5 ms·

You need to pick your poison though. I don't like defending them but unlike mnet and Vodafone they deliver a working product.

by wink 4y ago

erinnh 4y ago
Ive very much been happy with O2 for the last three years. For mobile phone as well as DSL access. For mobile they gave me a new 100% unlimited (data&speed) contract for 25€ a month. Cant really complain about that. For home internet its been rock-solid and I cant think of even one disconnection in the last years. Peering is better than Telekom as well.
- rollo 4y ago
  Just step out of the city, and boom no mobile connection with O2.
  - erinnh 4y ago
    I am out of the city.(close to Dutch border) O2 is best here. Even better than Telekom. I do understand that its not universal. But O2 is a pretty good alternative. Especially if I consider than I pay one third of the price that a similar contract would cost me with Telekom.
  - fuzzy2 4y ago
    It's actually the opposite: go inside a city, boom, no mobile data. Luckily, things have improved and network cells aren't overloaded all the time. In the countryside, all networks are hit and miss.
welterde 4y ago
I had mnet for a couple years and no problems whatsoever. They even had IPv6 much earlier than the competition. Also had Vodafone for a while and it was fine (but just as with DTAG one has to be lucky that the local segment is not overloaded). However unlike mnet and Vodafone, DTAG never works, since they overload their peering links to other internet providers on purpose. This means that accessing any website or service that isn't explicitly paying DTAG to get unrestricted access to their customers, performs very poorly. See for example Youtube being barely usable in evenings for years. None of the other internet providers had that issue.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Regarding the second point: Back when they still owned T-Mobile NL, they tried to change over the routing for residential (fixed line) users to their own DE-CIX exchange in Germany. The outrage over their bad peering there was so big that it made the national evening news. Within 2 days they reverted to their previous peerings.
  - welterde 4y ago
    I think you mean they switched to using the DTAG network as upstream - essentially giving them the same treatment as their customers in Germany. And also disconnecting from local internet exchanges in the process. DE-CIX is an internet exchange that is unrelated to DTAG (DTAG do have a port on DE-CIX, which they mostly use to sell some services across it I would guess, but not for settlement-free peering like mostly everyone else). As Sadly people in Germany will just blame the site being bad/slow, instead of having a closer look at their internet provider.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      > I think you mean they switched to using the DTAG network as upstream - essentially giving them the same treatment as their customers in Germany. And also disconnecting from local internet exchanges in the process. Yes, this is what I was trying to say. It's a while ago, so perhaps I remembered the details incorrectly.
    - wink 4y ago
      I guess we all have a line we draw where we do the right thing on this side and "I want a hassle free life" on the other, and my line is having a stable internet connection at home. Everything I've experienced in ~20 years of Telekom pales in comparison to everything else I tried.
      - welterde 4y ago
        That they deserve some good legal troubles for their behavior is another discussion entirely (Swisscom, which was doing the same thing as DTAG and running a collab with DTAG for a while, actually lost a few court cases over things like that). However that's not my point. My point is that the service DTAG offers is just inferior and people that were never exposed to something better (be it never tried or just got unlucky with the alternatives when they tried), just stick with it. I would never get internet from them in Germany simply because I value having good internet connectivity (not just germany-net) and want data to flow a little bit faster than during the isdn-dialup days. The mafia-like behavior (of requiring payment from hosting providers to get usable connectivity to their customers) is just the cherry on top.

You need to pick your poison though. I don't like defending them but unlike mnet and Vodafone they deliver a working product.

by wink 4y ago

You need to pick your poison though. I don't like defending them but unlike mnet and Vodafone they deliver a working product.

erinnh 4y ago

Ive very much been happy with O2 for the last three years. For mobile phone as well as DSL access. For mobile they gave me a new 100% unlimited (data&speed) contract for 25€ a month. Cant really complain about that. For home internet its been rock-solid and I cant think of even one disconnection in the last years. Peering is better than Telekom as well.

rollo 4y ago
Just step out of the city, and boom no mobile connection with O2.
- erinnh 4y ago
  I am out of the city.(close to Dutch border) O2 is best here. Even better than Telekom. I do understand that its not universal. But O2 is a pretty good alternative. Especially if I consider than I pay one third of the price that a similar contract would cost me with Telekom.
- fuzzy2 4y ago
  It's actually the opposite: go inside a city, boom, no mobile data. Luckily, things have improved and network cells aren't overloaded all the time. In the countryside, all networks are hit and miss.

welterde 4y ago

I had mnet for a couple years and no problems whatsoever. They even had IPv6 much earlier than the competition. Also had Vodafone for a while and it was fine (but just as with DTAG one has to be lucky that the local segment is not overloaded). However unlike mnet and Vodafone, DTAG never works, since they overload their peering links to other internet providers on purpose. This means that accessing any website or service that isn't explicitly paying DTAG to get unrestricted access to their customers, performs very poorly. See for example Youtube being barely usable in evenings for years. None of the other internet providers had that issue.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
Regarding the second point: Back when they still owned T-Mobile NL, they tried to change over the routing for residential (fixed line) users to their own DE-CIX exchange in Germany. The outrage over their bad peering there was so big that it made the national evening news. Within 2 days they reverted to their previous peerings.
- welterde 4y ago
  I think you mean they switched to using the DTAG network as upstream - essentially giving them the same treatment as their customers in Germany. And also disconnecting from local internet exchanges in the process. DE-CIX is an internet exchange that is unrelated to DTAG (DTAG do have a port on DE-CIX, which they mostly use to sell some services across it I would guess, but not for settlement-free peering like mostly everyone else). As Sadly people in Germany will just blame the site being bad/slow, instead of having a closer look at their internet provider.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    > I think you mean they switched to using the DTAG network as upstream - essentially giving them the same treatment as their customers in Germany. And also disconnecting from local internet exchanges in the process. Yes, this is what I was trying to say. It's a while ago, so perhaps I remembered the details incorrectly.
  - wink 4y ago
    I guess we all have a line we draw where we do the right thing on this side and "I want a hassle free life" on the other, and my line is having a stable internet connection at home. Everything I've experienced in ~20 years of Telekom pales in comparison to everything else I tried.
    - welterde 4y ago
      That they deserve some good legal troubles for their behavior is another discussion entirely (Swisscom, which was doing the same thing as DTAG and running a collab with DTAG for a while, actually lost a few court cases over things like that). However that's not my point. My point is that the service DTAG offers is just inferior and people that were never exposed to something better (be it never tried or just got unlucky with the alternatives when they tried), just stick with it. I would never get internet from them in Germany simply because I value having good internet connectivity (not just germany-net) and want data to flow a little bit faster than during the isdn-dialup days. The mafia-like behavior (of requiring payment from hosting providers to get usable connectivity to their customers) is just the cherry on top.