Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
wsj.com
wsj.com
And let's not talk about the landline broadband.... our rented appartment had a meager 1MBit download speed and 10MBit upload (yes, the reverse from what you would expect).
On the Autobahn, on many, many kilometers we had Edge only.
Compare that to my last travel to Iran: we had very fast LTE almost everywhere especially in the middle of the desert (it was heavily censored, but the infrastructure was working).
Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.
Just did a speed test and it's 31Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, but it varies wildly by location. But it's consistently fast enough that I can share out over Wifi from my cell phone so I can do my work and while my girlfriend watches youtube videos when we are travelling or the internet is down.
For home internet.. once it got faster then my wifi I stopped really caring a whole lot. 176Mbps on my last test.
If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.
Verizon tends to have the best coverage in the mid-west. If I was travelling a lot in the boonies I would get a second data-only account on Verizon's network just to increase my chances of always having internet.
Although nowadays that is less and less necessary as every hotel and most restaurants have wifi. Just look for a Mcdonalds and you can get internet most of the time.
This really depends on who you are using. When traveling between NorCal and SoCal, Sprint is basically garbage and Tmobile works decently for most of the trip.
Stretches of road in Utah would like to have a word with you. Specifically I-70.
Of course. But, you have to take into account the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to get the true picture. According to OECD data, Germany's PPP is 0.76 while India's is 18.128 (2019). On an average, there's a factor of 23.85 until prices reach a parity between them. Therefore, just because you pay ~ 2$ a month doesn't make it cheap for India.
https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...
(I'm referring to the comment which your comment was in response to, which I know you didn't post.)
This sounds like eastern europe pricing, western tends to be quite a bit higher. We're talking 20+ for DSL or "slow" fiber (100M or so), GB you won't get below 30+ or even 40~50 depending on the country.
We might be poorer but our telco operators pay market prices for equipment. Wages and land lease is also quite expensive. Financial cost is higher with rates and currency risk vs euro.
In Poland telco market had been skillfully and actively managed by regulator forcing constant investments in infrastructure and encouraging competition.
I pay 75€ per year for 1TB of mobile plan (calls ans SMS included).
https://biuroprasowe.orange.pl/blog/az-1-tb-danych-nielimito...
My parents broadband had been recently upgraded from 30Mbps to 150Mbps without any cost increase and without even asking for it. It is just the operator (UPC) trying to fend off competition (Orange, Netia). Cost is circa 10€ per month.
https://www.upc.pl/internet/kup-internet/
You can easily get 1Gbs in mayor cities.
Around the place where I live there is a lot of housing developments. Operators are racing to build the infrastructure and sign the clients even before the houses are finished.
Sudden population influxes produce problems.
Germany's growth rate in 2018 was 0.3%. The birth rate was 9.5/k versus a death rate of 11.3/k as of 2017, and the fertility rate been below replacement rate since the 1970s.
Uh, that'll be the fall of the Soviet Union adding ~16M East Germans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification
> Some countries don't even have a census every year
You don't need a census to get a population count. Governments definitely keep records of births/deaths, as well as immigration. Your own link provides population numbers for every year from 1900 through 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statis...
> Facts are so unpopular.
Indeed.
German population in 1998: 82,024,000.
German population in 2018: 83,000,000.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/germany-populatio...
The point remains: Germany has almost the same population it had 20 years ago. Blaming internet troubles on rapid population expansion is clearly false.
After reunification most areas in eastern germany were rebuild using fibre-optic but the system was a technical failure, too expensive to maintain as the last-mile was still copper mostly and hardware to translate was not available for too expensive - so no fast internet for most east german cities and villages until the mid-2000 as the state did not care anymore:
In the 90ies neoliberal privatisation wave, the privatisation of Bundespost created the Telekom AG that also got most of the infrastructure instead of playing it clever and keep infrastructure in state control like Sweden did and of course they have no incentive to invest in infrastructure because they want to generate profits and opening the ground is expensive - so copper it was again with fiber to the curb at the moment (VDSL) in most cities. The same idiocy was done with the Bundesbahn (rails) - instead of keeping the infrastructure in public hand it was given to the new Bahn AG that destroyed most of it in an insane effort to go public (I'm not joking, destroying trains to avoid having to sell them to the competition, stopping to service rail-tracks to spare some money... the problems are still felt)...
