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Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

wsj.com

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Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#31

Post by barsonme »

deminature wrote: post #10
siddhant wrote: 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.

Home internet regularly costs $80 in the US, or roughly €72. €40 seems pretty reasonable by comparison.

Really? $80? I haven't seen $80 for internet.

In a suburban area outside of Tacoma ~300mbps was about $50, and now just outside of Seattle I pay $75 for 1 gbps. The non-gigabit plans were south of $50.

I Googled a bit and most websites said Americans generally pay somewhere between $50-$60.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#32

Post by ses1984 »

kstenerud wrote: post #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.

A single 4k Netflix stream is up to 25mbps.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#33

Post by mrpippy »

nothis wrote: post #5

Wait, average internet speed in the US is 120 Mbits? About a gigabyte in 1 minute?

The source of the “data” is Speedtest.net tests, which is absolutely not an actual survey. At best, it represents the average speed of “enthusiasts who like to test their internet speed”. Who, not surprisingly, are going to have faster connections than the actual nationwide average.

Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#34

Post by Balero »

kstenerud wrote: post #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.

I think 20Mbps is ok if you are the only user (I would rather 30 at least). But if you live with other heavy internet users it can get congested easily.

Someone streaming something, someone playing games, someone downloading something, this all adds up quickly and it starts to be noticeable.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#36

Post by hannob »

dmix wrote: 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…

> The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?

Pretty much, yes.

"Deutsche Telekom" is the company that came out of the former state telecom company. So they own the national telephone network.

Appart from a few local networks the only alternative is Internet through the tv cable network. However that never got complete coverage in Germany.

So for a lot of people Telekom is the only company that can offer them Internet connectivity. All the others are just reseller offers.

Also there have been some pretty nasty strategies where they actively prevent other companies from building parallel infrastructure: Places where Telekom didn't offer fast Internet for years, then a competitor builds a fiber network and coincidentally just shortly afterwards Telekom offers fast Internet, so the competitor looses because he can't get as much income as expected.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#37

Post by gok »

That speedtest graph in the article is a great example of why averaging statistics is often a bad idea. The US fixed broadband mean is ~120mbps, but the median is more like ~70 mbps [1]. A few people with gigabit-ish connections are hiding the many people stuck with crappy sub-25 mbps connections.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#38

Post by luckylion »

dmix wrote: 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…

> Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?

For DSL, essentially, yes. Everybody else rents their infrastructure from them. Cable is a general competitor, but it suffers from other problems and will often be much slower than advertised during peak hours.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#39

Post by juskrey »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #28
juskrey wrote: post #14

Come to Ukraine. They have the cheapest internet, mobile plans and Uber in the world. And likely the worst air, food and city structure quality. There is always a choice.

What percentage of homes get that speed ?

Basically everyone who really wants to. All IT pros move to cities, because anyway rural life is nothing like Western picture.

End even for suburban areas, there are options for high speed air links.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#40

Post by southerndrift »

>“The whole problem in Germany is the lack of fiber-to-the-home strategy by Deutsche Telekom DTEGY -0.52% and other carriers,

No, it is not. The problem could have been solved decades ago. Helmut Kohl of the CDU (conservative party) turned back a decision of his predecessor to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. Germany could have had fiber to the home for 20 years at the least reachable areas and for 35 in major cities.

Rumor has it that nowadays, Telekom is postponing fiber because they don't want to sublicense their network to other carriers so they wait until they are getting a better deal. This is funny because Telekom is owned by many German small sharesholders (since that's how they have privatized the former public agency) - which has led to a situation where Germans don't get better internet because they are hoping for higher profits.

[1]https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...

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