331–340 of 343 posts
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This expectation & comparison is part of why “Death Valley Germans” is such a meme.
For reference: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun... It's quite the read. It's also recommended reading if you go to the US West and your expectations are mostly informed by tooling around the countryside of Western Europe (or the eastern US for that matter).
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I'm upstate ny and pay $80 for internet. This gets me 100Mbit down and a paltry 10Mbit up. I don't consider this "broadband" as the upload speed is so slow. It's also highway robbery... there's no choice here.
Could you get slower for less? Because that's the standout characteristic of the German market, something like 16/1 is almost universally available at about 30€ or less, but going and faster, if available, comes at a steep premium.
Also, the way they hide "offers" per customer/location is maddening. For my location, a new internet installation at my current speeds is $45 for 2 years. Meanwhile, look at me paying $80 per month -.- Thank you my senators and reps.
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> However, in the UK the inept politicians demanded 97% of the population, not geographically. Which is completely backwards. You don't need mobile where you live (as long as you can get a landline), you need it everywhere else.
Well I don't really know anyone that has a landline any more, so my correction would be you need it everywhere. Especially with 5G arriving soon.
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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.
As an example, I just checked a postcode in the city centre of Aberdeen (Scotland) - no availability.
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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…
I would agree Fiber to the CAB is really all that home users need. A lot of the whining in places like Faringdon Central London is one or two business wanting to do freeload off consumer BB. I helped my last company move at super short notice < 2 weeks and we got Last mile ethernet 70Meg as a stop gap before our 100 Meg line was delivered a month early
I have 80/20 FTTC, and the only thing bandwidth has ever been an issue for is first-time cloud backups, where I'm uploading 1-2TB of data.
I'd still like it to be cheaper though. I'd also like it to be faster, but perhaps part of that is just because I know it can be, and has been for decades in other parts of the world.
It's not only the average/median that's bad, it's the lower percentiles that are the most embarrassing. My parents live in a central, fairly dense neighborhood of a town of 40k people. Their only option until 2017 (!!!) was 64k dialup or very flaky 3G. It wasn't only their street that was affected, but the whole part of town, including a newly developed (but mostly empty, what a surprise) business park built from EU…
> They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols Fritz!Box routers? I was shocked how expensive they are, and how widespread.
I live in Central Berlin and the issue is present here as well. I had to choose the Telekom, one of the most expensive providers, because they intentionally blocked requests from other providers to service me with internet in my apartment.
How did they do that? No port free ? Do you know about https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerd... ?
I ordered service from 3 service providers and each of them called me a month after ordering and told me that Telekom is telling them there are technical problems and my bandwidth target of 50 MBit is impossible to deliver, so they aren't able to serve me.
I called Telekom after that and they told me everything is fine and aggressively tried to convert me to a customer. Tried another provider after that, still failed, so I went with...Telekom...and who would've thought...a week after that I had internet again.
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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.
it does kind of make sense if you consider that roads and rail lines are good places to put data cables, and that you have to dig up roads for the cables to be placed. so having the authority do do so within one ministry sounds like a good idea.
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How ever did people get by for thousands of years before cell phones existed?
The didn't. If you fell down into a crevice, you died. You could apply the same spurious argument to anything - how did people ever get by for thousands of years before antibiotics/vaccines/electricity/water purification existed? They didn't, they lived their nasty, brutish and short lives, and died.