Telekom now behaves much the same way: Unfortunatly they are asshats and when another rural ISP or fibre ISP develops a city the Telekom comes shortly after and attempts to kill their profit instead of doing something about underdeveloped areas. Also the regulators failed to open their new VDSL lines for the market, so you'll have to pay their premium prices.
So that's it for landlines.
I learned that Sweden did the clever thing and build the fiber-infrastructure with public money only once and ISPs can rent the lines and compete with services / price but there is a fiber line to your home.
I don't know about mobile market in Sweden but in Germany there was a huge auction on the start of the 3G technology that cost most ISPs billions of euros for licences, this money is missing and the result are higher rates and less coverage.
Besides that there are 3 big corpoorations having 3 distinct networks (with no roaming, even in sparse areas) - Telefonica with the most budget prices and most users but only good coverage in bigger cities and basically non-existent 4G in rural areas, Vodafone (better, depending were you are) and Deutsche Telekom (best coverage but far from perfect)
Regulators did nothing and so the shitshow goes on....
Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue.
Germany goes for government revenue alone.
Politics has no good ideas and mostly follows their wishes (as with subsidiaries for copper/fiber to the curb) probably because costs for fiber to the home would be way worse - so we'll stay at 16mbit (most villages) /50mbit (if you are lucky) /250mbit (innercity / dense population districts)
Cable market is owned mostly by Vodafone and a total mess due to being crazily overbooked in most cities...
But it's not so bad, for 40-50€ you can get 100/40mbit in a lot of places
The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.)
Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.
In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.)
It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs.
And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...
From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.
Besides that the Canadian plans are capped (E.g. at 1 TB/month even at high prices), whereas I never had a capped plan in Germany.
Mobile phone plans are even worse, without even talking about coverage.
So yes, Germany is not great, but it can be worse.
Oh great, I can go through my monthly allotment in 5 minutes by clicking on the wrong link. So useful.
I've turned off LTE just so I get a chance to cutoff a click that turns out to be a 300pg PDF.
That's what they want... But still... A bad joke..
Mobile Plans are so expensive, because we germans auction away the licenses for the Frequencies for billions.
When people say Germany is expensive to the rest of Europe I think they need to check the salary levels in the rest of Europe. German internet and cell is probably cheaper going by percentage of average income.
It's only the lack of coverage (and maybe the blocked YouTube videos) that bother me in Germany.
The nordic countries have higher salaries. It's really against the trend: Pretty much everything is more expensive in sweden and denmark, except Internet connectivity.
I recently moved to Germany and now have 100mbit DSL for 25€/month (~$30) plus a phone contract with 6GB/month (more than enough since I have Wifi at home and work) including a phone flat for <€20/month. That's on par with the UK and cheaper than US and Canada.
> In 2009, Yellowstone completed a plan for wireless communications in the park. The plan dictates that cell phone and wifi will only be allowed for visitor safety and to enhance park operations. It restricts towers, antennas, and wireless services to a few limited locations in the park, in order to protect park resources and limit the impact on park visitors.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/park/cell-phone-wifi-yellows...
To me that would be what a national park ... just is.
This is quite annoying in the US, that national parks or deserts have no cell service. The places that need it most (life and death situations) - this is basically a health service there.
In comparison to Europe the mobile density is quite sparse there.
I would never rely on a cellular phone for safety in the wilderness. Cellular service and geolocation was never be 100% reliable, and batteries die. A paper map, a compass, basic skills, and knowledge of one’s limits go a long way.
It should be understood that an EPIRB should only be used in the most dire of circumstances.
I mean if I see asphalt then it is quite reasonable to expect also cell service.
I was i national parks in Europe and I always got cell service. I might be lucky (considering the article and posts about Germany) but in US I was in one park (actually two, but I don't remember situation with mobiles in one) and I did get cell service even before the gates.
I don't expect to have cell service if the park doesn't have roads, just hiking tracks.
You're endangering yourself which I wouldn't care that much about but you're also potentially endangering any search and rescue teams that have to come looking for you.
As for the lost scenario specifically. I don't know. Maybe carry a (paper) map and compass? In addition (not instead of) a GPS doesn't need cell reception to operate and works most places. (Some exceptions, like narrow canyons.)
