To be picky ... Most other providers aren't resellers of Telekom plans. They own their own infrastructure and only have to rent the cables going from the distribution box to the customer's house. And this line is not charged by the traffic or bandwith. And Telekom can not change the way how they charge this line. There are federal regulations for that.

And to be specific, as customer of 1&1 I seem to be having a VDSL connection (50M) like any other T-Online customer. My host is some *.t-ipconnect.de and Youtube is as throttled as it is for a direct contract. If they now add bandwidth caps on top of that, they can go screw themselves.

So that's why YouTube is still so flaky even on my 50Mbit connection. That's ridiculous. With a 200GB data cap, what's the point in paying for that? I use 500GB/month without even trying.

I think O2 is also just a simple reseller of Telekom's VDSL. So apparently we have a competitive market for standard DSL up to 16Mbit (if you're very lucky, but often well under 10Mbit in practice), but not for the current generation of highspeed internet.