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> Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have. The German Minister for Economic Affairs has s
by sc11 7y ago
> Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.
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...
- terminalhealth 7y agoThey also have a "Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure" as if expertise in one domain would easily transfer to the other. The only commonality seems to be that things are being transported from A to B via some network, but it pretty much ends there.
- luckydata 7y agoI think the money comes from the same budget, and it's both cases infrastructure. At the end of the day you don't need that much expertise to allocate funds, it's more about politics.
- terminalhealth 7y agoDigital infrastructure is mostly privatized (and monopolized).
- brokenmachine 7y ago>you don't need that much expertise to allocate funds You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.
- filmor 7y agoOh, that's not really an issue, he shows very similar levels of incompetence in both areas.
- mschuster91 7y agoHis predecessors from CDU/CSU also. Infrastructure ministry is dominated by a history of politicians hellbent on kissing the automotive industry's butt...
- phoenixdblack 7y agoI second this
- disillusioned 7y agoStrictly speaking, aren't they both just series' of tubes? /s
- afiori 7y agoLet's join also the ministry of health then! :)
- eurg 7y agoThe infamous "Datenautobahn".
- thaumasiotes 7y agoSounds like a pretty close translation of the "information superhighway".
- hurrrrrrrr 7y agoCompetence doesn't seem to be a requirement in these positions.
- KONAir 7y agoUltimately they are both "realtime logistics" and the minister better have expertise in longterm public projects then either. But yea, sure they better be seperate.
- em-bee 7y agoit does kind of make sense if you consider that roads and rail lines are good places to put data cables, and that you have to dig up roads for the cables to be placed. so having the authority do do so within one ministry sounds like a good idea.
- terminalhealth 7y agoFair point, but they do invoke this ludicrous metaphor of the data highway, also why isn't it then simply called "infrastructure". There are surely other large scale planning decisions that could be subsumed e.g. pipelines, power lines etc.; why would they not be mentioned?
- nextos 7y agoI have had the same experience both in Germany and in some areas of the UK, like downtown Cambridge which was shocking. 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.
- msiebuhr 7y agoAFAIK, most of the Danish cellphone infrastructure was built after TeleDanmark (now TDC) was privatized.
- close04 7y agoSome Southern European countries still have pretty crappy internet overall - average to low for mobile, and really bad for landline (Italy, Greece, Croatia). 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.
- vetinari 7y agoEastern European countries are ...complicated. 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.