It's certainly not routine for individuals or even groups to carry such devices in wilderness areas even if cell phone reception is spotty. I can go 2 hours north of where I live and hike on steep trails where there's no guarantee of cell phone reception.
But, if I'm being sensible and I'm off by myself in a remote area, yeah, I'd probably take one.
ADDED: And, yes, it's nice to be able to call for help if you really need it. But way too many folks think they can just get in trouble because they're really not prepared, call 911, and everything will be great. A number of states actually collect costs from people if they were negligent these days.
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).
The only reason you find mobile coverage sparse in the US is because the US has large, nearly unpopulated areas, whereas Europe doesn’t.
The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...
You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.
In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.
Eastern European countries mostly have great internet (especially landline, probably above average for mobile). I always assumed it must be because they came later to the party and went directly for modern technologies. As opposed to Germany who had telephone lines all over and then decided to get the most out of them because rebuilding with fiber would cost the companies too much.
The state-owned telcos were privatized in 90-ties, because the state is a bad owner, by ...state owned telcos from the west (Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica, etc). Of course, the first thing they tried was to move the obsolete equipment from their home countries to Eastern Europe for the price of a new one and for the money to get the new equipment in their home countries.
That didn't work out, because new competitors appeared, that built FTTH/Tripple Play networks from the scratch, with very low red tape at the time. That made the old DSL equipment not competetive in the cities (some even wanted to charge based on data transferred via DSLAM, making the flat-rate FTTH even better deal), so the ILECs had to do something with it - which meant to build their own FTTH network. DSLAMs were relegated to country side.
That's how Eastern Europe got fast and cheap fixed-line Internet in their cities. In the country, it is still mixed bag, better bet is LTE & 3G.
In Norway, they demanded the networks cover 97% of the geographic areas. It's why you might get 3G or even 4G in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain, wherever you might drive.
However, in the UK the inept politicians demanded 97% of the population, not geographically.
So all the UK networks just built perfect coverage for all the cities and towns, and could mostly ignore everywhere else.
Which means even in the populous South East England whenever I drive slightly outside my town towards one of the bigger cities 20-30 minutes away I can not have a conversation in my car as the connection is always lost. Nor on the train into London. And also must be a nightmare for the small villages that fall outside the 97%.
(On the plus side whenever we go to the country pubs around here, I can not be reached, and noone can look at the phone during dinner...)
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.
It was also surprising as I've had good service in France, UK, Belgium, Spain, UK, etc. I expected the Germans to be stereotypically efficient on this.
Contrasting Germany and the U.K. offers a really good illustration of how important it is to set incentives correctly. The U.K. also relies heavily on unbundling, through BT. But when British Telecom was privatized, the U.K. intensely studied the issue of how to set the appropriate incentives: http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_semin.... The end result was a regulatory structure where rates were set such that BT ended up being very profitable. (Last year, BT's profit margin was around 16%, versus 3% for Telekom.) That created the incentive for BT to invest in pushing fiber further into its DSL network.
edit: there are other issues in the UK, like fibre tax, that makes the situation even more difficult for competition.
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 elsewhere had 100 or even 1000mbit connections (e.g. South Korea, various Nordic countries).
Now, widely available and inexpensive FTTH is the next goal here, although I'd say the availability of FTTC is "enough" for the vast majority of people to be happy with it. Which is just as well, as I'd guess we're 20 years aware from seeing FTTH. I realise 5g is starting to become a thing, but it's unlikely to ever be ubiquitous outside of major cities, and is bound to suffer once contention becomes an issue.
* FTTC: fibre to the cabinet * FTTH: fibre to the home
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.
However I feel BT as a company needs big changes. They are a monopoly because most people (especially older people) don't realise how easy it is to change. Their prices are consistently higher than competitors, and they get a lot of government incentives.
I now live in Lithuania where most households within city limits can get 1000/1000 FTTH, and even in remote areas you can get decent 4G speeds (50mbit+), and it's costs less than half of what BT charge for the cheapest BT Infinity package. This has all been rolled out in the last few years, and I can't see BT doing anything like that anytime soon in the UK.
