I recently moved to Germany. I used to work as a software dev in India before this. I was horrified to learn that (urban) India has way better internet than Germany. When it comes to mobile data it's even more depressing - back in India I used to get 1.5GB _daily_ 4G mobile data for 200 rupees (around 2.5 euros) a _month_. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, 2.5 euros a month for virtually unlimited mobile data is super cheap. In comparison, I pay 10 euros a month for a _monthly_ quota of 1.5 GB with O2 here in Germany. Not to mention that it's slower, and yes, there are a lot of patches with no data reception.
Considering that Germany has otherwise superb infrastructure, the internet was a let down.
Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
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Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#42It's really expensive for companies, too. The company I work for (small to medium sized) has a 34/34 Mbit/s fiber connection and it costs us 600€ per month. Included are 8 IPv4 addresses and an 8h response time (which has never been met and when we sued after a week of non-working internet, we lost in court). It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection…
Curious the reason they gave for you losing in court???
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#43I came back from Germany in April. Infrastructure (trains, roads, airports) are wonderful, compare that with crawling slow internet.
I can assure you that trains are as bad as Internet.
And I can assure you that the trains are much much better than in other parts of the world (eg: India). In India, trains running on time are an exception, not the rule. At least all the German trains that I've been on were on time to the very minute.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#44The running gag of mobile internet in Germany is EU-roaming (no-charge use of you cellular internet service abroad in the EU): I can travel the 1-4 hours to any neighboring countries for the perfect cellular internet access I paid for. The only country where it doesn’t perfectly work is the one I live in. Germany.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#45Germany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling, implemented poorly: https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/f.... Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway.
Contrasting Germany and the U.K. offers a really good illustration of how important it is to set incentives correctly. The U.K. also relies heavily on unbundling, through BT. But when British Telecom was privatized, the U.K. intensely studied the issue of how to set the appropriate incentives: http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_semin.... The end result was a regulatory structure where rates were set such that BT ended up being very profitable. (Last year, BT's profit margin was around 16%, versus 3% for Telekom.) That created the incentive for BT to invest in pushing fiber further into its DSL network.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's why I put the speed in quotes. I get about 900 Mbps both ways on my computer that has only a 1 Gbps port.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#47I came back from Germany in April. Infrastructure (trains, roads, airports) are wonderful, compare that with crawling slow internet.
I can assure you that trains are as bad as Internet.
Take a train in America and then you will think the trains in Germany are absolutely beautiful.
Take a train in Japan and you will weep because no matter what country you are from, your trains suck in comparison.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#48Yep... I returned yesterday from Germany and it is awful . I thought the UK (rural) was bad, but Germany takes the cake. There are even (expensive) hotels which still ask money for using their wifi. When you go to have only a meal at a hotel, they tell you internet is just for guests (we had this 5 times in 2 weeks). And driving around with 3g/4g you notice massive patches without data reception. I live in the mounta…
Talking about Romania: in the modem Internet era I cabled (with my brother)the block of flats where we lived to share a connection. The wires were hanging between floors and were simply stitched to the walls internally. These types of cabling were then bought by ISP for cheap and they found themselves with cities cabled for pennies. Now they pulled fiber on public light poles (for free, of course) and interconnected all these networks, changed the switches to Gigabit and got cheap and fast Internet for the masses.
You cannot do this kind of shady work in Germany, you need to get permits, pull the wiring underground, these kind of things increase the cost a lot. Also the mobile Internet is fast in Romania because of the competition from the very fast land lines. In Germany both are missing.
Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#49It's really expensive for companies, too. The company I work for (small to medium sized) has a 34/34 Mbit/s fiber connection and it costs us 600€ per month. Included are 8 IPv4 addresses and an 8h response time (which has never been met and when we sued after a week of non-working internet, we lost in court). It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection…
Curious the reason they gave for you losing in court???
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Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
#50It’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.
Not mind-blowing. Comparing to Romania, where internet is "cheaper" and faster, the salaries in Germany are much higher, so the cable guy costs more. Many times more. So in the end Internet is just faster in Romania, not cheaper, because compared to the salaries it is quite expensive.