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> we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size. What is it about Europe that makes it more difficult? That internet in Europe isn't

> we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size. What is it about Europe that makes it more difficult? That internet in Europe isn't as good? Actually, I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet. My grandson's elementary school in rural California (population <10k) had internet as far back as 1998.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago
At least here in Western Europe, in general the internet is great. Though coverage in rural areas varies by country.
gnrlst 2y ago
In most EU countries we have multi-gigabit internet (for cheap too). Current offers are around ~5 GBIT speeds for 20 bucks a month.
- n_ary 2y ago
  Well good for you. On my side of europe, I pay €50/- for a cheap 50Mbps(1 month cancellation notice period). I could get a slightly cheaper 100Mbps from a predator for €20/- for first 6 month but then it goes up to €50/- and they pull bs about not being able to cancel if you even move because your new location is also in their coverage area(over garbage copper) and suffers at least 20 outages per month while there are other providers with much cheaper rates and better service. Some EU is still suffering from Telekom copper barons.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Sadly, I'm in Germany. Which is a third world country when it comes to decent connectivity. They are rolling out some fiber now in Berlin. Finally. But very slowly and not to my building any time soon. Most of the country is limited to DSL speeds. Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. Germany has borders with nine countries. Each of those have better connectivity than Germany. I'm from the Netherlands where over 90% of households now have fiber connections, for example. Here in Berlin it's very hard to get that. They are starting to roll it out in some areas but it's taking very long and each building has to then get connected, which is up to the building owners.
  - barrkel 2y ago
    When I travel in Germany I use a Deutsche Telekom pay as you go SIM in a 5G hotspot, and generally get about 200Mbit throughtput, which is far higher than you can expect any place you're staying to provide. It's €7 a day (or €100 a month) but it's worth it to avoid the terrible internet.
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      Oh, that is an incentive for them not to improve anything. Wouldn't want customers to stop purchasing mobile Internet for 100 Euro a month.
  - aniviacat 2y ago
    > Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. According to the Bundesnetzagentur over 90% [1] of Germany has 5G coverage (and almost all of the rest has 4G [2]). [1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2024/20240613_MoFu.html https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... [2] https://gigabitgrundbuch.bund.de/GIGA/DE/MobilfunkMonitoring/Vollbild/start.html https://gigabitgrundbuch.bund.de/GIGA/DE/MobilfunkMonitoring...
    - jillesvangurp 2y ago
      I usually lose connectivity on train journeys across Germany. I'm offline most of the way. Even the in train wifi gets quite bad in remote areas. Because they depend on the same shitty mobile networks. There's a stark difference as soon as you cross the borders with other countries. Suddenly stuff works again. Things stop timing out. I also deal with commercial customers that have companies in areas with either no or poor mobile connectivity and since we sell mobile apps to them, we always need to double check they actually have a good connection. One of our customers is on the edge of a city with very spotty 4G at best. I recently recommended Star Link to another company that is operating in rural areas. They were asking about offline capabilities of our app. Because they deal with poor connectivity all the time. I made the point that you can get internet anywhere you want now for a fairly reasonable price.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  Not in the UK. Still on 80Mbit VDSL here.
  - sirsinsalot 2y ago
    I and many I know have Gb fiber in the UK
  - _joel 2y ago
    You must be unlucky, according to Openreach "fibre broadband is already available in more than 96.59 per cent of the UK."
    - badgersnake 2y ago
      Coming next year apparently. I won’t hold my breath.
    - mattlondon 2y ago
      Is that "fibre" or "full fibre". They lied a lot for a good few years saying "OMG fibre broadband!" When in reality is was still copper for the last mile so that "fibre" connection in reality was some ADSL variant and limited to 80/20mpbs. Actual full fibre all the way from your home to the internet is I think still quite a way behind. Even in London (London! The capital city with high density) there are places where there are no full fibre options.
      - _joel 2y ago
        Maybe myself and my friends are lucky as we're all on ftth
        mattlondon 2y ago
        Only a few I know are on ftth. I guess I live in a fairly affluent area in Zone 3 which is lower density than average - zero flats etc, all just individual houses so perhaps not worth their effort rolling out
      - 2y ago
yashap 2y ago
They’re probably downloading from a server in the states, being much further away makes a big difference with a massive download.
- jonathancreamer 2y ago
  This.
_kidlike 2y ago
Let's pretend you didn't write the last 2 sentences... first of all "internet in Europe" makes close to zero sense to argue about. The article just uses it as a shortcut to not start listing countries. I live in a country where I have 10Gbps full-duplex and I pay 50$ / month, in "Europe". The issue is that some countries have telecom lobbies which are still milking their copper networks. Then the "competition committees" in most of these countries are actually working AGAINST the benefit of the public, because they don't allow 1 single company to start offering fiber, because that would be a competition advantage. So the whole system is kinda in a deadlock. In order to unblock, at least 2 telecoms have to agree to release fiber deals together. It has happened in some countries.
- 0points 2y ago
