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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

#191

Post by GordonS »

rayiner wrote: post #45

Germany'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 reli…

Here in the UK, widely available fast internet access still feels fairly recent.

I've had a 80/20 FTTC connection (~£23/m) for 5 years or so, but before that it was ADSL, starting really crappy and ending up at something like 8/1 IIRC, and it took forever to get that - people were complaining for decades about BT and OpenReach's slow rollout of ADSL, and then FTTC. All the time I was painfully aware that people elsewhere had 100 or even 1000mbit connections (e.g. South Korea, various Nordic countries).

Now, widely available and inexpensive FTTH is the next goal here, although I'd say the availability of FTTC is "enough" for the vast majority of people to be happy with it. Which is just as well, as I'd guess we're 20 years aware from seeing FTTH. I realise 5g is starting to become a thing, but it's unlikely to ever be ubiquitous outside of major cities, and is bound to suffer once contention becomes an issue.

* FTTC: fibre to the cabinet * FTTH: fibre to the home

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#192

Post by ghaff »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #168
dkersten wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The didn't. If you fell down into a crevice, you died. You could apply the same spurious argument to anything - how did people ever get by for thousands of years before antibiotics/vaccines/electricity/water purification existed? They didn't, they lived their nasty, brutish and short lives, and died.

I could argue that cell phones (etc.) are technology that is basically: "Come rescue me." There are plenty of other technologies that we can use to help ourselves (maps, compasses, matches, and so forth). I'm at least somewhat uncomfortable with saying that calling for help is quite in the same category.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#193

Post by nextos »

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...

I have had the same experience both in Germany and in some areas of the UK, like downtown Cambridge which was shocking.

In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#194

Post by angott »

brixon wrote: post #166
black_knight wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Also, use a scheduler to download this at night when you are a sleep or not at home.

Download schedulers, you brought up so many memories of my dial-up days...

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#195

Post by iso-8859-1 »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #92

Which germans? All of them? The rural "Landeier"? The suburbians? The failed capital Berlin? In my personal experience they are mostly too lazy or anxious to switch because of FUD, and/or stingy. The situation is complicated because in most places the so called last mile is in the hands of the former state monopolist, which now is playing a joint-stock company, while the state holds about one third of shares directly…

Needs more newlines.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#196

Post by robohoe »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #124
ghaff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's fairly common in a lot of the bigger and more remote national parks. Death Valley has decent cell reception at Furnace Creek (the main visitor center and lodging area) but AFAIK there's none in the rest of the 3,000 square miles.

Death Valley is also in a valley surrounded by tall mountains loaded with cell tower equipment so the signal propagates pretty easily because there are minimal line-of-sight obstructions.

Last time I was in Death Valley in December I could barely get any signal outside of Furnace Creek. Even in FC it was terrible. I had two cellphones on T-Mobile and AT&T for that matter.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#197

Post by robohoe »

ghaff wrote: post #127
sambal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This expectation & comparison is part of why “Death Valley Germans” is such a meme.

For reference: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun... It's quite the read. It's also recommended reading if you go to the US West and your expectations are mostly informed by tooling around the countryside of Western Europe (or the eastern US for that matter).

Other articles by Tom Mahood are a great read as well. Highly recommend subscribing to his blog. There is lots to learn from his piddling around the American Southwest.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#198

Post by Causality1 »

It's been a long time since I cared or noticed how fast my internet was. Experientially, there's not much difference between 25 megabit service and 200 megabit service. You can stream 4K video on either, and both will require you to go do something else while your 60 gigabyte game download completes. One does it in 5 hours and the other in 40 minutes, but neither are instant-access. There's no escaping from the 1TB data cap I've had for ten years and until that's dead for good I won't be moving my media archive to the cloud.

Now, offer service that cuts my average ping to multiplayer servers in half and I'll get excited. Give me a plan with guaranteed 4G coverage no matter where in the US I go and I'll get excited. That's not going to happen though.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#199

Post by Moru »

groundlogic wrote: post #156
magic_beans wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - t…

It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#200

Post by BjoernKW »

There's a very obvious reason for why mobile Internet in Germany is flaky, slow yet at the same time ridiculously expensive:

During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in in the subsequent years.

In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the sudden, unexpected windfall.

The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the better.

The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary infrastructure.

Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in 2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):

https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-raises-6-point-5...

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