The German technical story, properly
DS-Lite: why a German line has two addresses and only one of them is yours
Almost every guide to reaching American streaming from Germany skips this, and it is the one part that is genuinely German. Dual-Stack Lite is the standard configuration on a large share of German cable and fibre. On such a line your router receives a public IPv6 prefix of its own, but no public IPv4 at all — its IPv4 address comes from the carrier’s private range, and all IPv4 traffic is tunnelled to a provider gateway (the AFTR) and translated there onto an address shared with a large number of other households.
The consequence is a split identity. To a website you are simultaneously a carrier-owned German IPv4 that belongs to nobody in particular, and a German IPv6 address that belongs to you specifically. Which one Paramount+ reads depends on which protocol your browser used to reach it — and if your tunnel carries IPv4 only, it reads the half you did not change.
This is not theoretical. It is the single most common reason a German reader configures everything correctly, sees “United States” on an IP-check page, and still gets a territory message. The check page showed IPv4. Paramount+ used IPv6.
Tell
Look at the router’s own status page
A FRITZ!Box shows the connection type in Internet › Online-Monitor and will say “DS-Lite” outright when it is in use. Other routers use the term “DS-Lite” or name an “AFTR” address. That is the fastest answer and it costs nothing.
Tell
Check whether the WAN IPv4 sits in 100.64.0.0/10
That block is reserved for exactly this — carrier-grade address sharing. If your router’s WAN IPv4 starts anywhere from 100.64 to 100.127, you do not have a public IPv4 address and no amount of port forwarding will give you one.
Tell
Compare the router’s address with what a website reports
On an ordinary dual-stack line the two match. On DS-Lite they do not: the router holds a private address while websites report the carrier’s shared public one. A mismatch is the confirmation.
Then
Test both families, not one
Once you know you are on DS-Lite, the test in the next section has a step most guides do not: confirm the connection carries IPv6 as well as IPv4, or disable IPv6 for the duration of the test. Either is fine. Leaving it unchecked is not.
| Provider | What it publishes | Public IPv4 for a consumer line |
|---|
| O2 Telefónica | Its own support community states that booking a public IPv4 address is not possible, across its DSL, cable and fibre arrangements | No. Those statements date from 2022, so treat them as the last public word rather than a promise about today |
| Vodafone | Sells a fixed public IPv4 as a business product rather than a consumer one | Business tariffs only |
| Deutsche Glasfaser | DS-Lite by default on residential lines | A fixed IPv4 is available through a third-party service at roughly €11.90 a month |
| Deutsche Telekom, 1&1 and the regional carriers | Publish nothing about DS-Lite or address sharing on their consumer help pages in terms we could quote | Unknown, and we are recording the gap rather than filling it. Your router will tell you in thirty seconds — which is more reliable than anything we could write here |
One thing this section is not saying: that Germany is short of addresses. It is not. Germany holds about 1.47 public IPv4 addresses per person, one of the larger national allocations anywhere, and roughly 63% of German users are IPv6-capable — which is precisely why carriers here felt able to move IPv4 behind a shared gateway in the first place. DS-Lite is a design decision that IPv6 readiness made cheap, not a shortage forcing anyone’s hand.