  What european countries still dont have fiber? //Confused swede with 10G fiber all over the place. Writing from literally the countryside next to nowhere.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    Germany, GP's situation smells like their policies.
  - holowoodman 2y ago
    Germany. Deutsche Telekom is the former monopoly that was half-privatized around 1995 or something. The state still owns quite a large stake of it. They milk their ancient copper crap for everything they can while keeping prices high. They are refusing useful backbone interconnects to monopolize access to their customers (Actually they are not allowed to refuse. They just offer interconnections only in their data centers in the middle of nowhere, where you need to rent their (outrageously priced) rackspace and fibres because there is nothing else. They are refusing for decades to do anything useful at the big exchanges like DECIX). And if there should ever be a small competitor that on their own tries to lay fibre somewhere, they quickly lay their own fibre into the open ditches (they are allowed to do that) and offer just enough rebates for their former copper customers to switch to their fibre that the competitor cannot recoup the invest and goes bankrupt. Since that dance is now known to everyone, even the announcement of Telekom laying their own fibres kills the competitors' projects there. So after a competitor's announcement of fibre rollout, Telekom does the same, project dead, no fibre rollout at all. Oh, and since it is a partially-state-owned former monopoly/ministry, the state and competition authorities turn a blind eye to all that, when not actively promoting them... Then there is the problem of "5G reception" vs. "5G reception with usable bandwidth". A lot of overbooking goes on, many cells don't have sufficient capacity allocated, so there are reports of 4G actually being faster in many places. And also, yes, you can get 5G in a lot of actually populated areas. But you certainly will pay through the nose for that, usually you get a low-GB amount of traffic included, so maybe a tenth of the Microsoft monorepo in question. The rest is pay-10Eur-per-GB or something.
nyanpasu64 2y ago
I've experienced interruptions mid-clone (with no apparent way to resume them) when trying to clone repos on unreliable connections, and perhaps a similar issue is happening with connections between continents.
- joshvm 2y ago
  The only reliable route I’ve found is to use SSH clone. HTTPS is lousy and as you mention, is not resumable. Works fine in Antarctica even over our slower satellite. Doesn’t help if you actually drop, but you can clone to a remote and then rsync everything over time.
p_l 2y ago
It's issues cloning super huge repo over crappy protocols across ocean especially when VPNs get included in the problem
teo_zero 2y ago
> > we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size. > I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet. Maybe they lack internet but teach their pupils how to write "its".
johnisgood 2y ago
Some countries in Europe (even Poland) definitely offer faster Internet and for cheaper than the US, and without most of the privacy issues that US ISPs have.
nemetroid 2y ago
The problem is probably that the repo is not hosted in Europe.
heisenbit 2y ago
Effective bandwidth can be influenced by roundtrip time. Fewer IP4 numbers means more NAT with more delay and yet another point where occasionally something can go wrong. Last but not least there are some areas in the EU like the Canary Islands where the internet feels like going over a sat.
mattlondon 2y ago
I was not sure what this meant either. I know personally I have downloaded and uploaded some very very large files transatlantic (e.g. syncing to cloud storage) with absolutely no issues, so not sure what they are talking about. I guess perhaps there are issues with git cloning such a large amount of data, but that is a problem with git and not the infrastructure. FWIW every school I've seen (and I recently toured a bunch looking at them for my kids to start at) all had the internet and the kids were using iPads etc for various things. Anecdotally my secondary school (11-18y in UK) in rural Hertfordshire was online in the 1995 region. It was via I think a 14.4 modem and there actually wasn't that much useful material for kids then to be honest. I remember looking at the "non-professional style" NASA website for instance (the current one is obviously quite fancy in comparison, but it used to be very rustic and at some obscure domain). CD-based encyclopedias we're all the rage instead around that time IIRC - Encarta et al.
59nadir 2y ago
Most european countries have connections with more bandwith and less base latency for cheaper than the US, it's not a connection issue. If there was an issue it's that the repo itself is hosted on the other side of the world, but even so the sidenote itself is odd.
- tom_ 2y ago
  I wouldn't say it's odd at all - it's basically what's justifying actually trying to solve the problem rather than just going "huh... that's weird..." then putting it on the backlog due to it not being a showstopper. This sort of thing has been a problem on every project I've worked on that's involved people in America. (I'm in the UK.) Throughput is inconsistent, latency is inconsistent, and long-running downloads aren't reliable. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but I always figured the problem was fairly obvious: it's a lot of miles from America to Europe, west coast America especially, and a lot of them are underwater, and your're sharing the conduit with everybody else in Europe. Many ways for packets to get lost (or get held up long enough to count), and frankly it's quite surprising more of them don't. (Usual thing for Perforce is to leave it running overnight/weekend with a retry count of 1 million. I'm not sure what you'd do with Git, though? it seems to do the whole transfer as one big non-retryable lump. There must be something though.)
o11c 2y ago
My knowledge is a bit outdated, but we used to say: * in America, peering between ISPs is great, but the last-mile connection is terrible * In Europe, the last-mile connection is great, but peering between the ISPs is terrible (ISPs are at war with each other). Often you could massively improve performance by renting a VPS in the correct city and routing your traffic manually.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

