Roaming in Germany - What is the current situation?

[Theo77]

When I went to Germany before Covid, my phone always connected to the telekom.de network. I always got a great signal which was really fast (30 MBPS +).   

Since 2021, this has changed for the worse. My phone now connects to o2-de, which often says 4G but gives me 2-3 MBPS on average. Once I had 4 bars but only about 0.05 MBPS, not even enough for Google Maps. I often find myself moved over to vodafone.de, which I have learned to be EE's backup. This seems a lot more reliable, though I am limited to Edge data. This problem seems specific to Germany, I can roam in other EU countries without issue. 

I'm going to be going through Germany in a couple of weeks, so I would like to clarify the following:

1. Is manually connecting to telekom.de currently possible?

2. Does EE have any plans to let us use 4/5G on vodafone? If Telekom can't be done this would be almost as good.

3. If not what's the best way to stay connected in Germany with the current situation. 

4. Are EE and Telekom.de still partners and is there a plan to re-enable this in future? They are still listed as such and Deutsch Telekom owns part of BT. 

[mailjackhorrey]

I was in Germany the final week of March, I can’t believe EE don’t care about this a won’t sort it out. I made a complaint about this and the same thing happens everytime, I get passed to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and say they’ve reset my network settings. nothing ever cures this problem. 

Last time I was there, I was getting 5G with O2 at the airport and this is fine until you travel away from it. Then the phone latches onto Vodafone, which is edge coverage, which is no good at all.  I have managed to manually reconnect to O2, but the signal is so weak it’s unusable hence the fact my phone switched to Vodafone in the first place.

The answer is really simple, EE need to stop being tight and give their customers who roam in Germany a decent service.  5G on Vodafone would solve all the problems, Even better, they could reconnect the excellent Deutsche Telecom network.  

[ak370]

EE should:

1. Ensure customers can use their service smoothly in Germany by defaulting to O2 for consistent connectivity. If Vodafone 4/5G data roaming causes intermittent issues, remove it from the roaming profile to prioritize stable service.
2. If feasible or if customer demand is high, enable 4/5G roaming on Vodafone or other networks as an extension of the stable service established in point 1.
3. Ideally, offer unrestricted roaming across all networks, with EE partnering with top-tier networks in other countries for optimal performance.

Since many people have reported this to EE, are there any representatives here to investigate why their support teams have been ineffective at resolving, escalating, or prioritizing this on their roadmap for years? It’s not just an issue—it appears to be a serious process failure at EE.

[decoleman]

I'd like to feed back my experience roaming in Dusseldorf, Gernamy for five days.  

The automatically selected partner was Vodaphone but it only offered E data rate in spite of turning on and off, rebooting etc..  When I turned off auto selection I was offered O2 as well as Vodaphone which gave strong, consistent 5G.  I could then turn back to auto selection and it remained on O2!