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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

#271

Post by close04 »

nextos wrote: post #193
sc11 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some Southern European countries still have pretty crappy internet overall - average to low for mobile, and really bad for landline (Italy, Greece, Croatia).

Eastern European countries mostly have great internet (especially landline, probably above average for mobile). I always assumed it must be because they came later to the party and went directly for modern technologies. As opposed to Germany who had telephone lines all over and then decided to get the most out of them because rebuilding with fiber would cost the companies too much.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#273

Post by krzyk »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #101
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.

Cell Towers have no place in National Parks/Forests and other nature preserves. If you're in the middle of the ocean you're not going to have cell phone service either, and you should plan accordingly.

Do roads have place in national parks? If so then cell towers also.

I mean if I see asphalt then it is quite reasonable to expect also cell service.

I was i national parks in Europe and I always got cell service. I might be lucky (considering the article and posts about Germany) but in US I was in one park (actually two, but I don't remember situation with mobiles in one) and I did get cell service even before the gates.

I don't expect to have cell service if the park doesn't have roads, just hiking tracks.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#275

Post by chewz »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #71
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.

It's far cheaper than the US. I get 6MB/s downloads for 15€/month. For mobile, there's a chart making the rounds on Twitter, and it seems to me Germany is very much in line with other countries. Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.

> Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.

We might be poorer but our telco operators pay market prices for equipment. Wages and land lease is also quite expensive. Financial cost is higher with rates and currency risk vs euro.

In Poland telco market had been skillfully and actively managed by regulator forcing constant investments in infrastructure and encouraging competition.

I pay 75€ per year for 1TB of mobile plan (calls ans SMS included).

https://biuroprasowe.orange.pl/blog/az-1-tb-danych-nielimito...

My parents broadband had been recently upgraded from 30Mbps to 150Mbps without any cost increase and without even asking for it. It is just the operator (UPC) trying to fend off competition (Orange, Netia). Cost is circa 10€ per month.

https://www.upc.pl/internet/kup-internet/

You can easily get 1Gbs in mayor cities.

Around the place where I live there is a lot of housing developments. Operators are racing to build the infrastructure and sign the clients even before the houses are finished.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#276

Post by 00deadbeef »

GordonS wrote: post #191
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 elsew…

Fast internet has been available to at least half the country for some time now. Virgin Media launched 50Mbps in 2008, and for most households that would still be enough today.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#278

Post by IntelMiner »

boyter wrote: post #147
southerndrift wrote: post #40

>“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…

Hah! That’s exactly what happened in Australia. There is legit talk about changing the hugest plans here from 100/40 to 120/20. It’s that bad. Which is moot anyway because 40% of the “new” network probably cannot get that speed anyway.

Australia's situation is fairly different. And reeks of all the wrong steps of privatization of infrastructure

Telstra (at the time "Telecom Australia") was drawing up plans to roll out FTTH all the way back in 1994(!) before being privatized whole cloth in 1998

Some of their delightful missteps leading up to (and during) the NBN rollout included

- Selling Dial-Up services cheaper than competitors by virtue of not needing to pay line rental or other fees

- Describing ADSL as a "fetish" and saying ISDN was "good enough"

- Running a competitor's (Optus) HFC rollout into the ground. Large swathes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to this day have "Telstra Cable" on one side of a street and "Optus Cable" on the other, simply because Telstra wanted to bankrupt Optus out of trying to avoid using their copper network, and thus, paying fees

- Breaking the ADSL 1 standard to prevent having to buy more DSLAM backhaul. The 8/1 ADSL standard was changed to "at most" 1.5/256

- Attempting to roll out FTTN across the country in 2006, on the provision that they NOT be required to allow competing providers access to their equipment (this was a large part of what precipitated Labor's original NBN vision in 2007)

- Stalling NBN negotiations as long as possible while gold plating their "4G" network, along with NewsCorp (which owns a 33% stake in Telstra) parroting the "WIRELESS IS THE FUTURE!" line, complete with ads for the "FASTEST 4G NETWORK IN AUSTRALIA"

- Staffing the entire NBN board after the LNP victory in 2013 with "ex" Telstra executives, whom were not required to divest their shares in Telstra, while actively negotiating terms to use Telstra's network(!)

There's many other egregious Telstra incidents like charging 5x the market rate for peering on their network (being the biggest ISP has its "perks") and repeated nation-wide outages of their services due to outsourced network operations, but these are the ones directly related to the NBN today

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#279

Post by 00deadbeef »

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 can't think of anything I'd do that would saturate my 20Mbps link

Have children

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#280

Post by coolg54321 »

In India i had a BSNL prepaid plan for 2€ a month for 2GB 4G data "per day" which worked fast even in the rural villages there. But in Germany with O2 I get 2GB 4G data for 10€ a month which goes "No Service" or switches to Edge many times if i goes out of the city.
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