At least here in Western Europe, in general the internet is great. Though coverage in rural areas varies by country.

gnrlst 2y ago

In most EU countries we have multi-gigabit internet (for cheap too). Current offers are around ~5 GBIT speeds for 20 bucks a month.

n_ary 2y ago
Well good for you. On my side of europe, I pay €50/- for a cheap 50Mbps(1 month cancellation notice period). I could get a slightly cheaper 100Mbps from a predator for €20/- for first 6 month but then it goes up to €50/- and they pull bs about not being able to cancel if you even move because your new location is also in their coverage area(over garbage copper) and suffers at least 20 outages per month while there are other providers with much cheaper rates and better service. Some EU is still suffering from Telekom copper barons.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Sadly, I'm in Germany. Which is a third world country when it comes to decent connectivity. They are rolling out some fiber now in Berlin. Finally. But very slowly and not to my building any time soon. Most of the country is limited to DSL speeds. Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. Germany has borders with nine countries. Each of those have better connectivity than Germany. I'm from the Netherlands where over 90% of households now have fiber connections, for example. Here in Berlin it's very hard to get that. They are starting to roll it out in some areas but it's taking very long and each building has to then get connected, which is up to the building owners.
- barrkel 2y ago
  When I travel in Germany I use a Deutsche Telekom pay as you go SIM in a 5G hotspot, and generally get about 200Mbit throughtput, which is far higher than you can expect any place you're staying to provide. It's €7 a day (or €100 a month) but it's worth it to avoid the terrible internet.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    Oh, that is an incentive for them not to improve anything. Wouldn't want customers to stop purchasing mobile Internet for 100 Euro a month.
- aniviacat 2y ago
  > Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. According to the Bundesnetzagentur over 90% [1] of Germany has 5G coverage (and almost all of the rest has 4G [2]). [1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2024/20240613_MoFu.html https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... [2] https://gigabitgrundbuch.bund.de/GIGA/DE/MobilfunkMonitoring/Vollbild/start.html https://gigabitgrundbuch.bund.de/GIGA/DE/MobilfunkMonitoring...
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    I usually lose connectivity on train journeys across Germany. I'm offline most of the way. Even the in train wifi gets quite bad in remote areas. Because they depend on the same shitty mobile networks. There's a stark difference as soon as you cross the borders with other countries. Suddenly stuff works again. Things stop timing out. I also deal with commercial customers that have companies in areas with either no or poor mobile connectivity and since we sell mobile apps to them, we always need to double check they actually have a good connection. One of our customers is on the edge of a city with very spotty 4G at best. I recently recommended Star Link to another company that is operating in rural areas. They were asking about offline capabilities of our app. Because they deal with poor connectivity all the time. I made the point that you can get internet anywhere you want now for a fairly reasonable price.
badgersnake 2y ago
Not in the UK. Still on 80Mbit VDSL here.
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  I and many I know have Gb fiber in the UK
- _joel 2y ago
  You must be unlucky, according to Openreach "fibre broadband is already available in more than 96.59 per cent of the UK."
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    Coming next year apparently. I won’t hold my breath.
  - mattlondon 2y ago