As an example, I just checked a postcode in the city centre of Aberdeen (Scotland) - no availability.
that's not always true. It's still not clear if they are allowed to upgrade without putting new cables in.
if the last-mile is on copper you can replace it with vectoring (FTTC+Vectoring) the problem is that it is only legally allowed if there is a second network, because LLU and vectoring is currently incompatible. and the telekom of germany needs to sublicense. and fttb (or better) is basically not feasible. (exceptions prove the rule)
actually all cities between karlsruhe and freiburg will be gradually changed to use fttc+vectoring which will improve data rates up to 300mbit/40mbit (most often to 100/40 or 50/10)
Of course this applies to other providers too - why would you invest and add infrastructure if you have to share it with your competitors anyway? I think allowing providers to use their network contributions exclusively for a certain time, let's say 2 years, is a worthwhile incentive.
No, it is not. The problem could have been solved decades ago. Helmut Kohl of the CDU (conservative party) turned back a decision of his predecessor to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. Germany could have had fiber to the home for 20 years at the least reachable areas and for 35 in major cities.
Rumor has it that nowadays, Telekom is postponing fiber because they don't want to sublicense their network to other carriers so they wait until they are getting a better deal. This is funny because Telekom is owned by many German small sharesholders (since that's how they have privatized the former public agency) - which has led to a situation where Germans don't get better internet because they are hoping for higher profits.
[1]https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...
There is legit talk about changing the hugest plans here from 100/40 to 120/20. It’s that bad. Which is moot anyway because 40% of the “new” network probably cannot get that speed anyway.
In Germany eventually I ended up with 50mbit VDSL which was fine, but having to get Telekom out to connect a phone line in a new building was not fun. Lots of hoops had to be jumped through.
Coming back home to Sydney, stuck on 3mbit ADSL2+ (4km from exchange) was also not fun, but at least it was upgraded to HFC NBN a year later. We're making progress... but as in Germany, it all depends on where you live.
Telstra (at the time "Telecom Australia") was drawing up plans to roll out FTTH all the way back in 1994(!) before being privatized whole cloth in 1998
Some of their delightful missteps leading up to (and during) the NBN rollout included
- Selling Dial-Up services cheaper than competitors by virtue of not needing to pay line rental or other fees
- Describing ADSL as a "fetish" and saying ISDN was "good enough"
- Running a competitor's (Optus) HFC rollout into the ground. Large swathes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to this day have "Telstra Cable" on one side of a street and "Optus Cable" on the other, simply because Telstra wanted to bankrupt Optus out of trying to avoid using their copper network, and thus, paying fees
- Breaking the ADSL 1 standard to prevent having to buy more DSLAM backhaul. The 8/1 ADSL standard was changed to "at most" 1.5/256
- Attempting to roll out FTTN across the country in 2006, on the provision that they NOT be required to allow competing providers access to their equipment (this was a large part of what precipitated Labor's original NBN vision in 2007)
- Stalling NBN negotiations as long as possible while gold plating their "4G" network, along with NewsCorp (which owns a 33% stake in Telstra) parroting the "WIRELESS IS THE FUTURE!" line, complete with ads for the "FASTEST 4G NETWORK IN AUSTRALIA"
- Staffing the entire NBN board after the LNP victory in 2013 with "ex" Telstra executives, whom were not required to divest their shares in Telstra, while actively negotiating terms to use Telstra's network(!)
There's many other egregious Telstra incidents like charging 5x the market rate for peering on their network (being the biggest ISP has its "perks") and repeated nation-wide outages of their services due to outsourced network operations, but these are the ones directly related to the NBN today
Also interesting that even the reporter fell for one of the lamest excuses: "Among them are the country’s large geographic area". Northern neighbor Sweden, which happens to be one of the countries with fiber connections even in very rural areas, is larger and much less densely populated.
Mobile isn't terribly better than in Germany (there are still many areas with fairly poor coverage) but it's way cheaper, yes. For instance I use a French SIM card for traveling, since it covers the entire EU, EFTA countries and North America. Unlimited calls/SMS and 15GB for 15€/month.
As recently as 2017 they ranked behind Russia in fixed avg mbps according to Akamai's report and were 5th slowest in Europe. They were #51 globally at that point and Germany was 50% faster and ranked #25 globally.
