> My employer's Internet connection is *guaranteed* to be 5 Mbit/sec in both 
> directions at all times. (There are also contractual guarantees about how 
> quickly the ISP will fix it if it breaks.)
>

>
> How much do you pay for your broadband?

Ouch!

IF you are lucky enough to dwell at a convenient location and get VDSL, then 
you pay with t-com about 600 EUR/year for 25-50 Mbit/s downstream / 2.7-10 
Mbit/s upstream, including a phone-flat and a few (for me) uninteresting 
TV-programs.

If you want just 6Mbit/s - .5 Mbit/s and a phone-flat you pay about 468 EUR.

However, nobody here expands into rural areas. The reason is simple: if you 
are in communications and invest into infrastructure, our laws force the 
companies to "open" their lines to competitors at very cheap rates. So new 
cables are only places below surface where they can be reasonably sure that 
enough customers will stay with them to make it worth their while. That is 
only the case where many people are crammed into very small spaces, like the 
large cities. Free markets are not always good...

If you can only get ISDN (128 kbit) things get expensive - the worse the 
line, the more you pay. Then you pay about 100 EUR/month (to my best 
knowledge). Absurd.

In the worst locations here to get a 5 Mbit/5Mbit line you would have to 
bundle 40 ISDN connections, so you would have to pay around 48.000 EUR / 
year. Probably you could get this cheaper with other telcos.

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