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Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

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Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#171
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the requirements in the policy. 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…

But it’s still Google’s choice?

They clearly didn’t publish a guarantee or an obligation that they will peer with anyone who meets the criteria.

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#172
post #7

Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts? If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part? I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.

Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?

There's no monopoly, it is a cartel. Most big businesses in Germany operate in cartels to fuck the customer.

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#173
post #145

Is anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone or Telekom?

No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster.

We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#174
post #48

I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month. The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality cou…

And here I am in the US paying $50+/mo for CenturyLink to give me 20Mb down and 0.5Mb up.

And here I am in Hong Kong paying a too high (there's cheaper offerings) 248HKD (USD32) for 2gbit/s up/down

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

What you are describing sounds mostly like a US-problem, not sure it's a western gov problem in general? 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?

Even in America, there are plenty of places that have municipal ISPs. But it has some... interesting political dynamics.

Basically, because people move out of cities that don't have good Internet connectivity, and it's unprofitable for private industry to serve rural America, rural America's towns and cities wound up just building their own ISPs. However, since a lot of these cities tend to be in blood-red states, a lot of these networks get kneecapped by state legislatures who are bought and paid for by cable companies worried that the government will subsidize Internet service into oblivion.

For example, in Utah we have a municipal fiber network, but because our state politicians are bought and paid for by Comcast, the UTOPIA[0] network is wholesale-only. That is, the towns in UTOPIA can lay the fiber, but they can't sell you Internet. At least, not without doing a shitton of accounting work to prevent subsidization by making sure they're accounting for costs that a fully private system would theoretically[1] incur. So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out. Other states have even more onerous laws[2] regarding municipal ISPs.

The thing about regulation is that it can either be constructed to improve competition and market freedom (i.e. antitrust) or it can be constructed to build moats around existing competitors. The state is the root of almost[3] all monopoly, after all. Additionally, it's difficult to write competent regulation without expert opinion; and if all the experts work for 2 companies, it's very easy for those companies to 'keep the story straight' and hoodwink the public. If you have a public option, then you can 'prove them wrong', so to speak.

[0] Utah Telecommunications OPen Infrastructure Agency.

For what it's worth, I'm not in the UTOPIA coverage area, but they did also have a Google Fiber buildout in my neighborhood. I jumped off Comcast almost immediately.

[1] To be clear here, almost no telecom last-mile is actually fully private, that's why Ronald "Fuck Antitrust" Reagan was willing to break up AT&T. This is just to make UTOPIA's life harder.

[2] https://www.baller.com/wp-content/uploads/BallerStokesLideSt...

[3] Strictly speaking, in a perfect ancap world of perfect competition with no aggression on homesteaded virgin land, you'd still see monopolies develop. Both because certain companies have value as infrastructure and because someone will break the whole 'no aggression' thing pretty damned quick and make themselves the state.

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act. South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share…

Because western governments (and those whose governments were modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and corruption. It’s why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked, or reversed reforms like net neutrality or “nutrition labels” on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to “fair share” regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is hugely in…

The "tech" companies are on the other side of Telcos.

See Hivane and HOPUS

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#177
I have had sporadic problems with Vodafone Germany’s IPv4 routing for months, sent detailed analyses and refused in advance to pay for any technicians they might send because the problem could not be on my property. They sent two technicians who confirmed my view. Then they charged me 160 EUR for them without fixing the issue.

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#178
post #86

Telefonica does this. Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it. I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to app…

The logic is money.

Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#179
post #173
post #145

Is anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone or Telekom?

No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster. We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodaf…

Use the same provider

Re: Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

#180

Inter.link is openly peering on IX's tho. So I'm unclear why the angst. https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/

No guarantees of performance to peers, no one's carrying peered traffic to other peers or upstreams.

That's giving free transit/route leaks

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