First of all, I moved to Berlin 9 months ago and in general I'm pretty happy with the service uptime and promised speed etc.
BUT the activation time of your connection is something unacceptable in Germany. Four weeks seems to be the normal case for a landline connection to be up and running. FOUR WEEKS, are you kidding me?
And the same problem is ahead of you if you're moving to another flat.
As I did. I moved one month ago. And I didn't know the new address until 1 week before the end of month. As soon as I knew about it I went to the ISP & asked them to make the switch to the new address.
I had to pay extra (which was ok) and WAIT ANOTHER FOUR WEEKS (which was not ok at all).
So in effect I was without internet for 3 weeks while paying the connection to my old address at the same time.
Someone was saying that here the bottleneck is on Telekom's end. And maybe so? The guy who eventually came after 4 weeks was from Telekom - he basically came around for max 10 minutes (probably 5) and made some magic tricks and voilà - internet working.
EDIT:
Wild guess #1: the problem is just too few people at Telekom.
Wild guess #2: If Telekom would offer a service that you pay 100EUR extra to get the connection in two days, they 1) could do it, 2) have loads of customers wanting that service and 3) give jobs to more people and 4) have more money in the pocket
The last 3 cable connections i ordered in germany where set up in under a week, one even on the same day!
For DSL ist different yeah, but its not a general thing in germany.
Now I'm back in Germany and have fabulous 16mbit for nearly 50 Euros. (Fastest internet I can get here.)
Also it's ridiculous that my internet access in Poland was set up within 2 days and here I had to wait 6 weeks for everything to work properly.