    Is that "fibre" or "full fibre". They lied a lot for a good few years saying "OMG fibre broadband!" When in reality is was still copper for the last mile so that "fibre" connection in reality was some ADSL variant and limited to 80/20mpbs. Actual full fibre all the way from your home to the internet is I think still quite a way behind. Even in London (London! The capital city with high density) there are places where there are no full fibre options.
    - _joel 2y ago
      Maybe myself and my friends are lucky as we're all on ftth
      - mattlondon 2y ago
        Only a few I know are on ftth. I guess I live in a fairly affluent area in Zone 3 which is lower density than average - zero flats etc, all just individual houses so perhaps not worth their effort rolling out
    - 2y ago

yashap 2y ago

They’re probably downloading from a server in the states, being much further away makes a big difference with a massive download.

jonathancreamer 2y ago
This.

_kidlike 2y ago

Let's pretend you didn't write the last 2 sentences... first of all "internet in Europe" makes close to zero sense to argue about. The article just uses it as a shortcut to not start listing countries. I live in a country where I have 10Gbps full-duplex and I pay 50$ / month, in "Europe". The issue is that some countries have telecom lobbies which are still milking their copper networks. Then the "competition committees" in most of these countries are actually working AGAINST the benefit of the public, because they don't allow 1 single company to start offering fiber, because that would be a competition advantage. So the whole system is kinda in a deadlock. In order to unblock, at least 2 telecoms have to agree to release fiber deals together. It has happened in some countries.

0points 2y ago
What european countries still dont have fiber? //Confused swede with 10G fiber all over the place. Writing from literally the countryside next to nowhere.
- SSLy 2y ago
  Germany, GP's situation smells like their policies.
- holowoodman 2y ago
  Germany. Deutsche Telekom is the former monopoly that was half-privatized around 1995 or something. The state still owns quite a large stake of it. They milk their ancient copper crap for everything they can while keeping prices high. They are refusing useful backbone interconnects to monopolize access to their customers (Actually they are not allowed to refuse. They just offer interconnections only in their data centers in the middle of nowhere, where you need to rent their (outrageously priced) rackspace and fibres because there is nothing else. They are refusing for decades to do anything useful at the big exchanges like DECIX). And if there should ever be a small competitor that on their own tries to lay fibre somewhere, they quickly lay their own fibre into the open ditches (they are allowed to do that) and offer just enough rebates for their former copper customers to switch to their fibre that the competitor cannot recoup the invest and goes bankrupt. Since that dance is now known to everyone, even the announcement of Telekom laying their own fibres kills the competitors' projects there. So after a competitor's announcement of fibre rollout, Telekom does the same, project dead, no fibre rollout at all. Oh, and since it is a partially-state-owned former monopoly/ministry, the state and competition authorities turn a blind eye to all that, when not actively promoting them... Then there is the problem of "5G reception" vs. "5G reception with usable bandwidth". A lot of overbooking goes on, many cells don't have sufficient capacity allocated, so there are reports of 4G actually being faster in many places. And also, yes, you can get 5G in a lot of actually populated areas. But you certainly will pay through the nose for that, usually you get a low-GB amount of traffic included, so maybe a tenth of the Microsoft monorepo in question. The rest is pay-10Eur-per-GB or something.

