7 ms·

Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

479 points by PhilKunz 11mo ago

wil421 11mo ago
I worked with Vodafone years ago to do an integration with ticketing systems. It seems like no one actually worked for Vodafone it was all contractors or contractors of contractors of contractors. Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
- lifestyleguru 11mo ago
  I used service of Vodafone Germany once. In paperwork fever I only scanned the contract and saw somewhere 6000 but signed off and moved along with remaining paperwork. I thought "it has to be at least 60Mbit/s, right?". Nope. 6Mbit/s DSL, two years contract, cancellation by letter. Fuck you, Vodafone.
- egeozcan 11mo ago
  At such organizations, you can usually communicate with any contractor, but you must go through a project manager. These managers, who are often contractors themselves, act as a support center for the other contractors.
benced 11mo ago
Rare comparative W for American ISPs?
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  I think Comcast charges for peering as well (but not through an intermediary).
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- stego-tech 11mo ago
  Not really, as US ISPs have been repeatedly trying to game the system into becoming landlords for decades. The difference is, ironically, their own self-imposed monopolies: Comcast may be a T1 ISP, but they’re largely a monopoly in the markets they serve. Same goes for Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, TDS, etc. The end result is a sort of “forced cooperation” with each other, though occasionally one will try to extort the others for cash (I seem to recall L3 and Cogent both engaging in this bullshit around the time streaming video got big). Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
  - rsingel 11mo ago
    California's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs
    - stego-tech 11mo ago
      Exactly. Regulations without suitable punishments and investigatory powers are essentially only barriers to new entrants, not deterrents of bad behavior.
    - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
      California bans "fast lanes" and service plan bundles i.e Facebook and YouTube internet plans. No one's allowing you to plug X x 100G into their eyeball network for free
Liftyee 11mo ago
New selling point for all the VPN sponsored segments... "if you're on Vodafone Germany, make your connection speeds faster with YetAnotherVPN!"
- timvisee 11mo ago
  A VPN won't make your route shorter
  - toast0 11mo ago
    If the shortest route is congested, a longer route can be advantageous if it avoids congested hops.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    It actually can, depending on where it is. Paperclip optimizers don't optimize for route length - they optimize for paperclips received. When Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom gets your packet, they try to send it to one of their customers, because their customers pay them to receive traffic, even when it's a longer route. If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route. In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
  - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
Lio 11mo ago
Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts? If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part? I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
- tracker1 11mo ago
  Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?
  - lifestyleguru 11mo ago
    In Germany in specific building there is only one provider available in your telephone socket, and one in your cable socket in your apartment. Frequently there is no cable socket.
    - amaccuish 11mo ago
      That's not relevant. Over a Deutsche Telekom phone line you can choose an ISP. The ISP sometimes has a layer two connection to you and therefore has their own infrastructure or they have a layer 3 connection in which case you suffer from the Telekom policies. Layer 2 = their infrastructure connects you to the internet Layer 3 = theyre literally just a reseller, DTAG is providing your internet connection, the ISP just billing etc.
      - lifestyleguru 11mo ago
        That's too many words for simply saying "The fastest available DSL is 16Mbit/s and the customer service will be rude and useless".
  - aidenn0 11mo ago
    Sounds like their largest competitor (DT) is already doing this.
mystraline 11mo ago
The play by major content providers is "not to pay" and "block inter.link" Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media. This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  Blocking seems overkill. Just put up a banner explaining why the service is slow, warning customers about their ISPs.
  - Spivak 11mo ago
    Because a banner is ignorable. A block will actually spur action.
    - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
      A banner by itself is very ignorable, but in this case the website is going to be annoyingly slow, and people are gonna notice that and be thinking a little about why. In that scenario, they're much more likely to notice and pay attention to something like a banner.
- preya2k 11mo ago
  Doesn’t seem to work in regards to Deutsche Telekom so far.
- noAnswer 11mo ago
  "The play by major content providers" like Google? Where in order to become a "Verified Peering Provider" you are not permitted to use a IX?! https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provider https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
  - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
    The restriction is only to Google. 1299, a Google gold partner is at IXes
fuzzy2 11mo ago
It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever? I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
- sadeshmukh 11mo ago
  They mention it extensively in the article.
  - kleiba 11mo ago
    I suppose OP is hinting at the fact that Germans are probably already used to having one of the shittiest internet services in the Western world.
  - fuzzy2 11mo ago
    They certainly do; however, we all know the game: Headlines only. Reading TFA? Meh
- lxgr 11mo ago
  The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.
  - cachius 11mo ago
    Still Telekom has a big market share there.
    - archi42 11mo ago
