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Comment by jbi | Hacker News Reader

Too bad, Deutsche Telekom is blocking fiber built-up for customers in Germany by pushing VDSL vectoring.

Is that the reason for the slow fiber roll-out in Germany? I just looked at Berlin and there's a small neighborhood in Mitte that has it, otherwise there's nothing. Can't any other company than Telekom lay out fiber?

Telekom are toying with (super) vectoring and g.fast to avoid having to roll out fiber to every household. I guess it makes financial sense because the are still moving the Network Access points closer to homes and these are usually connected with fibre. However this will work until 500-1000Mbps at best and probably only for a few people, so at some point they have to do FTTH especially because cable providers are already pushing 400Mbps in many places in Germany.

DNS.NET and Versatel (now 1&1) have their own fibre network in some areas of Berlin and they actually do FTTH if you are one of the lucky few. I live in a pretty dense and central area of Berlin and all i get is 50Mbps VDSL, because i want to avoid the cable providers that have an inferior network. For private usage it's still okay and i have access to 1Gbps at work, but i still can't wait for Vectoring to arrive.

Can you explain:

"I want to avoid the cable providers that have an inferior network"

I live in Köln, and because of the distance to the nearest loop, I don't get the 100mbit offer from Telekom… only 18mbit vdsl at best. I went to UnityMedia cable and get 200mbit. Unity is an Evil Media Company, but I haven't noticed anything wrong with their network. So what am I missing?

ds-lite + shoddy aftrs unless you're on a business contract. meaning a subpar ipv4 experience. at least we have router freedom now.

Kind of a Berlin problem i guess. In the places i lived before i had UnityMedia and was generally pretty happy with it. In west Berlin you have Kabel-Deutschland which is also okay (but offers only Fair Use Flats yuck), but in the east where i live there is only Telecolumbus if you choose cable. While they offer 400Mbps there are a lot of dense places where people complain about <10Mbps in the evening or the weekends.

In general using Cable, more people have to share the same bandwidth, especially if the provider cheaped out and only does whats necessary. You don't even get your own IPv4, you are basically sharing public IPs with other people through NAT, which makes accessing anything at your home more complicated as well.

Any idea why we have nothing like M-net though? I understand Berlin is poor, but with all the tech startups nowadays, I'm sure there would be demand in a few neighborhoods.

This is one domain where Berlin is clearly lagging behind compared to most European cities. The LTE coverage is another one too. I personally don't care much, but the reliability of Telekom's network in Berlin is a total joke (Vodafone seems a bit better, O2/E-plus suck but it's cheap at least).

Probably because Berlin's status as a tech hub is a relatively recent development and before that the city was way behind other major german cities that had strong economies for decades. DNS.NET does FTTH but they are super small compared to MNET, so i hope this will get better in the next few years. Cable in the west of Berlin through Kabel Deutschland is fast and okay, just in the east with Telecolumbus it sucks pretty badly in some areas.

I have no problem with Telekom LTE though, seems to generally work fine and gives me >50Mbps in most areas, it's often faster than my 50Mbps at home.

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