When your address doesn't exist — a Telekom story

The setup

We’ve been living in a newly developed neighbourhood for just over three years now. Our street has no gas supply and no traditional copper telephone infrastructure — it was built from scratch, and the only utilities laid down were power and fibre optic connections. Our internet comes via Deutsche Glasfaser, and that’s the only option here. The Telekom never built out infrastructure in this area, so they have no fixed-line presence on our street whatsoever.

Early this month, I decided to sign up for Telekom’s IPTV package, Magenta MegaStream. The main appeal was convenience: bundling our existing subscriptions — Netflix, Disney+, RTL+ — into a single package, while also getting access to Sky for football. Telekom offers this as a combined deal, and it ends up being a bit cheaper than booking everything separately. Straightforward enough, you’d think.

It wasn’t.

What could possibly go wrong

During the ordering process, our address was simply rejected. Not flagged, not questioned — just silently replaced with the address of a neighbouring property. No warning, no explanation. I only noticed because I double-checked the order summary. And that’s where the fun began.

Since then, I’ve had countless rounds with Telekom support over the phone, and I’ve also posted in their official support forum. The root cause, as far as I can tell, is embarrassingly simple: Telekom never maintained address records for our street because they never had any customers here. No copper lines, no DSL, no customers — no data. So our address simply doesn’t exist in their internal systems. Fair enough, I suppose, as a historical artefact.

What is not fair, however, is that this broken database quietly corrupted my order — for a product that has absolutely nothing to do with a physical line. Magenta MegaStream is an IPTV service — it runs over whatever internet connection you already have. It doesn’t matter whether that’s Telekom DSL, Deutsche Glasfaser, Vodafone cable, or two tin cans and a piece of string. There is no engineer coming to install anything. There is no infrastructure dependency. And yet, their ordering system apparently cannot accept a customer-provided address unless it already exists in their “Stammdaten” — their master address database.

The order went through in the end — with the wrong address attached to it. The service works, I’m using it, and in that narrow sense everything is fine. But my billing address is now the address of my neighbour’s property, and Telekom has been busy for nearly three weeks trying to correct their internal records so that my actual address can be entered. I received an update in their forum six days ago confirming that they are, quote, still working on it.

Three weeks

Three weeks. For a data entry correction. For an address that any mapping service, the local municipality, or a basic postal lookup would confirm in seconds.

I find it hard to decide whether this is more impressive as an organisational failure or as a technical one. Probably both. A large telecommunications company — one that sells internet and connectivity as its core business — cannot get a customer’s billing address right because its own internal geography data hasn’t kept up with new residential construction. And the kicker is that the product doesn’t even need that data to function.

And the truly absurd part? I could simply send them a copy of my ID to prove where I live. That thought, apparently, has not occurred to anyone there yet.

So I’m waiting — not for the service to work, but for a company to figure out where I live. Apparently, somewhere in Telekom’s back office, someone is manually editing a database record so that my street becomes real enough for their systems to acknowledge.

At least my internet works fine — no thanks to them.