7 ms·

What did Sweden get so right with internet that Germany got so wrong??

nisa 7y ago
Quite a lot: In the 80ies in western germany the then responsible person at the ministry for postal issues (Postministerium) had family connections to a copper producer so everything was build with copper, besides at that time it was clear that there is no long-term future for the technology. 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....
- cc81 7y ago
  You had a similar spectrum auction with 5G recently and that got very expensive as well. That seems to be a problem in a lot of Europe and something the hardware providers like Ericsson complains about as that hinders the service providers ability to buy things from them because they spend so much money on the auction.
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    The difference between Sweden and Germany in terms of RF spectrum license auctions has typically been: Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue. Germany goes for government revenue alone.
  - nesadi 7y ago
    It's telling that only the four biggest providers in Germany were able to take part in the auction because of how expensive it is. Not a lot of companies can throw billions at some spectrum before even building any towers or other infrastructure. It really distorts the market and makes it far less competitive.
- dylz 7y ago
  I have not had fun with DTAG - they seem to adamantly refuse to peer like most other networks and demand additional cost for bandwidth requested by their users..
  - nisa 7y ago
    Yes, their peering policy was and still is? infamous for being vile. They even had no ports at de-cix for a long time. However as ISP regarding reliability and technological improvement they are pretty good but they won't and/or can't build new fiber infrastructure and try to make the existence for competition in this space difficult... 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
groundlogic 7y ago
Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started... 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 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...
- Moru 7y ago
  It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.
- ckris 7y ago
  In Stockholm it was decided to connect all public housing, which was ~25% of the housing stock at the time. Owned apartments being coops, and presumably being able to make majority decisions, probably helped as well. That said, I don't think it is that impressive these days. Most digital or infrastructure things are very "1.5" compared to for example some parts of Asia.

nisa 7y ago

Quite a lot: In the 80ies in western germany the then responsible person at the ministry for postal issues (Postministerium) had family connections to a copper producer so everything was build with copper, besides at that time it was clear that there is no long-term future for the technology. 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....

cc81 7y ago
You had a similar spectrum auction with 5G recently and that got very expensive as well. That seems to be a problem in a lot of Europe and something the hardware providers like Ericsson complains about as that hinders the service providers ability to buy things from them because they spend so much money on the auction.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  The difference between Sweden and Germany in terms of RF spectrum license auctions has typically been: Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue. Germany goes for government revenue alone.
- nesadi 7y ago
  It's telling that only the four biggest providers in Germany were able to take part in the auction because of how expensive it is. Not a lot of companies can throw billions at some spectrum before even building any towers or other infrastructure. It really distorts the market and makes it far less competitive.
dylz 7y ago
I have not had fun with DTAG - they seem to adamantly refuse to peer like most other networks and demand additional cost for bandwidth requested by their users..
- nisa 7y ago
  Yes, their peering policy was and still is? infamous for being vile. They even had no ports at de-cix for a long time. However as ISP regarding reliability and technological improvement they are pretty good but they won't and/or can't build new fiber infrastructure and try to make the existence for competition in this space difficult... 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

groundlogic 7y ago

Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started... 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 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...

Moru 7y ago
It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.
ckris 7y ago
In Stockholm it was decided to connect all public housing, which was ~25% of the housing stock at the time. Owned apartments being coops, and presumably being able to make majority decisions, probably helped as well. That said, I don't think it is that impressive these days. Most digital or infrastructure things are very "1.5" compared to for example some parts of Asia.