Internet providers in Germany II: more options

Continuing with the subject of Internet providers in Germany, I found these:

• Alice (photo above). It is not a woman's name, it is an Internet provider called Alice. They use a model to promote the advertising of the service and recently they have used Brad Pitt in their TV commercials as well. I am not sure, but it can be that is the same company as HanseNet.
  
• Kabel Deutschland. Honestly, I have never heard of them. Looks like they have good prices and they claim to offer a high speed access.

Now, as in other countries, and specially in Germany where each Bundesland or region has its own laws and peculiarities, the internet providers may be different in each one of them. My in-laws have a regional internet provider, which seems to work just fine.

These are some issues you must consider when deciding yourself for one of these companies:

Does it include fix telephone services? Festnetz, is a normal land line telephone. Sometimes you can call for free to your friends or family who are customers of this company. And sometimes it is also free to call people who are customers of other companies. Be careful on this point.

Does it have special rates for calling abroad? If you are reading this blog, is very likely you will be making international phone calls. Either in to other European countries or to America, Asia or Africa. Sometimes they have special rates for international calls as well.

How long does it take to have the service running? In our case it took around 4 weeks until I had the telephone line and the Internet running. You must be patient.

Do I have to pay for the Modem/Telephone/WLAN Modem? We bought the telephone in Saturn (more about this shop in another post soon), and we were never offered one when we did the contract. The normal modem for the Internet was free, but we wanted a wireless one. In Spain we got it for free, here we had to pay around 40 euro. The first three months of the Internet service is free, so it makes it up.

What about this all inclusive offers? In some cases, some companies offer: mobile services, telephone services, tv services and internet services in one whole package. I would not know how good or bad this is as we have not tried it yet.

If you want to know more about the internet providers in Germany, I strongly suggest you to take a look at the STIFTUNG WARENTEST website. If you are in Germany already you might be familiar with the logo of this association or company, I am not sure what kind of organisation they are.

What they do is testing all sorts of products and services in Germany and awarding points to them in relation to quality. I will speak more about this later, but it does pay to take a look at their website, and even pay 1 euro for the results of their test on internet providers. It is a very serious test as very important brands and companies carry this logo on their products, when the review is good of course.

Reviews of services with TV, land line and internet:

http://www.test.de/themen/computer-telefon/test/-TV-Telefon-Internet/1558073/1558073/1561871/

Internet providers:

http://www.test.de/themen/computer-telefon/test/-Internetprovider/1538762/1538762/1539381/1539994/

Flatrates:

http://www.test.de/themen/computer-telefon/test/-Internet-und-Telefon/1512047/1512047/1527502/