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Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

wsj.com

21–30 of 343 posts

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#21
post #2

It’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.

Why do you consider that expensive? If it’s reliable, it sounds very reasonable to me. 1 dinner out.

well, maybe because in some other EU countries it's 22 EUR for 500Mbit :-)

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#22
Maybe I'm just behind the times, but I can't think of anything I'd do that would saturate my 20Mbps link, other than maybe downloading an iso or something. I'm using 1 und 1's ultra cheap plan, and browsing works fine, streaming works fine, video conferencing works fine, remote desktops work fine. I work remote, and only once have I experienced an outage.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#23
post #2

It’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.

So! that's competitive for a 35Mbs (inc phone service) in the Uk - consumer broadband doesn't need more than 35-50Mbs any how.

At least "Duecherbuderpest" is not still fixated on making you all use ISDN. "Duecherbuderpest" is what other Telco's use to refer to the German PTT as.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#24
post #16

> But Deutsche Telekom, Ger­many’s dom­i­nant op­er­a­tor, took a less costly route in 2012, up­grad­ing its ex­ist­ing cop­per net­work through a tech­nol­ogy called vec­tor­ing. The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country? I thought Canada’s oligopoly was bad, but one company for a much bigger country sounds like the perfect recipe…

Not saying it's the case here but it was usually one public operator controlling the entire country, which then got privatised in the 90s or stuff. So they have access to 99.9% of the population.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#25

I don't have faith in that chart. Average US internet speed is 120 mbps?! Do they mean advertised max speed? No way the average internet household speed is that fast. Maybe half. Maybe. I like to live away from town, but even when I could get FiOS, the normal package was 50 mbps. I happen to have 400 mbps now (which flies in the face of my argument, I know). EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes.…

[deleted]

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you consider that expensive? If it’s reliable, it sounds very reasonable to me. 1 dinner out.

I pay about that for ‘10 Gbps’ in CH. I don't even have a machine with a 10 Gbps port, but there isn't anything cheaper here that makes sense.

That's connection speed what payload do you get on average.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#27
post #20

Just a bit more background from Germany: This article largely focusses on broadband connections. It doesn't even begin to adress the even bigger issue, which is that mobile internet is extremely bad compared to most other european countries. Also interesting that even the reporter fell for one of the lamest excuses: "Among them are the country’s large geographic area". Northern neighbor Sweden, which happens to be on…

It seems to me France also has a comparable surface, although with more concentrated population centers.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#29
post #2

It’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.

100 Mbit/s can be had for 20 euro for first 12 months in Berlin. 40 afterwards.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#30

I don't have faith in that chart. Average US internet speed is 120 mbps?! Do they mean advertised max speed? No way the average internet household speed is that fast. Maybe half. Maybe. I like to live away from town, but even when I could get FiOS, the normal package was 50 mbps. I happen to have 400 mbps now (which flies in the face of my argument, I know). EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes.…

The source is speedtest.net, which probably biases toward “users that care about speed and run tests”, but also average likely is mean, not median, and the mean can get to 120Mb/s pretty easily with a fairly small fraction of Gb/s-class connections. even if the rest are in the 1-20Mb/s range.
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