      They're entrenched. They have Telekom-branded stores (resellers) in every other town. They operate the network and hence have the best ability for trouble shooting. Non-technical users don't know what peering means, they just pay for Internet like they pay for water or power. So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-) Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.
BoredPositron 11mo ago
Fucking around with peering is the specialty of German ISPs. Telekom (our biggest provider) is sometimes unusable for YouTube/Netflix/Cloudflare/Steam in big cities because of similar shenanigans.
- hylaride 11mo ago
  I was shocked just how slow and poor the mobile networks were in Germany. When I last visited (circa 2014) I literally switched my prepaid sim from T-Mobile to Vodaphone because the experience was so bad - only to have the same bad experience. I had barely usable LTE and connections dropped to EDGE on the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Google Maps barely loaded in the cities let alone the fact I was playing Ingress at the time and it was pretty much unusable This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
tracker1 11mo ago
I hate this line of thinking.. Netflix isn't just sending data to random users, it's data Vodafone users request and want to receive.
phineyes 11mo ago
This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive. On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
- stroebs 11mo ago
  I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue. I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
  - MichaelZuo 11mo ago
    Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering? If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
    - toast0 11mo ago
      Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the requirements in the policy. Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually. It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.
hylaride 11mo ago
Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to peer with any other domestic backbone providers. The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto. It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  That's insane given that Front St. 151 is probably the best spot on North America when it comes to connectivity.
- 1over137 11mo ago
  it’s also insane because probably no Canadian wants their traffic going through the US unnecessarily, since all the 51st state takeover crap.
  - hylaride 11mo ago
    FWIW, this has being going on for decades. Bell literally doesn't care if there's a chance they can suck up some peering fees. There have been periodic times where it became an acute problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams became saturated and there were few alternative paths.
  - subarctic 11mo ago
    Maybe that's a way to give them bad PR and convince then to change policies? Unfortunately most people probably don't understand this well enough and they have a pretty well oiled PR machine with all their control over tv and radio stations, etc
danogentili 11mo ago
Seems pretty much a private equivalent of "fair share" govt regulation currently being pushed by ISPs in Europe through lobbying with the Digital Networks Act (https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-future-regulatory-framework-for-electronic-communications-in-europe/ https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-fut..., https://stopdna.eu/ https://stopdna.eu/). South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
stego-tech 11mo ago
The solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already have very generous business models with widespread monopolies on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies, and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily - all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the need for additional extraction of capital from other parties. Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common man and thus can’t count on them to support the Open Internet as we’d like to see it. That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention. You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.
- danogentili 11mo ago
  The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act. South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
  - stego-tech 11mo ago
    Because western governments (and those whose governments were modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and corruption. It’s why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked, or reversed reforms like net neutrality or “nutrition labels” on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to “fair share” regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is hugely influential, and the industry is almost exclusively made up of rent-seeking slumlords at this point, particularly at the top (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, etc). It’s why DMCA reform is blocked, why pirates get jail time while AI grifts get a hand-wave, and why right-to-repair or data privacy remains a fractured and piecemeal reform instead of a national agenda item. The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.
fweimer 11mo ago
Is doing business with Inter.link really structurally different from getting connectivity to an exchange like DE-CIX and doing business there? I know that in theory, you get settlement-free peering at exchanges, but only for those networks that participate. And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  Depends what exactly you're buying from them L2 yes. L3 no
bbzylstra 11mo ago
I'm surprised to read an obviously AI written article ("This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction") from a tech/news site. Does anyone else find this weird? It make me question the editors note about how much background research was actually done.
- unethical_ban 11mo ago
  It didn't seem AI to me.
  - oasisbob 11mo ago
