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> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Ge

by skohan 6y ago

> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.

milankragujevic 6y ago
If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively. Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure. It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol. When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
  - milankragujevic 6y ago
    You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use. And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology. This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use. Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."
      - milankragujevic 6y ago
        Yes, I said that, and that would mean "The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use." OP said: > > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure > Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers. If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time). The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated. Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government: 1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad. 2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
gpvos 6y ago
...compared to where?
- skohan 6y ago
  Eastern Europe, south east Asia, even in Spain and the US I had better experience with internet.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    Also Nordic countries.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Where in Germany did you live with such bad internet?

by skohan 6y ago

milankragujevic 6y ago

If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively. Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure. It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol. When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
- milankragujevic 6y ago
  You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use. And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology. This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use. Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."
    - milankragujevic 6y ago
      Yes, I said that, and that would mean "The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use." OP said: > > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure > Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers. If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time). The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated. Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government: 1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad. 2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

gpvos 6y ago

...compared to where?

skohan 6y ago
Eastern Europe, south east Asia, even in Spain and the US I had better experience with internet.
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Also Nordic countries.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

Where in Germany did you live with such bad internet?