I'm sure it has improved some in the last two years, I doubt it has dramatically leaped forward.
They've also performed relatively poorly on mobile speeds (from early 2017):
"France got absolutely walloped by all its neighbours, and finished behind 21 other European countries"
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170224/we-all-knew-frances-mobile-...
For example, I pay 35€ for 16GB LTE.
Also, while the Vodafone net is rather good, I read they are replacing their 3G with 4G, which means stuff gets faster, but only for people with newer phones.
During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in in the subsequent years.
In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the sudden, unexpected windfall.
The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the better.
The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary infrastructure.
Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in 2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):
https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-raises-6-point-5...
I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_ worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad.
However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier connection.
I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload & download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using another Internet provider).
My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank them enough as before the copper cable often did not work at all) and if I remember correctly they're paying ~60 CHF/month for symmetric 1Gb/s (sunrise.ch).
In general I think that in Switzerland we're currently all ok with having to pay ~60 CHF/month for such a speed.
I get my internet over 4g here because land lines are 10/1 mbps.
Still, 4g is 80/15 or so, so it's viable for now (sunrise too)
We lived near Tübingen and internet was pretty terrible. The options were 50MBit downstream (not guaranteed) VDSL or cable internet. With cable internet we had 200/20MBit, downstream was as promised, but upstream was often actually around 2MBit. Then there were regular service interruptions throughout the region. At some point, internet would be down for a few hours at least one Saturday/Sunday per month or so. (Maybe during the week as wel, but I was at work.)
We moved to The Netherlands a year ago, we have synchronous fiber of up to 500/500 (we currently use 200/200, and fiber is not available everywhere). It hasn't been down a single time over the last year.
I'm thinking about it for my mom: the cableco's STB shows every channel in the guide, whether you get it or not. And you only realize it when you try to go to the channel.
They have updated the box to show more ads in the guide though... Argh.
Streaming video is not the same experience as TV. My parents would never sit down and binge watch or even watch a video on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. It's just not how they see TV. They wouldn't even have watched a VHS or DVD it's just not how they see TV. To them it's more like radio it's read only, you sit you watch, no control other than on or off.
The 500Mbps is at 99€/month
I lived that way for a decade. It was terrible.
It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection and we are located in a larger city near the center, not even in a rural area that needs an extra fiber just for us.
So it doesn't come as a surprise that German companies are so much behind Americans in the tech sector. My company has a lot of manufacturing customers and we don't even need to think about a cloud strategy because most of them are still on 6/0.6 MBit/s DSL connections. So it's on-premises or nothing.
I would've probably never signed such a contract but I'm not the boss and maybe other providers are just as bad. But I certainly wouldn't have kept them as my provider after that.
Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies instead of small ones.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...
And the UK is 50th... I feel it should be higher than Germany.
Compared to Thailand (including in the middle of the forest), Romania and other random countries I have been, it is strange to see such a difference.
No single person ever said "I'll pay a premium for an M3"!
https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?
I thought Canada’s oligopoly was bad, but one company for a much bigger country sounds like the perfect recipe for this type of thing.
Pretty much, yes.
"Deutsche Telekom" is the company that came out of the former state telecom company. So they own the national telephone network.
Appart from a few local networks the only alternative is Internet through the tv cable network. However that never got complete coverage in Germany.
So for a lot of people Telekom is the only company that can offer them Internet connectivity. All the others are just reseller offers.
Also there have been some pretty nasty strategies where they actively prevent other companies from building parallel infrastructure: Places where Telekom didn't offer fast Internet for years, then a competitor builds a fiber network and coincidentally just shortly afterwards Telekom offers fast Internet, so the competitor looses because he can't get as much income as expected.
For DSL, essentially, yes. Everybody else rents their infrastructure from them. Cable is a general competitor, but it suffers from other problems and will often be much slower than advertised during peak hours.
In the U.K., France, and Germany, the phone operator (BT, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom) were kept intact, but regulated. In the 1990s, they were required to lease out access to the phone network to competitors at regulated, wholesale rates. The idea is that you can't have effective competition for the last mile anyway, so you might as well put that into a monopoly, and require it to offer access to the last mile loops to competitors. (Obviously you then have to regulate the price of that wholesale service otherwise the monopoly can easily circumvent that by pricing wholesale access sky high.)
This approach is common, and theoretically sound. Something similar is used for the electric market in the U.S. (a local, rate-regulated monopoly owns the electric wire into your house, but it is required to buy electricity from competitive, wholesale markets.) But it's hard to do correctly--if you set the regulated rates too low, you kill off any incentive to invest. If you set them too high, consumers pay too much. Nobody really did it that great--of the largest five EU countries (the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy), all have slow Internet relative to the U.S. Spain and France are turning that around recently by investing a bunch of government money in building fiber.
The U.S. situation was better due to an accident of history. Unlike most of Europe, almost everyone already had two wires into their house (cable and telephone). The U.S. implemented unbundling for DSL service for a relatively short but key period (early 2000s). That set a floor--cable had to be better than DSL to compete.
That never happened in the big EU countries. If you look at the OECD statistics, the thing that really holds them back is very high DSL usage: https://data.oecd.org/broadband/fixed-broadband-subscription.... Germany, France, and the U.K. have 30 DSL subscribers per 100 people, versus just 7 for the U.S.
Probably gigabit connections? More than 1000 megabits / second requires hardware that is still rather uncommon in consumer grade routers and computers.
> Telecom giants in France and Portugal were already rolling out all-fiber networks early in the decade, in keeping with a 2010 European Union report that recommended that national carriers invest in fiber. How Fast 5G Mobile Internet Feels
But Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s dominant operator, took a less costly route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called vectoring.
Such kind of stupid short term greed driven decisions slow down progress by decades. I've seen somewhere, that Australia suffered a similar problem, where government decided that copper will be good enough, and halted deployment of fiber optics. And now it's becoming a big problem.
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents/webcon...
I have bette mobile internet and call quality on every tiny village of every other country in Europe than what I have in a large German city.
And I thought I was getting screwed when I could only get 120Mbps with Spectrum Cable.
In a suburban area outside of Tacoma ~300mbps was about $50, and now just outside of Seattle I pay $75 for 1 gbps. The non-gigabit plans were south of $50.
I Googled a bit and most websites said Americans generally pay somewhere between $50-$60.
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.
At least "Duecherbuderpest" is not still fixated on making you all use ISDN. "Duecherbuderpest" is what other Telco's use to refer to the German PTT as.
It is kind of ridiculous how they actually punish loyal customers by making them pay more after two years if you don't do anything. Sure, enough people are lazy enough to make this model feasible, but just imagine the butcher you've been getting your meat at for years suddenly goes like "hey you come here all the time so I'm gonna charge you 30% more"
For $120 I could bump that up to 750 up & down.
And a bit more about the 750 plan here https://www.telus.com/en/deals-and-bundles/internet-750. The 150 404s on their website at the moment https://www.telus.com/en/shop/home/product/internet-150-150 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Th exact prices you see seem to vary depending on where it thinks you are, and it requires a street address and unit number to quote you exactly what I get quoted. I’m not going to give you my address to verify my prices, because I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.
But if you google around you’ll see their pretty typical (eg. googling “telus internet 750 review” will give you a result that links to Telus’ page with Google adding that there’s a price range of $95-$140)
edit: more info, if you’re really curious https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30805481-Telus-fibre-towns...
Do you think maybe that’s why I said “compared to elsewhere in Canada” and not “compared to every single other place in Canada”?
I have no clue how you convinced yourself I was unaware of this obvious fact. Two different links in my post clearly spell out every community it’s available in.
Due to heavy oversubscribing cable is an inferior product in Germany (on weekends actual speeds drop to a fraction of the advertised line speed), and the biggest cable provider by far (Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone) has serious user support and service quality issues, not to mention they only offer ipv6 dual-stack lite connectivity.
This was meant as an incentive for investment ("if you build new stuff it's all yours"), but it has cemented the usual premiums for higher bandwidth as a permanent fixture, instead of something that only hits early adopters before trickling down to entry levels. So now you have a situation where quite a few people would be able to upgrade to something like 50 mbps down, sticking to the 16 mbps contract that does the job as well (when you're not hooked to cloud services yet, something Germans might tend to be wary of anyways, given the data protection mindset). In a market where VDSL is widely rejected (because it would almost double the bill), who would invest in even faster infrastructure?
EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes. That is more in line with what I would have thought.
So Germany averages 10mbps?! That is terrible.
End even for suburban areas, there are options for high speed air links.
1. De facto monopoly of the state-owned telecom provider suffering from mind boggling not-invented here syndrome. They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols for decades while the world largely moved to china-built commodity which is orders of magnitude cheaper.
2. Political resistance against declaring broadband as an essential utility. There was a parliamentary vote in 2011 to declare a right for households/businesses to get broadband connections (as is the case for electricity/sewers/telephone). It was declined with votes of the conservative/liberal coalition at the time. Nobody even talks about this anymore, other culture war topics seem more important nowadays. Whether to allow wolves to be hunted seems like a more important topic in the national debates.
3. In general there seems to be an unfortunate climate of hostility against technology that reminds me of the Luddites. Smart phones and laptops are banned in high schools, etc. People mostly focus on the dangers and downsides of technology vs the benefits.
Source: Born in Germany, I moved to California a few years ago and can see the difference.
As to the thing with the schools, that depends? There are (even public) schools where laptops or tablets are mandatory, which lead to discussions how kids with not so rich parents could afford them. In the 90ies i tought some interestd teachers how to network, installing and administering gateways, proxies, and so on. So don't overgeneralize this, please. I bet it's not evenly distributed in the whole of CA either. Furthermore, what educational use do cell phones have for teens, when they are distracted by viral videos of degrading nature, or texting while not following the teacher? You could call me a luddite in parts, while i would answer with anti-consumerism. It all depends... HTH
Fritz!Box routers? I was shocked how expensive they are, and how widespread.
http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/k...
In Ilorin, Nigeria, I can get 500kbps on good days. Most times, the speeds hover around 100kbps. I can hardly watch YouTube at anything more than 360p. Even that resolution buffers too much sometimes.
Same happened with 4g & 3g beforehand. Result being, only profitable areas are covered and competition has no chance to get into the market.
Sadly in German politics it's easier to get voted for tax cuts (because they get money by selling frequencies) then promising good internet coverage :(
Depending on your mobile provider, you also only have edge connectivity in most of the building.
I live in Moscow. I've heard you can find even better deals here, but it all depends on your location. One block of a city is usually covered by 3-4 internet providers, so you have a choice, most of the time.
Customer support is top notch, they installed it the same day, never had any problems.
My providers is OnLime is you are interested.
The city average is 200-300 Mbps.
Someone streaming something, someone playing games, someone downloading something, this all adds up quickly and it starts to be noticeable.
Uploading anything took freaking ages on DSL, I even used mobile data to do it, it's an important part of life today.
Would rather investment went into getting more areas up to a reasonable speed.
Silly example I know but real.
That's my problem as a Dutchman in Germany. Server still in NL, hosted at my parents', because it would be impossible here to host at home without registering a company (volatile IP, forced to change very 24 hours, only business connections get a static IP). Right now I'm attempting an off-site backup a second time, which will take a week or so, just like last time. Due to the interrupts and resumptions every 24h, there are lots of unused pack files, which you can prune, but then the system ran out of RAM during pruning and the backup doesn't appear recoverable.
The 4.5MiB/s upload I'm getting is the fastest possible connection in the centre of a city of about 50k people. I checked what it would cost to have fiber installed, and I'm not even sure it would be worth it for a company, let alone for a private person. It's cheaper to hire a moving company and go somewhere else. In the village of 1k people that my parents live in, I can get symmetric 500mbps since 2012 or something, they give a static IP, a /48 IPv6 range, reverse DNS...
Have children
For all of this I pay
- 39,99 for the cable - 29,99 for the DSL - 30,00 for unlimited LTE
On the other hand, there are very small villages with population < 500 with only 10 or 20Mbit/s DSL available. However, I think that this is to be expected in these areas and any complaint about it is, at least in this day and age, a first world problem and your own fault for living in the middle of nowhere.
I dream of a land with 10Gbit symmatrical networking for an affordable price. It would be future proof. I could role my own server. Heck i could probably start a cloud business and scale up if i wanted to somehow by buying more fiber lines.
Where can you get unlimited mobile data plans in Germany?
Now, offer service that cuts my average ping to multiplayer servers in half and I'll get excited. Give me a plan with guaranteed 4G coverage no matter where in the US I go and I'll get excited. That's not going to happen though.
It's so bad that I can't even call many times during my daily commute.
Spent a day trying to upload my first vlog & just gave up. The cable based modem was not only slow, but unstable in the heat. ️
Same video takes seconds to upload on a Singapore gigabit connection.
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.
I have zero choice of ISP: I had to first go to a small company who maintain my line, who then pointed me at another company for the contract.
Though rated at 1gbit, I can only get max 500mbit from my ISP, and then that costs a whooping 90 EUR a month, without any phone or TV service.
In the end I took 300mbit at just under 70 EUR a month. Happy enough here, Netflix is great in HDR, but the costs and choice are ridiculous even when you have full fiber in Germany...
For instance, you pay 10€ / month in Italy and you get 50 GB of LTE data. In Germany you pay 10€ and you get at most 3GB
2009: Widespread broadband for everyone by 2010
2010: At least 50 MBit/s for most households by 2014
2011: 50 MBit/s everywhere by 2018
2014: Let's hope we can reach this
2015: Digital Agenda -> 50 Mbit/s by 2018
2016: The goal cannot be reached
2016: Gigabit nets by 2025, fastest internet on the planet
2018: The goal cannot be reached
I have a whopping 3 Mbit/s at my home. It's so slow the technician that wanted to sell me a 10 MBit line didn't believe me when I said that I decline because it's not possible. Mind you, I live in an area where most houses are from 2010 or newer so it's not like they had no opportunity to set up decent connections.
On my daily train commute there are two 10 minute patches where I cannot make phone calls...the list goes on.
Pretty embarrassing for a so called industrial nation. I had better connections in every single country I have been to.
A common excuse that you hear is that Telekom had plans to roll out fibre everywhere in the 1990s but had to cut that plan due to the cost of setting up a phone system in East Germany.
tl;dr: it's pretty bad
Take a train in Japan and you will weep because no matter what country you are from, your trains suck in comparison.
I live a 40 minute drive from London but it costs £45 for a day ticket on decades old, cramped trains.
It's fast because prices are 50-100x as pricey as other OECD country. ~$10/gb in Canada vs. $25 for a 100gb plan in France.
Of course it's fast when utilizing it has heavy costs.
So much wasted capacity...
Meanwhile, I've experienced reliable high speed (both direction) internet in Thailand and even Bali. Perhaps I got lucky, but imo there's no excuse for shit internet in US or NL (or Germany).
Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.
It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow internet.
To fix this, the country needs lots of investments. E.g. they lack fiber optic cables in most of the country because the state monopolist pretending to be an actual company simply chose not to invest in this and the German government was completely OK with this for decades. This probably is part of the reason why 4G sucks here because there simply is nothing decent to connect the base stations to in most of the country. Fixing this will take ages and there are very little signs of this actually happening. E.g. most of Berlin has no access to fiber optic cable even though most of former East Berlin has gone through 25 years plus of heavy construction, renovation, etc. Apparently it never occurred to anyone here that stuffing some fiber optic cable in the ground would have been a clever idea. This is a key difference with e.g. the Netherlands where they've been putting cables in the ground for decades whenever there was any opportunity to do so. As a consequence, you can get fiber to your home in most places and reliably fast 4G in most of the country. This is the case across most of Europe with the exception of Germany.
The German government meanwhile is pretty hopeless. They have a "digitization" minister even. No idea what that means but it does not seem to yield more than weird photo opportunities for politicians without any apparent clue babbling about digitization (which is an actual word they keep on using with a straight face as if it means something). Also this minister is apparently not actually responsible for straightening out the dysfunctional mess that is the Deutsche Telekom, O2, and Vodafone kartel. That apparently is the responsibility for the traffic minister: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet-digit....
So yea, it's finally getting better in India?
Food delivered in middle of nowhere in 20 minutes.
Everything is soo good here except the heat but now with monsoon it's more bearable.
I wonder what Germany will do. Maybe Germany wants everyone to work for big automobile companies because when I worked at Audi, we had 1gbps internet.