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German Telephone Charges
Since deregulation in January 1998, there is no longer one charging system
(the one of Deutsche Telekom, the former monopoly) but literally hundreds of
them. Which tricks you can use, depends on the type of telephone you have
access to:
Since deregulation this is no longer the only charging system you may run
into, but it still does apply to public telephones, hotel phones and the
like.
General Remarks
All charging is done by units ("Einheiten") of constant (though
not equal) price. The first unit is charged when
the other party answers and then the units tick in regular intervals - in
recent years, Deutsche Telekom modified this to charge by the minute, so many
units may tick away as soon as the other party answers; this is especially bad
when calling mobile phones. The expensiveness of a call is officially defined
by the number of seconds you can talk for each unit, e.g. "90 seconds per unit
for a local call between 9 am and 6pm on a weekday". This is expensive for
long calls but cheap for short calls, because there is effectively no
startup charge. Taken to the extreme, you can ring up someone in the USA for
just one unit - provided you are finished before the 15 seconds of the first
unit are over.
The charging system has undergone several significant changes since the
beginning of 1996. There are 3 distinguished "times of
day" and 3 distinguished domestic "distance
ranges", in addition to a lot of special (e.g. for mobile telephones) and
international rates.
Since April 1999, public telephones have a somewhat simpler, but
more expensive, system: local calls are one unit per minte, domestic
long distance calls are two units per minute.
Phone charges in Germany were said to be one of the highest among the
industrialized nations. This still holds for local calls, but it's no longer
true for long distance and international calls. Much of this was attributed to
the monoply of the Deutsche Telekom. But
this has also led to a uniformity of handling and a high reliability that
might be worth paying for.
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The Price of One Unit
The price of one unit depends on what type of telephone you are calling
from.
- standard home phone: 0.12 DM
- public phone with 50 DM card: 0.19 DM
- public phone with 12 DM card or coins: 0.20 DM
- public phone with credit card: 0.24 to 0.30 DM
- privately owned payphone (coins): 0.30 to 0.50 DM
- public mobile phone in a train: 0.70 DM
- hotel room phone: 0.40 to 0.80 DM - expensive enough that mobile phones
have an additional application
So if you are going to make expensive calls, the cheapest way would be to
visit a friend, ask him whether you might use his phone, stopwatch the call,
add some tip and give the money to him.
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Times of the Day
The German Telekom phone rate system distinguishes between three "times of
day":
- daytime "standard" rate
- monday through friday 9am to 6 pm. This is the business time
where Telekom earns the big money; up to three times as expensive as on
other times.
- leisure rate
- weekdays before 9 am and after 6 pm, all day on saturdays, sundays
and nationwide holidays. This is the standard evening and
weekend rate, reasonably cheap. Beware of regional holidays: many
holidays are valid only in some states and thus not "nationwide" - and
Telekom charges the full weekday rate.
- moonshine rate
- daily after 9 pm and before 5 am. Long distances are reduced by
another 50%, local calls by almost 40%. A real bargain, because you can
ring up the average german at 9 pm perfectly polight. The significant
reduction in local rates is the reason why all of Germany floods the
Internet at precisely 9 pm Central European [Summer] Time. (night rate
has disappeared, because moonshine is now as cheap as night used to
be).
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Distance categories
To make comparison easy, all rates are given in DM/$ per minute or hour from a
standard home phone (0.12 DM/unit). For a quick guess, say $ (US) instead
of DM for public telephones.
- City
- same area code, all neighbouring area codes and all others that are
less than 20 kilometres away (air distance between centre of
areas). Became uncomfortably expensive (doubled) in 1996: daytime
rate is 5 DM (3$) per hour (one unit every 90 seconds) for the home
internet user. Leisure rate is 2.88 DM/hour, moonshine 1.80 DM/hour (4
minutes per unit)
- Regio 50
- up to 50 kilometres (30 miles). same rates as long distance,
except during daytime ("only" two units per minute).
- Long Distance
- everything else beyond 50 kilometres, but inside Germany.
Daytime rates are three units (0.36 DM = 0.20$) per minute, leisure one
unit (0.12 DM = 0.07 $) per minute, moonshine one unit every two
minutes.
- Mobile Radio Phones
- 016x and 017x area codes. There are slight differences between
networks, but basically it's 0.60 DM per minute. If you compare
that with world 1 (USA), then you'll notice some difference. In fact, it
can be economically feasible to place a domestic "fixed to mobile" call
through a north american callback provider....
If you call a mobile phone which is currently abroad ("international
roaming"), then you pay "only" the standard domestic mobile radio charge
and the poor person you're calling will be billed for the distance from
Germany to his current place of mobility - at cell phone rates...
- International
- Different rate for almost every country, but independent on
the time of the day. Usually for international calls (with a few
exceptions), Deutsche Telekom is so expensive, that you might find it
worth investigating into a calling card or a callback service. The
best thing is to use a call-by-call provider. To some
countries (e.g. Australia), alternate carriers charge as little as 10%
of Telekom's rate.
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Becoming a Subscriber (get your own line)
If you are planning to stay in one single place (e.g. a rented flat, not a
hotel room) in Germany for more than one or two months, you might consider
becoming a subscriber of the Telekom phone network, just as any family or
small company does. You will have to fill a form in a Telekom branch, which
can be found in major cities (more than about 50.000 people). I highly
recommend the help of a friend who did something like that before, because
every check box must be right if you want to get what you want.
Such a project will set back your budget by these amounts:
- Line installation: 100 DM + work needed in your rooms (max. 100
DM), so a maximum of 200 DM; if you just take over an installed
line and its number, it's only 50 DM. The charge is independent of the
rurality of your location - one of the few advantages of a former state
regulated monopoly. This provides you (at your option, same price for
both) either with a (nationally) standardized analogue TAE-socket or an
ISDN (digital phone network, 64 kbps digital connection instead of an
analogue one; there are perfect gateways to the analogue network)
S0-socket ready to be connected to the S0-bus or to 2 ISDN devices (the
network terminator rental is already included in the monthly ISDN
subscription fee)
- equipment cost: you can rent it from the Telekom, but that's
usually more expensive (minimum rent times of several years) than buying
it directly, which is permitted since July 1990. A simple analogue phone
can be as cheap as 50 DM, cordless ones start around 150 DM. For ISDN you
typically need an a/b adapter (200-400 DM, qualities vary significantly, a
bad one can cause a lot of headache) to use analogue equipment and some
digital equipment to make use of it. Passive ISDN cards (the equivalent of
a modem) for Wintel-PCs start around 150 DM (recommendable: the
Fritz!-Card by the company AVM).
All equipment (analogue and ISDN) must be type checked (bear a seal with a
BZT-number) to ensure it won't disturb the network - Telekom and police
don't joke in this area, so be careful with a foreign (non EU) modem.
- monthly subscription fee: 24.60 DM per month for an
analogue line, 46 DM per month for an ISDN basic rate line (2 simultaneous
64 kbps digital calls, 3 numbers). ISDN is quite popular here; consider
it, if you need multiple numbers or domestic data transfer (internet!) and
the equipment cost is not prohibive to you. ISDN call charges are slightly
cheaper (e.g. daytime domestic long distance calls through Deutsche
Telekom are 2 instead of 3 units per minute) than analogue ones.
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Back to German Telephone System
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Last updated: 05.05.2007 17:43:04
Martin Stut, email: 
, Marburg, Germany
URL: http://www.stut.de/phgc.htm