Business to Avoid - Deutsche Telekom

If you ever happen to move to Germany, and require a phone, we here cannot recommend enough that you do NOT get phone and internet services from Telekom in Germany. This includes their T-Mobile and T-Online services as well as their regular phone services.

My wife and I were living in Germany, and had both phone and internet with them. About one week after the 1-year warranty on our modem expired, the modem died. We called customer service (for which you must pay by the minute, even for the 10+ minutes you'll be on hold), and after not getting much help, they said they thought the problem was on their end. They were going to look into it more and call us back. The next day, Saturday, a technician showed up at our apartment at 8:30 AM without warning, walked inside in his dirty boots, messing up our floor, messed around for two minutes, said we had to buy a new modem, then gave us a bill for 35 Euros. We refused to sign that bill.

Anyways, when we went to buy our new modem (something like 110-120 Euros!), the worker in the store noticed that we were paying phone and internet separately, and that we could save money if we bundled them. We said we had no interest in that because we didn't want to sign a contract, since we could be transferred out of Germany at any time. We assured by two employees that if we were forced to move from Germany, we would not have to pay the remainder of our contract. We were told that all we would have to do was write a letter that we were leaving and our contract would be cancelled at no cost. This of course turned out to be a lie.

Because they assured us we could cancel with no penalty, we signed a 3-year contract, which gave us the cheapest monthly rate. When my wife was transferred out of Germany shortly after 1 year later, Telekom refused to allow us out of the contract, and said that we were required to pay the remaining two years. When we signed up for three years, we were never given a paper contract, just the assurance of two employees, so we had no proof that we were told this.

We went into a store to talk to someone about it, and a nice young guy at the store tried to help us. He called customer service, who basically said "Good luck trying, but you ain't getting out of this" and his boss, who said it was not possible that anyone told us we could get out of the contract if we moved (basically he was calling us liars). The young guy said he actually believed us, because co-workers of his tell people that all the time, since they get a commission for every contract they sign people up to you. Dishonesty at its best!

In 3.5 years dealing with Deutsche Telekom, we had pretty much nothing but problems and bad service outside of this one guy. We can't recommend not using them strongly enough. For phone and internet, use someone else. If you need a cellphone, go the pre-paid route with someone like Vodafone, who is helpful, usually has English-speaking staff, and won't screw you on pre-paid phone costs or contracts. Just don't use Telekom.