    The easiest way to notice it is its excessive use of what Wikipedia calls "negative parallel construction". [1] It's a super common genai tic > This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction > The problem isn't your connection to Vodafone—it's Vodafone's restrictive connections to the rest of the internet. > Vodafone's exit from public peering isn't an isolated technical decision—it's part of a broader pattern of large telecoms trying to reshape internet economics in their favor The more obnoxious signs though is the excessive length, loose structure, repetition, and lack of serious editing. Writing ~3000 words used to take quite a bit of effort, so you'd need to be at least a strong enough writer to organize and structure your thoughts to make it that far. Now it's so easy anyone can put out tons of generated content on whatever topic they want. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- littlestymaar 11mo ago
  It looks like the website was founded not so long ago, and I guess AI-generated slop is the only way to make a profitable web media nowadays.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- bbzylstra 11mo ago
  Also, am I going crazy or do the "comment" and "share" buttons under the header just tick up but don't allow you to actually do anything? This feels like a vibe-coded website but it could be Firefox being weird.
littlestymaar 11mo ago
The disclaimer at the top of the article is really mind blowing: > We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
- alienbaby 11mo ago
  it sounded to me like an AI generated article covering it's ass, or at least written by someone who did naught but AI generated research as their own 'research'.
bell-cot 11mo ago
Not to say that Mr. Musk seems popular in Germany, nor that orbital dynamics are friendly to high user densities, but ...
- noAnswer 11mo ago
  https://inter.link https://inter.link "Trusted By: SpaceX"
  - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
    SpaceX used to pay AS33891 Core-Backbone GmbH to reach AS3320 now they pay 1299 (German (landed) Starlink users) for that Interlink is to get to France Telecom/ Orange from German Starlink users And to get Italian/Bulgarian landed traffic to AS3320 From what I see most of the traffic that flows via inter.link from SpaceX is point to point traffic. Not regular IP transit like what they get from 1299 or GTT SpaceX is settlement free in Germany, customer elsewhere.
uyzstvqs 11mo ago
It's very simple. I host my stuff on a network with an open peering policy. If you as an ISP somehow have peering issues with that, then that's a you problem. I will not pay a ransom to some shady middleman that you decide to use because your network admins are too lazy. I will (rightfully) blame you and tell your customers to switch ISPs if they have issues. Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.
- LaurensBER 11mo ago
  This is a very reasonable approach until somehow your competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany network. As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  The network is buying transit from someone
lwn 11mo ago
I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month. The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
- LaurensBER 11mo ago
  While this is great when it works it does raise some interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money, should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a utility but not on the same level as water or sewage. I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
  - redserk 11mo ago
    Why make the assumption that municipalities must treat their internet services as a second-rate utility? Many local governments are competently run. If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water.
    - markdown 11mo ago
      > If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water. More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
      - VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
        I don't find that it is usually even possible to have internet without power. How would that work?
binome 11mo ago
Interesting take, but generally large, incumbent eyeball networks have refrained from open peering at IX's for decades at this point. They maintained presences, but usually just to grab a few specific peers they wanted, not to peer broadly with everyone across the exchange, and the bulk of traffic from large providers into eyeball networks comes across PNIs or on-net CDN nodes, not IX. If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.
meibo 11mo ago
The Telekom story mentioned in this article is 100% as bad as they make it out to be, most of the users we support with issues reaching our services are with Telekom Germany. Or in an authoritarian nation that blocks access to western services.
- amaccuish 11mo ago
  Can confirm, recently moved to o2, it was insufferable. For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/ EN https://netzbremse.de/en/ https://netzbremse.de/en/
  - mft_ 11mo ago
    Would you recommend o2?
    - amaccuish 11mo ago
      Can't complain so far, reddit loads in the evenings again.
      - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
        Isn't 02 Telefonica? I don't believe they peer either
ThinkBeat 11mo ago
Using Starlink as your Internet provider does not protect you in any way when it comes to changes in pricing, speed or connectivity.
- Jackson__ 11mo ago
  Yeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for his $1T payment.
  - PhilKunz 11mo ago
    except the only infrastructure to replace is the satellite dish, and not the fiber that goes into your home. Or am I wrong here.
pimeys 11mo ago
Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants. What a time to be alive.
- immibis 11mo ago
  Deutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000€ per month per gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still at their sole discretion.
- mtmail 11mo ago
  The issue here seems to be the landlord.
  - socksy 11mo ago
    Part of the issue is that the landlord gets any say whatsoever about a public utility.
  - pimeys 11mo ago
    Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable. I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
    - lifestyleguru 11mo ago
      How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.
naIak 11mo ago
Refusing to peer directly is not “killing the free internet”. This level of hyperbole doesn’t help your argument.
- immibis 11mo ago
  yes it is? This level of normalcy bias doesn't help your argument, either.
globular-toast 11mo ago
When can we start doing meshnets again? I was excited about it in '05 long before I could afford networking equipment. 20 years later and we've only regressed.