nyanpasu64 2y ago

I've experienced interruptions mid-clone (with no apparent way to resume them) when trying to clone repos on unreliable connections, and perhaps a similar issue is happening with connections between continents.

joshvm 2y ago
The only reliable route I’ve found is to use SSH clone. HTTPS is lousy and as you mention, is not resumable. Works fine in Antarctica even over our slower satellite. Doesn’t help if you actually drop, but you can clone to a remote and then rsync everything over time.

p_l 2y ago

It's issues cloning super huge repo over crappy protocols across ocean especially when VPNs get included in the problem

teo_zero 2y ago

> > we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size. > I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet. Maybe they lack internet but teach their pupils how to write "its".

johnisgood 2y ago

Some countries in Europe (even Poland) definitely offer faster Internet and for cheaper than the US, and without most of the privacy issues that US ISPs have.

nemetroid 2y ago

The problem is probably that the repo is not hosted in Europe.

heisenbit 2y ago

Effective bandwidth can be influenced by roundtrip time. Fewer IP4 numbers means more NAT with more delay and yet another point where occasionally something can go wrong. Last but not least there are some areas in the EU like the Canary Islands where the internet feels like going over a sat.

mattlondon 2y ago

I was not sure what this meant either. I know personally I have downloaded and uploaded some very very large files transatlantic (e.g. syncing to cloud storage) with absolutely no issues, so not sure what they are talking about. I guess perhaps there are issues with git cloning such a large amount of data, but that is a problem with git and not the infrastructure. FWIW every school I've seen (and I recently toured a bunch looking at them for my kids to start at) all had the internet and the kids were using iPads etc for various things. Anecdotally my secondary school (11-18y in UK) in rural Hertfordshire was online in the 1995 region. It was via I think a 14.4 modem and there actually wasn't that much useful material for kids then to be honest. I remember looking at the "non-professional style" NASA website for instance (the current one is obviously quite fancy in comparison, but it used to be very rustic and at some obscure domain). CD-based encyclopedias we're all the rage instead around that time IIRC - Encarta et al.

59nadir 2y ago

Most european countries have connections with more bandwith and less base latency for cheaper than the US, it's not a connection issue. If there was an issue it's that the repo itself is hosted on the other side of the world, but even so the sidenote itself is odd.

tom_ 2y ago
I wouldn't say it's odd at all - it's basically what's justifying actually trying to solve the problem rather than just going "huh... that's weird..." then putting it on the backlog due to it not being a showstopper. This sort of thing has been a problem on every project I've worked on that's involved people in America. (I'm in the UK.) Throughput is inconsistent, latency is inconsistent, and long-running downloads aren't reliable. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but I always figured the problem was fairly obvious: it's a lot of miles from America to Europe, west coast America especially, and a lot of them are underwater, and your're sharing the conduit with everybody else in Europe. Many ways for packets to get lost (or get held up long enough to count), and frankly it's quite surprising more of them don't. (Usual thing for Perforce is to leave it running overnight/weekend with a retry count of 1 million. I'm not sure what you'd do with Git, though? it seems to do the whole transfer as one big non-retryable lump. There must be something though.)

o11c 2y ago

My knowledge is a bit outdated, but we used to say: * in America, peering between ISPs is great, but the last-mile connection is terrible * In Europe, the last-mile connection is great, but peering between the ISPs is terrible (ISPs are at war with each other). Often you could massively improve performance by renting a VPS in the correct city and routing your traffic manually.