Moving house: internet, router and your home tech

The opening question of every move is this: does the internet contract come along, or does it end? The law answers in the customer's favour, but with one condition. Anyone who changes residence and wants to continue the contract can require the contractually owed service to be provided at the new address, without any change to the agreed contract term or the other terms of the contract (§ 60 (1) TKG). The condition sits in the same sentence: as far as the provider offers that service there. Everything else follows from that. In a new development without the existing network, or in a building connected only by a different technology, the contract is suddenly up for discussion.

The provider may charge a fee for the effort caused by the move. It has to be reasonable and may not exceed the fee set for activating a new connection (§ 60 (1) sentence 2 TKG). If the service is not offered at the new address at all, the second route applies: the contract can be terminated with one month's notice (§ 60 (2) TKG), and notice may be given with effect from the moving-out date or from a later date. That matters more in practice than it sounds: if you know the moving-out date, you can write the notice in advance and still have it take effect exactly when you want – for instance only once the new line is running.

At the new address the first question is which device serves the line. The network termination point is where the public network ends; it is installed at a suitable place agreed with the end user (§ 73 (1) TKG). What sits behind it is the household's business: network operators and providers may not refuse to connect terminal equipment as long as it meets the basic requirements (§ 73 (3) TKG). Your own router may therefore move house with you, even if a rental device is offered at the new address.

In practice that means the familiar device stays in the household, and with it all the settings that have grown over the years – guest access, parental controls, phone book, numbers, port releases. The condition is that the connection type at the new address suits the device. When the underlying technology changes that is not a given; what to expect is set out in the overview of the switch to fibre, and the setup itself we handle during the router setup appointment.

For a move, smart home devices fall into three groups: devices that simply come along, devices that come along and have to be set up again, and devices that stay in the flat. The allocation depends less on the technology than on what is permanently installed and who owns it. A thermostat head can be unscrewed; a smoke alarm in many cases belongs to the flat. How to build up a new home sensibly without buying everything twice is covered on the page about smart home setup.

Two devices almost always require manual work during a move. The robot vacuum has to drive the new flat once in full before no-go zones and room names make sense again; the old map should be deleted, otherwise the two get mixed. How a map is built cleanly is set out on the page about robot vacuum setup. The voice assistant, in turn, knows room names, groups and routines that run into nothing after a move – the command for the living room light then switches a lamp that is still in a box. That allocation can be reset in one pass, see voice assistant setup.

The printer is the quiet special case. It hangs not only on the Wi-Fi but also on the computers and phones in the household, and its network address is stored there. If the address range of the new router changes, nobody finds it any more even though it is connected. Two steps fix that for good: assign the printer a fixed address in the router and then select it once again on every device. The procedure is on the page about printer setup.

The most common source of trouble in a move is not the contract but the appointment. The law knows the problem. Providers and network operators work together to ensure that activation of the telecommunications service at the new address takes place on the day expressly agreed with the consumer; § 58 (3) and § 59 (4) apply accordingly (§ 60 (3) TKG). So the same compensation rules apply to a move as to switching provider: if an agreed customer service or installation appointment is missed, compensation of 10 euros or 20 percent of the agreed monthly charge is on the table for each missed appointment, whichever amount is higher (§ 59 (4) TKG). The exception is where the end user is responsible for the appointment being missed.

A second point concerns flats where the internet or TV connection runs through the tenancy agreement. Anyone who provides or invoices telecommunications services in connection with a tenancy agreement has to ensure that the consumer protection rules are complied with; consumers can declare an end to their use of those services once the tenancy has existed for 24 months or longer (§ 71 (2) TKG). In a new flat it is therefore worth looking at the service charge statement before signing a second contract – otherwise two lines run side by side.

That leaves the case where no line is running on moving-in day. Then the mobile network carries the first few days, and it is worth trying that out beforehand rather than in an emergency – particularly in ground floor and basement flats. More important is the data: photos, documents and passwords should be backed up before moving out, not after, because a move is the most common occasion on which a device disappears or is dropped. How a device changeover runs cleanly is covered in the article on moving data to a new device; during an on-site appointment we handle it as data transfer.