- immibis 11mo ago
  Right now. There's Freifunk in Germany. But we're all terrified of laws now. There was a time when hackers would dare to sticky-tape cables out their window and across the street. Not any more, everything's all nice and regulated and a strict order is harshly enforced. If I place a fiber anywhere outside of my apartment I expect to be deported.
everfrustrated 11mo ago
Inter.link is openly peering on IX's tho. So I'm unclear why the angst. https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/ https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  No guarantees of performance to peers, no one's carrying peered traffic to other peers or upstreams. That's giving free transit/route leaks
metanonsense 11mo ago
Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“
- IlikeKitties 11mo ago
  Do not switch to Vodafone. Even without their peering it's still a horrible ISP
ElijahLynn 11mo ago
Thank you for writing this article. It is a rare take on what is happening, and not everyone has the expertise to write it. It seems easy enough to share to consumers who may be affected by this. And it does have some action steps too.
trvz 11mo ago
Even the first paragraph is wrong: > There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free. When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
vitorsr 11mo ago
Telefonica does this. Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it. I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away. So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well. To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  The logic is money. Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
weinzierl 11mo ago
I think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.
- 20after4 11mo ago
  Mesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with, it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet without some major technical breakthroughs.
  - sunshine-o 11mo ago
    I do not think this is about replacing the current Internet and watching Youtube or Netflix using a mesh network. It would be more about having a slow, free and backup internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the same time as the grid). I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.
fortranfiend 11mo ago
Wow, thanks I hate it.
lxgr 11mo ago
> Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much data they send to Vodafone customers. As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
1a527dd5 11mo ago
Germany is on a weird path; first the nuclear power withdrawal and now this. It's all a bit topsy turvy.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  Germany has had a weird approach when it comes to the Internet for several decades, but sure, it must somehow be related to recent nuclear power policies.
- glitchcrab 11mo ago
  It doesn’t make sense to conflate a decision made by the government with that of a private company, just because they happen to be in the same country.
Starlevel004 11mo ago
> When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is abandoning. Tab closed
- cachius 11mo ago
  Why?
  - Dilettante_ 11mo ago
    AI writing cadence I presume. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683
    - cachius 11mo ago
      Thanks. I thought it was something factually wrong.
      - galaxy_gas 11mo ago
        It is also likely factually wrong as most major ISPs use GGC for popular traffic
        marcusb 11mo ago
        After using Deutsche Telekom as an example of how great direct peering is, a few paragraphs later the article uses Deutsche Telekom as an example of the dangers of using peering provider intermediaries.
        PhilKunz 11mo ago
        Is it the only peering of Starlink though?
mft_ 11mo ago
Is anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone or Telekom?
- rurban 11mo ago
  No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster. We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
  - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
    Use the same provider
Nevermark 11mo ago
Companies claim mergers of competitors are good because they increase efficiency, to get permission to centralize markets to a far greater degree than any cartel could. Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense. The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure. And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR. -- It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.) A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed. But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater. Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant. Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc. Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type. (I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)
lorenzk 11mo ago
I have had sporadic problems with Vodafone Germany’s IPv4 routing for months, sent detailed analyses and refused in advance to pay for any technicians they might send because the problem could not be on my property. They sent two technicians who confirmed my view. Then they charged me 160 EUR for them without fixing the issue.
- noAnswer 11mo ago
  You have to go to forum.vodafone.de: 1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router. 2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router. 3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error. 4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times. After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone. I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
- 0xbs 11mo ago
  They are NATing the IPv4s, i.e. multiple customers are sharing the same IPv4, which can cause problems. I called them and told them that I absolutely need to do port forwarding and asked nicely if I could get an exclusive IPv4. The support said „Of course, let me check the box in the UI for your account, should be active by tomorrow“ and done. You have to get lucky to get someone who understands your problem and is willing to fix it, though.
ExoticPearTree 11mo ago
Greed. The shortest explanation. There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe. And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra. I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.

