121–130 of 225 posts
As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
I think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.
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Why make the assumption that municipalities must treat their internet services as a second-rate utility? Many local governments are competently run. If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water.
> If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water. More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants. What a time to be alive.
The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect each household.
No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status quo.)
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I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have t…
Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering? If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually.
It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.
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Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?
No monopoly. Only for cable internet, which may be a possible argument. For landline internet (DSL), there's plenty of alternatives.
Some apartment buildings exlusively offer DOCSIS via a single provider (as there's never been any unbundling of the DOCSIS "local loop"; presumably under the assumption that a landline will always be available anyway?).
If that one provider is oversubscribed, you're pretty much out of luck.
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> If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water. More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
I don't find that it is usually even possible to have internet without power. How would that work?
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Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?
Yes and no. There are other providers in Germany. However, with the EU's neoliberal privatization policy the governments privatized many existing infrastructure. Vodafone bought the previous government company that owned all of the the cable TV infrastructure of Germany. So they are a monopoly of a particular type of internet connection. Depending on the place the alternatives could be too slow since Germany also has…
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In the US the FCC named and shamed broadband ISPs for their low speeds and "magically" those speeds increased over the following years. Overcome with greed, some ISPs eventually found ways to cheat on the benchmarks though. https://www.fcc.gov/general/measuring-broadband-america
The question was whether a customer could do something.
It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever? I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.