Which germans? All of them? The rural "Landeier"? The suburbians? The failed capital Berlin?
In my personal experience they are mostly too lazy or anxious to switch because of FUD, and/or stingy. The situation is complicated because in most places the so called last mile is in the hands of the former state monopolist, which now is playing a joint-stock company, while the state holds about one third of shares directly and indirectly via the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW
Then there are the tv-cable companies and the really complicated "Netzebene 4", the last mile equivalent for anything Docsis in .de
Complicated because of ownership, and non-sharing. This all feels really backwards, and IT IS!
Nonetheless i got away from the Deutsche Telokom ASAP when i had the chance.
A few anecdotes...
Lived in a not so large town about 199x. Got ISDN and payed them insane amounts of money for dual-channel (128Kb/s). Flatrate? Not existent. Moved to a smaller town some years later, first DSL available, but not in my part of smalltown.
Too far away from the exchange. Well, there was another option from Versatal. ISDN Flatrate(which Telekom didn't even offer!) for 40 or 50 DM a month. Most people didn't even knew, or didn't dare, because the company had some mishaps(years) before. I didn't care and had an excellent experience for the time, one could see the way the packets went via traceroute, which was very different from the way the telekom routed. Of course! Different company, different network. Anyways, blazingly fast(for ISDN). The € came, DSL didn't. I moved to Hamburg and had the option to choose
DSL from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet
Again, excellent service, the speeds went slowly up without getting more expensive! Then they've been bought by Telecom Italia and it was renamed Alice. Didn't matter, speeds went up further without getting more expensive(€29,90 flat with landline flat to other german landlines)
Some years later Telekom Italia sold Alice/former Hansenet
to spanish Telefonica, which is branded O² in .de
That was a sad story because one could see how a good company with a good product went bad. Slower speeds, crappy routing/peering, disconnects, changing dsl-standards without announcing them, or sending a modem capable of handling that. One hand not knowing what the other does.
What to do? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel to the rescue! Another local provider born out of a public utility, very progressive since its beginnings, best thing i ever had. I even got more instead of the announced up to.
Fibre to the basement and some VDSL with 100/31 for the usual €29,90 flat with landline to german landlines phone flat included. Excellent peering, latencies, whatever.
Which will be upgraded to fiber to the home until end of the year, begin next year with gigabit, which i don't really need.
Anyways, this is not the only provider apart from the big, mostly crappy ones, or resellers of them. There are
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL
https://www.dokom21.de/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen
These were the ones i remembered, i'm sure there are more.
Then there is this comparison site
https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/
And to be honest, if you are a business, ask COLT, Zayo, BT, KPN, or something like that?
So, that was the wired side of things. Mobile is more expensive and patchy. Depends on region, again.
Shit happens.
Maybe waiting for Starlink? Though i don't believe in that because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber