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Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
- siddhant 7y agoIt’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.
- WoodenChair 7y agoWhy do you consider that expensive? If it’s reliable, it sounds very reasonable to me. 1 dinner out.
- whatshisface 7y agoIt's all relative to what you can get in the market. It's very expensive compared to what is available in countries with good internet.
- lloda 7y agoI pay about that for ‘10 Gbps’ in CH. I don't even have a machine with a 10 Gbps port, but there isn't anything cheaper here that makes sense.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoThat's connection speed what payload do you get on average.
- lloda 7y agoThat's why I put the speed in quotes. I get about 900 Mbps both ways on my computer that has only a 1 Gbps port.
- rsynnott 7y agoDoes the ISP equipment even have a 10Gbps port? I know someone here (Ireland) who had an early consumer 1Gbps FTTP connection. The ISP provided equipment had 100Mbps ports and 802.11n...
- mic47 7y agowell, maybe because in some other EU countries it's 22 EUR for 500Mbit :-)
- siddhant 7y agoMy point of comparison is the internet prices/quality in India. Post Jio, fast internet seems to be practically free over there.
- TheRealSteel 7y agoWow, I wish you could get a reliable 50mbps connection in Australia for that cheap. The government is still installing new Fibre to the node (DSL) there which can max out as low as 12mbps.
- deminature 7y agoHome internet regularly costs $80 in the US, or roughly €72. €40 seems pretty reasonable by comparison.
- barsonme 7y agoReally? $80? I haven't seen $80 for internet. 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.
- deminature 7y agoI'm in NYC and after tax, my bill is roughly $80.
- throw7 7y agoI'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.
- usrusr 7y agoCould 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.
- throw7 7y agoI did a quick login online to search for current "offers", and they're only offering higher tier speeds. Now, it might be possible, but that takes calling them up and I'm not in the mood. 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.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoSo! that's competitive for a 35Mbs (inc phone service) in the Uk - consumer broadband doesn't need more than 35-50Mbs any how. 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.
- sorokod 7y ago100 Mbit/s can be had for 20 euro for first 12 months in Berlin. 40 afterwards.
- ahartmetz 7y agoUsually it's best to "cancel" the contract immediately after signing, then when the cancellation comes in effect a year later it's easy to get the new customer rate again.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoOr if you don't mind the hassle and have another provider available at your location, switch to it via some broker like check24 and get it even cheaper. I'm currently on 30/6 mbits for 11€ for two years, before that I had 120/10 mbits for 17€ over two years. They would turn into 25€ and 35€ after two years. 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"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AdrianB1 7y agoNot mind-blowing. Comparing to Romania, where internet is "cheaper" and faster, the salaries in Germany are much higher, so the cable guy costs more. Many times more. So in the end Internet is just faster in Romania, not cheaper, because compared to the salaries it is quite expensive.
- crawdingle 7y ago110 CAD (~83 USD) for 7Mbps Down 0.5Mbps Up in Atlantic Canada.
- msbarnett 7y agoThat’s insane compared to elsewhere in Canada. $95 CAD for 150 Mbps up & down, unlimited data, here. For $120 I could bump that up to 750 up & down.
- RandyRanderson 7y agoPlease name your provider, location and url to your plan. I find your claim very hard to believe.
- msbarnett 7y agoThat’s Telus’ fibre optic offering. You can see an overview of their plans here: https://www.clearwest.ca/telus-home-solutions/telus-internet/monthly-packages/ https://www.clearwest.ca/telus-home-solutions/telus-internet.... Although this claims they are metered, Telus now claims they are not (at least, in my community). And a bit more about the 750 plan here https://www.telus.com/en/deals-and-bundles/internet-750 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 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-list-as-of-June-7-2019-some-with-940-940 https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30805481-Telus-fibre-towns...
- djmips 7y ago
- zrav 7y ago40 for 50 is not so bad. Some regional ISPs installing FTTB/FTTH offer 100mbps + voice for ~40€, which is a pretty good deal. 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.
- siddhant 7y agoInteresting. Not sure if it's location dependent, but I've had a considerably better/faster/stabler experience with cable. With DSL the connection keeps breaking all the time. And yes, Vodafone definitely has support/quality issues.
- usrusr 7y agoThe amount of regulator-enforced competition varies a lot between technology generations. The basic idea is that Telekom cannot deny renting out to resellers what they inherited from their government monopolist predecessor, but more recent infrastructure has no such strings attached (the details are slightly more complicated I think). 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?
- Jnr 7y agoI get 600Mbit for 12 EUR. Greetings from Latvia! :)
- foepys 7y agoIt's really expensive for companies, too. The company I work for (small to medium sized) has a 34/34 Mbit/s fiber connection and it costs us 600€ per month. Included are 8 IPv4 addresses and an 8h response time (which has never been met and when we sued after a week of non-working internet, we lost in court). 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.
- technics256 7y agoCurious the reason they gave for you losing in court???
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- foepys 7y agoI didn't work for the company back then but when I asked I was told that the fine print said they have longer if they acknowledged the issue. It turned out that our provider is just renting the fiber and has a 48 hour response contract with the actual owner of the fiber and our provider waited for the owner to confirm that it wasn't a hardware issue on the owner's side. 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.
- gingabriska 7y agoWhen I worked for Audi in Germany, they had 1Gpbs internet. Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies instead of small ones.
- 7y ago
- newprint 7y agoI came back from Germany in April. Infrastructure (trains, roads, airports) are wonderful, compare that with crawling slow internet.
- ofrzeta 7y agoI can assure you that trains are as bad as Internet.
- lonesword 7y agoAnd I can assure you that the trains are much much better than in other parts of the world (eg: India). In India, trains running on time are an exception, not the rule. At least all the German trains that I've been on were on time to the very minute.
- MakeUsersWant 7y agoIn Cologne, I have never seen light rail arrive on time, and I've used it daily for two years.
- fluffything 7y agoI take the train in a big German city every day. If my train were to arrive on time one day, I would share that information with all my friends as something more than exceptional. This never happens. I can't wait till i've saved enough to buy a car and stop using the trains and subway.
- mullen 7y agoTake a train in America and then you will think the trains in Germany are absolutely beautiful. Take a train in Japan and you will weep because no matter what country you are from, your trains suck in comparison.
- ArmandGrillet 7y agoI don't understand this German cliché, it's not insanely great but the amount of delays is the same as in France with better internet, cleaner toilets, and a descent price. Internet in Germany is a combination of shitty contracts, slow speeds, and deceptive ads. That is much worse than a descent service with clear pricings like Deutsche Bahn.
- nothis 7y agoWait, average internet speed in the US is 120 Mbits? About a gigabyte in 1 minute?
- ckuhl 7y agoMy bad, tried to do math before consuming coffee.
- illvm 7y agoApproximately 68 seconds for a gigabyte then. So about a minute?
- mrpippy 7y agoThe source of the “data” is Speedtest.net tests, which is absolutely not an actual survey. At best, it represents the average speed of “enthusiasts who like to test their internet speed”. Who, not surprisingly, are going to have faster connections than the actual nationwide average. Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoISPs boost traffic caps to speed test sites so they are completely useless for any real assessment.
- whatshisface 7y agoGermany sounds like it's about in line with suburban America.
- tluyben2 7y agoYep... I returned yesterday from Germany and it is awful. I thought the UK (rural) was bad, but Germany takes the cake. There are even (expensive) hotels which still ask money for using their wifi. When you go to have only a meal at a hotel, they tell you internet is just for guests (we had this 5 times in 2 weeks). And driving around with 3g/4g you notice massive patches without data reception. I live in the mountains of Spain where I have cheap 4g and even cheaper 'radio' uplinks. They are enough to download gigs a day (not that I need that; I need stable, not a lot of bandwidth, but it's both). I was used to drive out of London a just a little bit and everything dropping, but Germany is even worse. And when it does work, it's slow. 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.
- AdrianB1 7y agoTalking about Romania: in the modem Internet era I cabled (with my brother)the block of flats where we lived to share a connection. The wires were hanging between floors and were simply stitched to the walls internally. These types of cabling were then bought by ISP for cheap and they found themselves with cities cabled for pennies. Now they pulled fiber on public light poles (for free, of course) and interconnected all these networks, changed the switches to Gigabit and got cheap and fast Internet for the masses. You cannot do this kind of shady work in Germany, you need to get permits, pull the wiring underground, these kind of things increase the cost a lot. Also the mobile Internet is fast in Romania because of the competition from the very fast land lines. In Germany both are missing.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoYeah bureaucracy and regulations is one of the reasons things suck here. Extending the network is ridiculously costly with all the planning, approvements required, the city having a say, some wavie complaining they get headaches, an old dude thinking the tower looks ugly, paying the construction company and finally having that thing certified after it's been built.
- juskrey 7y agoCome to Ukraine. They have the cheapest internet, mobile plans and Uber in the world. And likely the worst air, food and city structure quality. There is always a choice.
- sethammons 7y agoI don't have faith in that chart. Average US internet speed is 120 mbps?! Do they mean advertised max speed? No way the average internet household speed is that fast. Maybe half. Maybe. I like to live away from town, but even when I could get FiOS, the normal package was 50 mbps. I happen to have 400 mbps now (which flies in the face of my argument, I know). 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 7y agoThe source is speedtest.net, which probably biases toward “users that care about speed and run tests”, but also average likely is mean, not median, and the mean can get to 120Mb/s pretty easily with a fairly small fraction of Gb/s-class connections. even if the rest are in the 1-20Mb/s range.
- geff82 7y agoThere are many areas where only 16Mbit are available max, some even only with 6Mbit. When buying a house, checking your potential internet connection with the providers is crucial, even for houses that are close to big cities. Where I live, in a city neighbouring Frankfurt, 50Mbit has only been available for about 4 years now.
- dmix 7y ago> But Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s dominant operator, took a less costly route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called vectoring. 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.
- yhamv 7y agoNot saying it's the case here but it was usually one public operator controlling the entire country, which then got privatised in the 90s or stuff. So they have access to 99.9% of the population.
- hannob 7y ago> The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country? 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.
- luckylion 7y ago> Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country? 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.
- rayiner 7y agoIn most European countries, like in the U.S., there was a national telephone company. These are by and large privitized in the 1980s and 1990s, subject to various rules and regulations. 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-subscriptions.htm 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.
- ctas 7y agoI 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.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoHow did they do that? No port free? Do you know about https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerde/SVNr10_Versorgung/node.html https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerd... ?
- ctas 7y agoI don't know about that. Thanks for the link. 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.
- hannob 7y agoJust a bit more background from Germany: This article largely focusses on broadband connections. It doesn't even begin to adress the even bigger issue, which is that mobile internet is extremely bad compared to most other european countries. 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.
- jrimbault 7y agoIt seems to me France also has a comparable surface, although with more concentrated population centers.
- Glawen 7y agoFrance has 30 millions less people and is 50% bigger than germany (550000km2 vs 350000km2), so no, it is not comparable. Germany is way denser than France, with a lot big cities.
- noja 7y agoIsn't Internet in France supposedly really cheap and very fast?
- hocuspocus 7y agoYes and no. Broadband is really hit or miss. You can live on a street where half the buildings have access to fiber (and therefore triple-play gigabit for <40€/month) while the other half is left with piss-poor DSL, that isn't even sold any cheaper. (At least in Germany the pricing reflects the speed). 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.
- 7y ago
- kstenerud 7y agoMaybe I'm just behind the times, but I can't think of anything I'd do that would saturate my 20Mbps link, other than maybe downloading an iso or something. I'm using 1 und 1's ultra cheap plan, and browsing works fine, streaming works fine, video conferencing works fine, remote desktops work fine. I work remote, and only once have I experienced an outage.
- ses1984 7y agoA single 4k Netflix stream is up to 25mbps.
- Balero 7y agoI think 20Mbps is ok if you are the only user (I would rather 30 at least). But if you live with other heavy internet users it can get congested easily. Someone streaming something, someone playing games, someone downloading something, this all adds up quickly and it starts to be noticeable.
- jotm 7y agoI'm afraid to ask... Your upload speed is 3Mbps or something? :D Uploading anything took freaking ages on DSL, I even used mobile data to do it, it's an important part of life today.
- rjsw 7y agoI'm happy with 40Mbps DSL, I could get 80Mbps for a bit more. Would rather investment went into getting more areas up to a reasonable speed.
- Havoc 7y agoOne easy usage case - downloading steam games. Those things are now frequently >60gigs so speed can be the difference between try my new game tonight or only get a chance to play tomorrow after work. Silly example I know but real.
- Nimitz14 7y agoTransferring data to and from the cloud.
- gok 7y agoThat speedtest graph in the article is a great example of why averaging statistics is often a bad idea. The US fixed broadband mean is ~120mbps, but the median is more like ~70 mbps [1]. A few people with gigabit-ish connections are hiding the many people stuck with crappy sub-25 mbps connections. [1] https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-fixed-broadband-eighth-report#_Toc427484591 https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...
- Nimitz14 7y agoYeah I checked the source out: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index And the UK is 50th... I feel it should be higher than Germany.
- southerndrift 7y ago>“The whole problem in Germany is the lack of fiber-to-the-home strategy by Deutsche Telekom DTEGY -0.52% and other carriers, 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-Kampf-um-die-Glasfaser-oder-Der-verpasste-Breitbandausbau-in-Deutschland-3952581.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...
- boyter 7y agoHah! That’s exactly what happened in Australia. 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.
- cknight 7y agoGerman internet didn't seem so bad to me, and I suspect it is because I am Australian. The parallels between Telstra and Telekom were uncanny. 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.
- IntelMiner 7y agoAustralia's situation is fairly different. And reeks of all the wrong steps of privatization of infrastructure 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
- lonesword 7y agoI recently moved to Germany. I used to work as a software dev in India before this. I was horrified to learn that (urban) India has way better internet than Germany. When it comes to mobile data it's even more depressing - back in India I used to get 1.5GB _daily_ 4G mobile data for 200 rupees (around 2.5 euros) a _month_. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, 2.5 euros a month for virtually unlimited mobile data is super cheap. In comparison, I pay 10 euros a month for a _monthly_ quota of 1.5 GB with O2 here in Germany. Not to mention that it's slower, and yes, there are a lot of patches with no data reception. Considering that Germany has otherwise superb infrastructure, the internet was a let down.
- sn41 7y agoPost Jio, India has one of the cheapest data rates in the world. Sometimes when you go elsewhere, one tends to accidentally turn on data and use it the same way as in India, and I have been bitten like this once. Luckily it was prepaid, so the damage was contained.
- jotm 7y agoYou're getting ripped off on O2 or Vodafone. Get an Ay Yildiz Prepaid card, 25 Euros for 12GB and there's an option to top up of you run out. It's an EPlus MVNO, speeds are pretty good on 3G (~8Mbps).
- nesadi 7y agoCoverage is pretty bad on anything that isn't D1 or Vodafone. O2 has okay coverage in cities, but anywhere else it's mediocre to bad.
- jotm 7y agoI used it in Recklinghausen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Koln, so yeah, within the cities. You're right, on the motorways the speed was sometimes atrocious, less than 1Mbps
- jgillich 7y agoE-Plus does not exist anymore, it was bought by o2.
- padelt 7y agoThe running gag of mobile internet in Germany is EU-roaming (no-charge use of you cellular internet service abroad in the EU): I can travel the 1-4 hours to any neighboring countries for the perfect cellular internet access I paid for. The only country where it doesn’t perfectly work is the one I live in. Germany.
- Havoc 7y agoYeah the EU roaming thing is a godsend. The UK contracts in particular are great cause you get ones that extend data to a handful of other interesting countries beyond EU for another couple bucks https://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents/webcontent/vfcon092802.pdf https://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents/webcon...
- fluffything 7y agoCame here just to make this joke, the sad part of it is that it's so true. 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.
- rayiner 7y agoGermany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling, implemented poorly: https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/faqs-on-the-unbundled-local-loop-ull--358710 https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/f.... Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway. 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_seminar/31_Model_Utility_Regulation.pdf 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.
- Paul-ish 7y agoIs there a list of key incentives that keeps BT investing in its network?
- newaccoutnas 7y agoI would not discount government 'incentives' to BT. Hundreds of millions have come the public purse for contracts that were supposedly put up for public tender. BT got about 95% of them. edit: there are other issues in the UK, like fibre tax, that makes the situation even more difficult for competition.
- walshemj 7y agoNone of the other providers wanted to serve low value customers is the blunt reason.
- newaccoutnas 7y agoI'm not sure that's the case, otherwise why would community driven projects like https://b4rn.org.uk/ https://b4rn.org.uk/ exist if BT was serving low-value customers properly? In reality they're the company that doesn't see the value in investment there, completely counter to what the pubic purse was supposed to be supporting.
- geff82 7y agoI recently did vacation at the North Sea (land side, not the islands). It was heartbreaking. In many areas the iPhone showed "No Service", in most areas we had "Edge" connection with virtually no data throughput. Even when it showed "3G" I was mostly unable to use WhatsApp. And this is a region where people live! 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.
- nesadi 7y agoThe crazy thing I think is how expensive internet is, in whatever form, in Germany compared to the rest of Europe while simultaneously being so terrible.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoIt's far cheaper than the US. I get 6MB/s downloads for 15€/month. For mobile, there's a chart making the rounds on Twitter, and it seems to me Germany is very much in line with other countries. Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.
- close04 7y agoFor a while in Germany I was paying 30€/month for 10Mbps. Meanwhile other EU countries gave you 1Gbps for ~10€/month. Germany is definitely at the lower end of internet infrastructure.
- heroic 7y agoThis is probably the only thing I feel great about in the Indian communication domain! I pay <$2 a month for about 1.5GB 4G every DAY! Speeds generally vary from crap to 11 Mbps
- segmondy 7y agoIt's not just Germany. Tons of places in the US have crappy internet connection. I'm average 2-3Mbps on really good days, on a bad day, I see below 1. On Comcast, $40 a month plan, suppose to be at least 10Mbps, it's not my modem. I was getting up to 15Mbps when I was paying $80 and suppose to get 50Mbps. It's oversubscribed or capped by Comcast. No competition, no other providers.
- ravenstine 7y agoGood grief! I'm using a small ISP that gets me ~250Mbps, but it would be more like 500Mpbs if I didn't buy a cheap router. In fact, they told me they'll be offering gigabit plans next year. And I thought I was getting screwed when I could only get 120Mbps with Spectrum Cable.
- segmondy 7y agoI'm in a major city too, not in a rural area. It's freaking ridiculous. I have learned to live with it. At one point, I was using my phone. Downloading things to a VPS and when I visit my folks, I'll download from my VPS to a usb stick. In 2020! If I liked downtown tho 15 minutes away where there's competition, I'll have Wow cable or fiber and much better service. Comcast is garbage.
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- gingabriska 7y agoI am in Yoga city of India and this hilly region, I am getting 50mbps up and down. 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.
- durnygbur 7y agoI can assure you that their slow-poke internet is a reason of a feeling of entitled superiority over their neighbours, especially eastern ones.
- crucialfelix 7y agoMy wifi in Berlin is so bad that when I make video calls on my phone I turn wifi off and use my mobile data.
- franczesko 7y agoThis is what economic protectionism (for which Germany is famous for) and lack of competition leads to - no investments in the infrastructure.
- StreamBright 7y agoThey do that with cars as well. I was shocked to figure out how bad some of their cars are compare to Asian or other European brands.
- sgt101 7y agoLike the lemons made by BMW, Mercedes and Audi? No single person ever said "I'll pay a premium for an M3"!
- StreamBright 7y agoMercedes is what I have the most experience with. There is actually a class action lawsuit against them in the US because of their faulty AC. This is insane, a supposedly premium brand cannot install a working AC. I think I just keep purchasing Asian brands for now. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/868955-mercedes-benz-class-action-lawsuit-says-hvac-systems-emit-mold-smell/ https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
- alkonaut 7y agoNational backbone level internet should be large government infrastructure projects. It’s like roads and railways. Competition works on the roads, but works poorly for constructing them. Infrastructure within cities and to premises can work though.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoGermany has at least a dozen "backbones" from different companies. The problems mentioned result from stupid last mile politics and practice, which factually deny affordable access for endusers to these.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoWhich germans? All of them? The rural "Landeier"? The suburbians? The failed capital Berlin? In my personal experience they are mostly too lazy or anxious to switch because of FUD, and/or stingy. The situation is complicated because in most places the so called last mile is in the hands of the former state monopolist, which now is playing a joint-stock company, while the state holds about one third of shares directly and indirectly via the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW Then there are the tv-cable companies and the really complicated "Netzebene 4", the last mile equivalent for anything Docsis in .de Complicated because of ownership, and non-sharing. This all feels really backwards, and IT IS! Nonetheless i got away from the Deutsche Telokom ASAP when i had the chance. A few anecdotes... Lived in a not so large town about 199x. Got ISDN and payed them insane amounts of money for dual-channel (128Kb/s). Flatrate? Not existent. Moved to a smaller town some years later, first DSL available, but not in my part of smalltown. Too far away from the exchange. Well, there was another option from Versatal. ISDN Flatrate(which Telekom didn't even offer!) for 40 or 50 DM a month. Most people didn't even knew, or didn't dare, because the company had some mishaps(years) before. I didn't care and had an excellent experience for the time, one could see the way the packets went via traceroute, which was very different from the way the telekom routed. Of course! Different company, different network. Anyways, blazingly fast(for ISDN). The € came, DSL didn't. I moved to Hamburg and had the option to choose DSL from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet Again, excellent service, the speeds went slowly up without getting more expensive! Then they've been bought by Telecom Italia and it was renamed Alice. Didn't matter, speeds went up further without getting more expensive(€29,90 flat with landline flat to other german landlines) Some years later Telekom Italia sold Alice/former Hansenet to spanish Telefonica, which is branded O² in .de That was a sad story because one could see how a good company with a good product went bad. Slower speeds, crappy routing/peering, disconnects, changing dsl-standards without announcing them, or sending a modem capable of handling that. One hand not knowing what the other does. What to do? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel to the rescue! Another local provider born out of a public utility, very progressive since its beginnings, best thing i ever had. I even got more instead of the announced up to. Fibre to the basement and some VDSL with 100/31 for the usual €29,90 flat with landline to german landlines phone flat included. Excellent peering, latencies, whatever. Which will be upgraded to fiber to the home until end of the year, begin next year with gigabit, which i don't really need. Anyways, this is not the only provider apart from the big, mostly crappy ones, or resellers of them. There are https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL https://www.dokom21.de/ https://www.dokom21.de/ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen These were the ones i remembered, i'm sure there are more. Then there is this comparison site https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/ https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/ And to be honest, if you are a business, ask COLT, Zayo, BT, KPN, or something like that? So, that was the wired side of things. Mobile is more expensive and patchy. Depends on region, again. Shit happens. Maybe waiting for Starlink? Though i don't believe in that because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber
- ayoisaiah 7y agoLet me tell you about slow internet. 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.
- black_knight 7y agoNot saying that slow Internet doesn’t suck – it does. But when I ever I am stuck on a slow network i download YouTube videos (the command line tool youtube-dl [0] also downloads a lot of other streaming sites). This trades some time for quality: You have to wait while downloading, but you can download whatever quality you have patience for. [0]: https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/
- robert_foss 7y agoI'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m. 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.
- zepearl 7y ago4Eur/m is really really cheap... . 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.
- tribaal 7y agoThat's only in big cities and some random gemindes though (your parents are lucky). 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)
- danieldk 7y agoI'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m. 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.
- MordecaiMaxwell 7y agoI mean, almost every country should. I live in Russia and it baffles me how much faster and cheaper internet is here, compared to the most western countries.
- robert_foss 7y agoWhat speeds/types/prices are available where you're located?
- MordecaiMaxwell 7y agoI pay around 8 dollars per month for unlimited internet. Speed varies between 90-100 Mbps + they gave me a free Wi-Fi router. 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.
- MordecaiMaxwell 7y agoThe highest speed offered that i've seen is 800 Mbps for around 15$, but that is some unique offer by only one provider. The city average is 200-300 Mbps.
- gdy 7y agoFTTb, unlimited 100 Mbps for about 7 euro per month. Not Moscow.
- RandyRanderson 7y agoCanadians have slow AND more expensive Internet but are, for some reason, not frustrated. :<
- gigatexal 7y agoI’m in Hamburg and it’s not great, not terrible but not great.
- kriro 7y agoPromises made 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
- Kenji 7y agoWho cares about throughput? I think very low latency and jitter is much more important. After 100MBit/s the improvements aren't that impressive anymore, you're almost always bottlenecked by the server and not your home connection. MBit/s is largely a useless measure for connection quality. I'll happily take a 10MBit/s connection with 1ms ping to Google over a 500Mbit/s connection with 400ms ping to Google.
- punnerud 7y agoIf you get bufferbloat at 20Mbit/s and have a 300Mbit/s line, I would argue that you only have a 20Mbit/s line for most practical purposes except downloading large files. Strange how little focus this gets.
- dangom 7y agoIt's particularly interesting crossing the border from Germany to the Netherlands and seeing how the internet speed can increase so much after riding 20km.
- sod 7y agoIt doesn't help that German politicians think it's a good idea to let companies bid on frequencies - 5g frequencies just went for 5.5 billion to 4 large companies. So those now have the monopoly on that plus they have to earn it back from the customer. And the highest bidder got the best frequencies. So good coverage can only be achieved by one company. 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 :(
- Causality1 7y agoIt's been a long time since I cared or noticed how fast my internet was. Experientially, there's not much difference between 25 megabit service and 200 megabit service. You can stream 4K video on either, and both will require you to go do something else while your 60 gigabyte game download completes. One does it in 5 hours and the other in 40 minutes, but neither are instant-access. There's no escaping from the 1TB data cap I've had for ten years and until that's dead for good I won't be moving my media archive to the cloud. 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.
- BjoernKW 7y agoThere's a very obvious reason for why mobile Internet in Germany is flaky, slow yet at the same time ridiculously expensive: 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-55-billion-euros-in-epic-5g-spectrum-auction https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-raises-6-point-5...
- plazmatic 7y agoThis article may as well be about the United States. They primarily speak of internet issues outside of the big cities in Germany, which is exactly the case in America. Furthermore, the Germans average internet speed is only 3mb slower than that of the U.S. Sorry. Anti-German articles are so poorly done, it's kind of sad.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoI live in Berlin. Mobile networks are indeed a bad joke here. Most third world countries have much better networks. I always joke that I live about 1 km from the biggest FFing antenna in Germany (the TV tower, 350m tall, a major landmark and tourist destination) and yet cannot seem to get a reliable connection. I consistently get edge only near touristic areas because all of the base stations in those areas are apparently over provisioned. E.g. on the Alexander Platz right next to the before mentioned TV Tower I get edge only. That's the very definition of an incompetent operator. There is no excuse for being allowed to get away with that poor level of service. They just don't care here. In case you are wondering, the operator here is O2. I'd switch but doing so takes quite a lot of hassle (and paper work because Germany) and there is little evidence of other operators actually doing a much better job. 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-digital-progress-with-new-digital-affairs-minister/a-42872383 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet-digit....
- shmerl 7y ago> In Germany, for example, gigabyte connections—which handle more than 1,000 megabits per second—are rare. 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.
- jupp0r 7y agoIt'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 development grants. In my mind the reason for disasters like this is a mixture of 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.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoTBH i'm missing ISDN a little, though i still don't need it ;-> The dialing was instant, which isn't the case with VOIP or mobile, at least i haven't seen better ones so far. The quality of voice was also good, which isn't always the case with VOIP or mobile either. Then there is the aspect of resilience, you could have a simple ISDN phone powered over the line from the exchange, which was protected against loss of power. Good for emergencies. All this is being built back, which seems like loss of quality to me, because mobile base stations aren't that well protected either. And even if, in case of larger emergencies often overloaded? I guess you understand "Dienstgüte und Verfügbarkeit"? 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
- hendry 7y agoTook my cameras to Berlin in the hope of making a couple of YouTube videos. 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.
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- excowboy 7y agoThat also includes Germans in New Zealand
- Scoundreller 7y agoAs a Canadian, I'm very disappointed about the graph showing that Canada has the 3rd fastest mobile data rates in the world. 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...
- blunte 7y agoSome Netherlands internet is garbage too, even the 4G. And a whole lot of US internet is garbage. 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).
- swimfar 7y agoThis is an old anecdote (~2010), so not completely relevant to the current discussion. But I was living in Germany and the only internet option I had was dial-up. I could hardly believe that such a thing still existed anywhere in Europe, but even more surprising was that it was pay-by-the-minute. There were a bunch of different providers that had different pricing plans where sometimes there would be a connection fee, but lower per-minute rates, and sometimes the rates would go down after so many minutes of connection. The landlord set me up with some software that would try to minimize the cost of an internet session. It would tell you which provider to go with based on an estimated connection duration that you gave it. You could also configure it to hang up and dial into another provider if rates changed enough based on the time of day.
- IloveHN84 7y agoIt's not only a matter of speed..the prices are really high compared to neighborhood. 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
- shakermakr 7y agoBrit living in Germany here. I just bought a new home, and it came with Fiber to the Home. Great I thought! Then I tried to get connected... 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...
- patrickk 7y agoI'll be moving within Germany at some point in the next 12 months, and one of my top considerations will be what broadband options already exist in the area, because of the reasons you mention. If you move to an area with slow/no broadband, you'll be stuck in that situation for years.
- davidkuennen 7y agoI'm from Germany and it's very frustrating. I'm already using the provider with the best network here (Deutsche Telekom). Having a fast connection outside of cities is still the exception. It's so bad that I can't even call many times during my daily commute.
- paule89 7y agoIt is so bad that one German Minister does not take a call anymore, if he is driving on the Autobahn. Because it would be too embarassing to redial again and again because the call will drop. Not might. It will!
- xtf 7y agoIn the 80s there were plans to roll out fiber every with a 30 year plan under chancellor Schmidt, but with reunifiction plans got dismissed. http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/kap2_15/para3_6.html http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/k...
- imtringued 7y agoI was frustrated 8 years ago. I upgraded from 16mbit to 32mbit to 50mbit and every 2 years the internet speeds keep getting higher until I stopped caring.
- jokinko 7y agonearby post-communist country...Slovakia...the coverage and quality they have is outstanding.
- coolg54321 7y agoIn India i had a BSNL prepaid plan for 2€ a month for 2GB 4G data "per day" which worked fast even in the rural villages there. But in Germany with O2 I get 2GB 4G data for 10€ a month which goes "No Service" or switches to Edge many times if i goes out of the city.
- znpy 7y agoI can understand this. I literally lost interest in moving to Düsseldorf when I realized that for a higher price than I currently pay I would get just a 60 Mbps down / 5mbps up internet connection, whereas I can get a 1gpbs down / 200mbps up FTTH connection.
- danielh 7y agoMost of the discussions focus on end-users, here is an anecdote how this affects businesses: my current client recently moved to Cologne, the 4th largest city in Germany. They ordered a broadband connection from Deutsche Telekom three months before the move. As it turns out, Telekom needs SIX months to provide service. This is in one of the top-tier business centers, which was built in 2009. Depending on your mobile provider, you also only have edge connectivity in most of the building.
- cyborgx7 7y agoThe promise of privatization of the Telekom was higher speeds and lower prices. The opposite of that happened. This country is now far behind many comparable countries in Internet speed and penetration. And the state, in selling the Telekom, lost the ability to do it themselves when private industry fails. Terrible development.
- Mo3 7y agoI really cannot concur. I live in the depths of Bavaria in a small village with ~2000 residents. Our apartment is connected by two 100MBit/s DSL and 500MBit/s Cable lines, set up in failover configuration in case one goes down (which always only happens on Cable for a few minutes, and that setup exists only because I work 100% remote). The village is located in a mountainous region, yet everywhere I go, I have +100Mbit/s LTE available, safe for the completely unpopulated areas between mountains. 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.
- pingyong 7y ago>30,00 for unlimited LTE Where can you get unlimited mobile data plans in Germany?
- Mo3 7y agoFreenet FUNK is mine and the cheapest. Besides that Telekom, Vodafone and o2 all offer uncapped LTE at prices ranging from 59,99 to 90,00/month.
- paule89 7y agoSorry but your setup seems to be outragouesly unique. Often times you have either cable or dsl. But not both. Also what about your upload speeds? probably only 20MBit/s or 40 max. 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.
- Mo3 7y agoThere are a lot of places where you can get both. Upload is 50Mbit/s on DSL and 50Mbit/s on Cable
- paule89 7y agoThe only Good Thing about German Internet access is the FRITZ!Box. Best basic Internet Router with minimal required setup. Still missing some things, but they do their job much better than what any provider can give you (or they are rebranding the FRITZ!Box itself)
- breadandcrumbel 7y agoI'm not an expert in economy but it just shows that there's a monopoly in the internet industry in Germany It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow internet.
- Brotkrumen 7y agoThere is no monopoly in the internet industry in Germany.
- deisner 7y agoFor what it's worth, the price/bandwidth in Cologne isn't bad: https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon-internet/tarifuebersicht/ https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon-internet/tari.... And not surprisingly, it appears to be fiber (FTTB and HCF): https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_ENGLISH.pdf https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_...
- dtaht 7y agoDo keep hoping everybody complaining here about their speed, also check their latency on dslreports.com. Bufferbloat makes slow internet a lot slower than it needs to be, and there's cures for it (sqm/fq_codel,sch_cake etc) - deploying that on your link can be a rather nice upgrade.
- thesaint 7y agoGerman internet is a joke. The words 'Unity Media' are enough to send a shiver down the spine. Connection on the Autobahn would be laughable if you were not already crying..