Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue here seems to be the landlord.
Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable. I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
151–160 of 225 posts
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make their own competing ISP. Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at. For s…
As I’ve stated in other comments, the reason western governments don’t do this more often boils down largely to regulatory capture. Every single time there’s been a large mobilization of efforts to regulate some aspect of tech - municipal broadband expansion, cable box standardization and openness, right to repair, DMCA reform, privacy reforms, mandatory binding arbitration clauses, EULA’s, provider monopolies, etc -…
In my city, the municipality owns much of the fibre. The country I live in owns a bank where you can get a mortgage pretty cheap. The good parts of GDPR or CRA are very good and was not disrupted by large corporations?
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#153Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I…
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
The internet connection, which was FTTN VDSL, never skipped a beat. It was completely solid.
This was accomplished by using batteries and generators.
The ISP was The Phone Company, so their Cold War-era central office had very good backup power.
The VRAD nodes scattered all over town had enough battery backup that (at least in my neighborhood) things stayed up until they brought out generators for those nodes.
And at my house, the VDSL box had its own UPS. And I also had a rather overkill UPS, and a portable generator
We ran the generator intermittently, mostly to charge batteries and chill down refrigerators.
It wasn't an awesome time. It was hot as hell. It was a pain in the ass to keep the generator fueled. We didn't even try to run the desktop PC rigs.
But, yeah: The internet was working fine.
(We charged batteries for neighbors, too. One or two neighbors also dragged over extension cords to run their own fridge. And I opened up the WiFi completely so everyone nearby could use it.
So if you were my neighbour in that 2008 power outage, I'd have just taken care of that internet problem for you. The range at 2.4GHz was amazingly good in that abnormally-quiet RF environment.)
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable. I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.
And every single construction project takes forever. And costs a fortune. And it is impossible to build housing fast enough.
The reason to be in Berlin has always been its great art scene. Now they are actively destroying it. What's left is a few Rossmanns and an Edeka.
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#157Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#158Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#159Using Starlink as your Internet provider does not protect you in any way when it comes to changes in pricing, speed or connectivity.
Yeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for his $1T payment.
Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
#160I 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.
Mesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with, it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet without some major technical breakthroughs.
It would be more about having a slow, free and backup internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the same time as the grid).
I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.