Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#311

Post by hurrrrrrrr » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

terminalhealth wrote: post #158

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...

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.

Competence doesn't seem to be a requirement in these positions.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#312

Post by Mo3 » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

paule89 wrote: post #309

Mo3 wrote: post #304

I really cannot concur. I live in the depths of Bavaria in a small village with ~2000 residents. Our apartment is connected by two 100MBit/s DSL and 500MBit/s Cable lines, set up in failover configuration in case one goes down (which always only happens on Cable for a few minutes, and that setup exists only because I work 100% remote). The village is located in a mountainous region, yet everywhere I go, I have +100Mb…

Sorry but your setup seems to be outragouesly unique. Often times you have either cable or dsl. But not both. Also what about your upload speeds? probably only 20MBit/s or 40 max. I dream of a land with 10Gbit symmatrical networking for an affordable price. It would be future proof. I could role my own server. Heck i could probably start a cloud business and scale up if i wanted to somehow by buying more fiber lines.

There are a lot of places where you can get both. Upload is 50Mbit/s on DSL and 50Mbit/s on Cable

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#313

Post by yxhuvud » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:31 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #306

close04 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Eastern European countries are ...complicated. The state-owned telcos were privatized in 90-ties, because the state is a bad owner, by ...state owned telcos from the west (Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica, etc). Of course, the first thing they tried was to move the obsolete equipment from their home countries to Eastern Europe for the price of a new one and for the money to get the new equipment in their home countries.…

That story isn't really the full story for some of the countries. For example, Romania had a really huge build it yourself boom (which have since consolidated into proper companies since, if I have understood it correctly) and at least for a while ended up with more people having fiber than running water.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#314

Post by yxhuvud » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

Matthias247 wrote: post #190

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.

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…

Compare that to the roughly 8€ I pay for gigabit connection for my apartment in Stockholm. Which is a better deal than normal since the deal is that the whole house also have it, without being able to opt out, but still.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#315

Post by hylaride » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

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…

When I was visiting Germany 3 years ago, I bought a prepaid sim a second time from a 2nd company because the service was so mediocre. It didn't help. I was only in the major cities and I was lucky to get good 3G signal/speeds let alone LTE. It surprised me quite a bit. As a Canadian, where we pay extremely high rates for mobile, the signals and speeds are at least very good.

It was also surprising as I've had good service in France, UK, Belgium, Spain, UK, etc. I expected the Germans to be stereotypically efficient on this.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#316

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #261

ceejayoz wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like Germany's population grew by over 20 million just recently. Uh, that'll be the fall of the Soviet Union adding ~16M East Germans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification > Some countries don't even have a census every year You don't need a census to get a population count. Governments definitely keep records of births/deaths, as well as immigration. Your own link provides population numbers…

Germany Population 2019: 83,547,429 http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/germany-populatio...

I don't doubt Germany has continued to take in refugees, but we're not comparing like-to-like here; they're different population estimates, as the 2018 number in your link differs from that in mine.

The point remains: Germany has almost the same population it had 20 years ago. Blaming internet troubles on rapid population expansion is clearly false.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#317

Post by thirdsun » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #254

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needs more newlines.

Why? how does it look? I'm typing this in Firefox on desktop. Are you on something mobile and need to scroll sideways?

Not OP, but I'm on desktop and it's the type of comment I'd scroll past since this wall of text looks rather unreadable - it lacks structure.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#318

Post by breadandcrumbel » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

I'm not an expert in economy but it just shows that there's a monopoly in the internet industry in Germany

It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow internet.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#319

Post by Brotkrumen » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

breadandcrumbel wrote: post #318

I'm not an expert in economy but it just shows that there's a monopoly in the internet industry in Germany It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow internet.

There is no monopoly in the internet industry in Germany.

Re: Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

#320

Post by KONAir » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

terminalhealth wrote: post #158

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...

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.

Ultimately they are both "realtime logistics" and the minister better have expertise in longterm public projects then either. But yea, sure they better be seperate.