231–240 of 343 posts
Spent a day trying to upload my first vlog & just gave up. The cable based modem was not only slow, but unstable in the heat. ️
Same video takes seconds to upload on a Singapore gigabit connection.
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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.
I think the money comes from the same budget, and it's both cases infrastructure. At the end of the day you don't need that much expertise to allocate funds, it's more about politics.
You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.
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.
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.
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I don't think the US is the country to compare against in this case.
Despite all the griping on the internet, USA is consistently top 10 in broadband speed rankings, and costs are not that different from other countries. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
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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…
From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.
It's fast because prices are 50-100x as pricey as other OECD country. ~$10/gb in Canada vs. $25 for a 100gb plan in France.
Of course it's fast when utilizing it has heavy costs.
So much wasted capacity...
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The crazy thing I think is how expensive internet is, in whatever form, in Germany compared to the rest of Europe while simultaneously being so terrible.
Germany guy living in Canada at the moment: German internet now seems super cheap for me. I had UnityMedia for years. 120Mbit/s and unlimited home phone for 25€ per month. You can triple that sum for Canada (90$ plus tax) if you don’t get any special deal. And deals are annoying, since internet providers randomly increase their prices even if you are on a contract. So even if are not constantly out on the watch for t…
Oh great, I can go through my monthly allotment in 5 minutes by clicking on the wrong link. So useful.
I've turned off LTE just so I get a chance to cutoff a click that turns out to be a 300pg PDF.