479 points by PhilKunz 11mo ago

wil421 11mo ago

I worked with Vodafone years ago to do an integration with ticketing systems. It seems like no one actually worked for Vodafone it was all contractors or contractors of contractors of contractors. Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.

lifestyleguru 11mo ago
I used service of Vodafone Germany once. In paperwork fever I only scanned the contract and saw somewhere 6000 but signed off and moved along with remaining paperwork. I thought "it has to be at least 60Mbit/s, right?". Nope. 6Mbit/s DSL, two years contract, cancellation by letter. Fuck you, Vodafone.
egeozcan 11mo ago
At such organizations, you can usually communicate with any contractor, but you must go through a project manager. These managers, who are often contractors themselves, act as a support center for the other contractors.

benced 11mo ago

Rare comparative W for American ISPs?

aidenn0 11mo ago
I think Comcast charges for peering as well (but not through an intermediary).
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
stego-tech 11mo ago
Not really, as US ISPs have been repeatedly trying to game the system into becoming landlords for decades. The difference is, ironically, their own self-imposed monopolies: Comcast may be a T1 ISP, but they’re largely a monopoly in the markets they serve. Same goes for Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, TDS, etc. The end result is a sort of “forced cooperation” with each other, though occasionally one will try to extort the others for cash (I seem to recall L3 and Cogent both engaging in this bullshit around the time streaming video got big). Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
- rsingel 11mo ago
  California's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs
  - stego-tech 11mo ago
    Exactly. Regulations without suitable punishments and investigatory powers are essentially only barriers to new entrants, not deterrents of bad behavior.
  - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
    California bans "fast lanes" and service plan bundles i.e Facebook and YouTube internet plans. No one's allowing you to plug X x 100G into their eyeball network for free

Liftyee 11mo ago

New selling point for all the VPN sponsored segments... "if you're on Vodafone Germany, make your connection speeds faster with YetAnotherVPN!"

timvisee 11mo ago
A VPN won't make your route shorter
- toast0 11mo ago
  If the shortest route is congested, a longer route can be advantageous if it avoids congested hops.
- immibis 11mo ago
  It actually can, depending on where it is. Paperclip optimizers don't optimize for route length - they optimize for paperclips received. When Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom gets your packet, they try to send it to one of their customers, because their customers pay them to receive traffic, even when it's a longer route. If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route. In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago

Lio 11mo ago

Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts? If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part? I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.

tracker1 11mo ago
Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?
- lifestyleguru 11mo ago
  In Germany in specific building there is only one provider available in your telephone socket, and one in your cable socket in your apartment. Frequently there is no cable socket.
  - amaccuish 11mo ago
    That's not relevant. Over a Deutsche Telekom phone line you can choose an ISP. The ISP sometimes has a layer two connection to you and therefore has their own infrastructure or they have a layer 3 connection in which case you suffer from the Telekom policies. Layer 2 = their infrastructure connects you to the internet Layer 3 = theyre literally just a reseller, DTAG is providing your internet connection, the ISP just billing etc.
    - lifestyleguru 11mo ago
      That's too many words for simply saying "The fastest available DSL is 16Mbit/s and the customer service will be rude and useless".
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  Sounds like their largest competitor (DT) is already doing this.

mystraline 11mo ago

The play by major content providers is "not to pay" and "block inter.link" Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media. This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.

TulliusCicero 11mo ago
Blocking seems overkill. Just put up a banner explaining why the service is slow, warning customers about their ISPs.
- Spivak 11mo ago
  Because a banner is ignorable. A block will actually spur action.
  - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
    A banner by itself is very ignorable, but in this case the website is going to be annoyingly slow, and people are gonna notice that and be thinking a little about why. In that scenario, they're much more likely to notice and pay attention to something like a banner.
preya2k 11mo ago
Doesn’t seem to work in regards to Deutsche Telekom so far.
noAnswer 11mo ago
"The play by major content providers" like Google? Where in order to become a "Verified Peering Provider" you are not permitted to use a IX?! https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provider https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  The restriction is only to Google. 1299, a Google gold partner is at IXes

fuzzy2 11mo ago

It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever? I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.

sadeshmukh 11mo ago
They mention it extensively in the article.
- kleiba 11mo ago
  I suppose OP is hinting at the fact that Germans are probably already used to having one of the shittiest internet services in the Western world.
- fuzzy2 11mo ago
  They certainly do; however, we all know the game: Headlines only. Reading TFA? Meh
lxgr 11mo ago
The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.
- cachius 11mo ago
  Still Telekom has a big market share there.
  - archi42 11mo ago
    They're entrenched. They have Telekom-branded stores (resellers) in every other town. They operate the network and hence have the best ability for trouble shooting. Non-technical users don't know what peering means, they just pay for Internet like they pay for water or power. So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-) Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.

BoredPositron 11mo ago

Fucking around with peering is the specialty of German ISPs. Telekom (our biggest provider) is sometimes unusable for YouTube/Netflix/Cloudflare/Steam in big cities because of similar shenanigans.

hylaride 11mo ago
I was shocked just how slow and poor the mobile networks were in Germany. When I last visited (circa 2014) I literally switched my prepaid sim from T-Mobile to Vodaphone because the experience was so bad - only to have the same bad experience. I had barely usable LTE and connections dropped to EDGE on the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Google Maps barely loaded in the cities let alone the fact I was playing Ingress at the time and it was pretty much unusable This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.

tracker1 11mo ago

I hate this line of thinking.. Netflix isn't just sending data to random users, it's data Vodafone users request and want to receive.

phineyes 11mo ago

This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive. On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.

stroebs 11mo ago
I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue. I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
- MichaelZuo 11mo ago
  Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering? If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
  - toast0 11mo ago
    Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the requirements in the policy. Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually. It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.

hylaride 11mo ago

Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to peer with any other domestic backbone providers. The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto. It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.

jacquesm 11mo ago
That's insane given that Front St. 151 is probably the best spot on North America when it comes to connectivity.
1over137 11mo ago
it’s also insane because probably no Canadian wants their traffic going through the US unnecessarily, since all the 51st state takeover crap.
- hylaride 11mo ago
  FWIW, this has being going on for decades. Bell literally doesn't care if there's a chance they can suck up some peering fees. There have been periodic times where it became an acute problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams became saturated and there were few alternative paths.
- subarctic 11mo ago
  Maybe that's a way to give them bad PR and convince then to change policies? Unfortunately most people probably don't understand this well enough and they have a pretty well oiled PR machine with all their control over tv and radio stations, etc

danogentili 11mo ago

Seems pretty much a private equivalent of "fair share" govt regulation currently being pushed by ISPs in Europe through lobbying with the Digital Networks Act (https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-future-regulatory-framework-for-electronic-communications-in-europe/ https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-fut..., https://stopdna.eu/ https://stopdna.eu/). South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).

