 22 percent of the Dutch and Danes or 19 percent of the Finns who surf with technologies faster than analog or ISDN connections. According to the paper made available to heise online, Germany is tied with Malta, Portugal, and Spain. On the average, 11 percent of the citizens of the 25 EU member states have broadband access. Granted, Germany has improved its status somewhat after coming in 13th last year, but the figures are not really comparable because the ranking in 2004 did not include the 10 new accession states to the EU. Back in 2001, Germany came in 6th.

The Commission surveyed the status quo of broadband in the member states as of July 01, 2005. Overall, there were more then 48 million broadband connections in the EU as of that date, equivalent to an increase of 22 percent since the beginning of the year. 80.2 percent of them were DSL connections, while just under 20% were other forms of transmission such as, above all, television cable broadband. The Commission did not include fast mobile Internet access, such as UMTS. Traditional telecommunication firms still make up 51.5 percent of the market, a share that continues to shrink. In made 2002, they still held 63 percent. From July 2004 to 2005, more than 18 million new contracts were signed for broadband connections, equivalent to growth of almost 62 percent.

In absolute figures, Germany does lead the pack with 8.45 million broadband connections and 17 percent of the market. On the other hand, France and Great Britain only have a few hundred thousand fewer broadband connections. The new member states only make up four percent of the total number of fast Internet connections in the EU. Germans have the third largest number of new connections behind the British and French. Cable remains a rare medium for broadband Internet in Germany with just below 300,000 connections. In comparison, Great Britain has almost 2.3 million.

Competitors of Deutsche Telekom believe that regulatory authorities and parliaments are partly to blame for the slow growth of broadband connections, which Germany's new chance for Angela Merkel plans to change. Alternative providers claim that, for instance, it took too long for landline connections to be theoretically prepared for DSL connections by means of "bit stream access." They claim that this step was crucial for competitors of Deutsche Telekom to be able to design rates independently for their own broadband services.