Getting home internet is a bit dreadful, at least in Germany.

• Very expensive, especially if you want somewhat decent speeds (starting from ~45€/month, up to ~80€/month depending on what speed you want)
• Fiber? not available in most areas
• DSL/etc.? Available, but oftentimes slow and kind of unreliable
• Something not working? Calling customer service is a nightmare, and rarely helps
• You don't know beforehand what:
  • infrastructure is available as each building differs,
  • each provider has a different idea of what infrastructure exists, and what
  • speeds you can expect

I am all for trying and exploring new things, but that mustn't include spending time arguing with customer service or dealing with things entirely out of my control.

So I decided against it.

I already pay for mobile data, so why not just use that?

How well 5G works in an area is something you can easily check by just going there and doing a speed test on your phone. There are also coverage maps available showing where cell towers are located at.

Both phone plans (when looking at data volume) and home internet (when looking at speeds) are expensive in Germany, but the per-unit price (GB or MBit/s) goes down quite significantly the higher up you go.

Assuming you need ~20GB/month and ~200MBit/s, you can either pay quite a lot for a medium tier of both, or you can try to eliminate one category entirely and go with a higher tier of the other one.

So that's what I did: I got an additional SIM card for my phone plan, upgraded that to 200GB/month, and got a 5G router. Some mobile plans have speed limits as well (e.g. 50MBit/s), but mine did not at any tier.

The setup

I bought a Zyxel FWA510 as my 5g router and I am using a Telekom plan with 200GB/month. The speeds do vary a bit depending on the time of day, but I usually get around 400-600MBit/s down and 70-100 MBit/s up which is plenty for my needs.

The 200GB/month is a bit tight sometimes, but if I ever need more I'll just upgrade my plan to unlimited, which in the case of Telekom is truly unlimited (up to a very very very high amount per month)

Setting everything up was quite easy and straightforward. After over half a year of usage I've yet to run into problems that weren't solvable with relative easy. Even if something wasn't working from the get-go it was a lot more enjoyable to tinker with the 5g setup than it would've been with a conventional home internet setup where the likely culprit is somewhere in the walls of your building, in the ground, or with the infrastructure of your ISP.

I'm not going back to a conventional home internet setup any time soon. Would recommend to anyone who has decent 5g coverage at home