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Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

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Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#151

Post by black_knight »

ayoisaiah wrote: post #99

Let me tell you about slow internet. In Ilorin, Nigeria, I can get 500kbps on good days. Most times, the speeds hover around 100kbps. I can hardly watch YouTube at anything more than 360p. Even that resolution buffers too much sometimes.

Not saying that slow Internet doesn’t suck – it does. But when I ever I am stuck on a slow network i download YouTube videos (the command line tool youtube-dl [0] also downloads a lot of other streaming sites). This trades some time for quality: You have to wait while downloading, but you can download whatever quality you have patience for.

[0]: https://youtube-dl.org/

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#152

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

alkonaut wrote: post #94
franczesko wrote: post #84

This is what economic protectionism (for which Germany is famous for) and lack of competition leads to - no investments in the infrastructure.

National backbone level internet should be large government infrastructure projects. It’s like roads and railways. Competition works on the roads, but works poorly for constructing them. Infrastructure within cities and to premises can work though.

Germany has at least a dozen "backbones" from different companies. The problems mentioned result from stupid last mile politics and practice, which factually deny affordable access for endusers to these.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#153

Post by tribaal »

zepearl wrote: post #144
robert_foss wrote: post #103

I'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m. I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_ worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad. However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier connection.

4Eur/m is really really cheap... . I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload & download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using another Internet provider). My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank the…

That's only in big cities and some random gemindes though (your parents are lucky).

I get my internet over 4g here because land lines are 10/1 mbps.

Still, 4g is 80/15 or so, so it's viable for now (sunrise too)

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#154

Post by cc81 »

nisa wrote: post #146
magic_beans wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Sweden get so right with internet that Germany got so wrong??

Quite a lot: In the 80ies in western germany the then responsible person at the ministry for postal issues (Postministerium) had family connections to a copper producer so everything was build with copper, besides at that time it was clear that there is no long-term future for the technology. After reunification most areas in eastern germany were rebuild using fibre-optic but the system was a technical failure, too e…

You had a similar spectrum auction with 5G recently and that got very expensive as well. That seems to be a problem in a lot of Europe and something the hardware providers like Ericsson complains about as that hinders the service providers ability to buy things from them because they spend so much money on the auction.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#155

Post by dkersten »

esrauch wrote: post #136
ghaff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. If your attitude is that if you get in some kind of trouble, you can just use your cell phone and have someone come get you, you should just stay out of wilderness areas. You're endangering yourself which I wouldn't care that much about but you're also potentially endangering any search and rescue teams that have to come looking for you. As for the lost scenario specifically. I don't know. Maybe carry a (pape…

If your friend falls down a gorge and is unresponsive it seems more than completely reasonable to phone for help.

How ever did people get by for thousands of years before cell phones existed?

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#156

Post by groundlogic »

magic_beans wrote: post #130
nesadi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing I think is how expensive internet is, in whatever form, in Germany compared to the rest of Europe while simultaneously being so terrible.

What did Sweden get so right with internet that Germany got so wrong??

Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started...

The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.)

Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.

In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.)

It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs.

And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#157

Post by cc81 »

ghaff wrote: post #102
krzyk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is the place where you might get lost and without cell service, you are really lost. This is quite annoying in the US, that national parks or deserts have no cell service. The places that need it most (life and death situations) - this is basically a health service there. In comparison to Europe the mobile density is quite sparse there.

Please. If your attitude is that if you get in some kind of trouble, you can just use your cell phone and have someone come get you, you should just stay out of wilderness areas. You're endangering yourself which I wouldn't care that much about but you're also potentially endangering any search and rescue teams that have to come looking for you. As for the lost scenario specifically. I don't know. Maybe carry a (pape…

There are options these days like the inReach that I would recommend for hikers that will be out in the wilderness for an extended period of time and/or might be away from easy access to help. Of course standard protocol still applies like telling someone what path you will take, when they should expect you back etc. but I would feel much safer with an inReach with me just in case.

https://explore.garmin.com/en-US/inreach/

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#158

Post by terminalhealth »

sc11 wrote: post #93
geff82 wrote: post #61

I recently did vacation at the North Sea (land side, not the islands). It was heartbreaking. In many areas the iPhone showed "No Service", in most areas we had "Edge" connection with virtually no data throughput. Even when it showed "3G" I was mostly unable to use WhatsApp. And this is a region where people live! And let's not talk about the landline broadband.... our rented appartment had a meager 1MBit download spe…

> Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have. The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...

They also have a "Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure" as if expertise in one domain would easily transfer to the other. The only commonality seems to be that things are being transported from A to B via some network, but it pretty much ends there.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#159

Post by Kenji »

Who cares about throughput? I think very low latency and jitter is much more important. After 100MBit/s the improvements aren't that impressive anymore, you're almost always bottlenecked by the server and not your home connection.

MBit/s is largely a useless measure for connection quality. I'll happily take a 10MBit/s connection with 1ms ping to Google over a 500Mbit/s connection with 400ms ping to Google.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#160

Post by icxa »

rxhernandez wrote: post #139
lazyguy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For mobile I have unlimited 4G LTE for $55 dollars a month, including talk/text/etc. The 'real' cap is 60GB were they 'review your account for violations of terms and services'. Just did a speed test and it's 31Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, but it varies wildly by location. But it's consistently fast enough that I can share out over Wifi from my cell phone so I can do my work and while my girlfriend watches youtube…

> If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas. This really depends on who you are using. When traveling between NorCal and SoCal, Sprint is basically garbage and Tmobile works decently for most of the trip.

I've experienced them all and across all various parts of the country. If you want to know what phone plan to get, just ask a trucker.
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