stego-tech 11mo ago

The solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already have very generous business models with widespread monopolies on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies, and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily - all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the need for additional extraction of capital from other parties. Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common man and thus can’t count on them to support the Open Internet as we’d like to see it. That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention. You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.

danogentili 11mo ago
The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act. South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
- stego-tech 11mo ago
  Because western governments (and those whose governments were modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and corruption. It’s why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked, or reversed reforms like net neutrality or “nutrition labels” on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to “fair share” regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is hugely influential, and the industry is almost exclusively made up of rent-seeking slumlords at this point, particularly at the top (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, etc). It’s why DMCA reform is blocked, why pirates get jail time while AI grifts get a hand-wave, and why right-to-repair or data privacy remains a fractured and piecemeal reform instead of a national agenda item. The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.

fweimer 11mo ago

Is doing business with Inter.link really structurally different from getting connectivity to an exchange like DE-CIX and doing business there? I know that in theory, you get settlement-free peering at exchanges, but only for those networks that participate. And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.

inemesitaffia 11mo ago
Depends what exactly you're buying from them L2 yes. L3 no

bbzylstra 11mo ago

I'm surprised to read an obviously AI written article ("This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction") from a tech/news site. Does anyone else find this weird? It make me question the editors note about how much background research was actually done.

unethical_ban 11mo ago
It didn't seem AI to me.
- oasisbob 11mo ago
  The easiest way to notice it is its excessive use of what Wikipedia calls "negative parallel construction". [1] It's a super common genai tic > This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction > The problem isn't your connection to Vodafone—it's Vodafone's restrictive connections to the rest of the internet. > Vodafone's exit from public peering isn't an isolated technical decision—it's part of a broader pattern of large telecoms trying to reshape internet economics in their favor The more obnoxious signs though is the excessive length, loose structure, repetition, and lack of serious editing. Writing ~3000 words used to take quite a bit of effort, so you'd need to be at least a strong enough writer to organize and structure your thoughts to make it that far. Now it's so easy anyone can put out tons of generated content on whatever topic they want. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
littlestymaar 11mo ago
It looks like the website was founded not so long ago, and I guess AI-generated slop is the only way to make a profitable web media nowadays.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
bbzylstra 11mo ago
Also, am I going crazy or do the "comment" and "share" buttons under the header just tick up but don't allow you to actually do anything? This feels like a vibe-coded website but it could be Firefox being weird.

littlestymaar 11mo ago

The disclaimer at the top of the article is really mind blowing: > We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.

alienbaby 11mo ago
it sounded to me like an AI generated article covering it's ass, or at least written by someone who did naught but AI generated research as their own 'research'.

bell-cot 11mo ago

Not to say that Mr. Musk seems popular in Germany, nor that orbital dynamics are friendly to high user densities, but ...

noAnswer 11mo ago
https://inter.link https://inter.link "Trusted By: SpaceX"
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  SpaceX used to pay AS33891 Core-Backbone GmbH to reach AS3320 now they pay 1299 (German (landed) Starlink users) for that Interlink is to get to France Telecom/ Orange from German Starlink users And to get Italian/Bulgarian landed traffic to AS3320 From what I see most of the traffic that flows via inter.link from SpaceX is point to point traffic. Not regular IP transit like what they get from 1299 or GTT SpaceX is settlement free in Germany, customer elsewhere.

uyzstvqs 11mo ago

It's very simple. I host my stuff on a network with an open peering policy. If you as an ISP somehow have peering issues with that, then that's a you problem. I will not pay a ransom to some shady middleman that you decide to use because your network admins are too lazy. I will (rightfully) blame you and tell your customers to switch ISPs if they have issues. Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.

LaurensBER 11mo ago
This is a very reasonable approach until somehow your competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany network. As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
inemesitaffia 11mo ago
The network is buying transit from someone

lwn 11mo ago

I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month. The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.

LaurensBER 11mo ago
While this is great when it works it does raise some interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money, should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a utility but not on the same level as water or sewage. I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
- redserk 11mo ago
  Why make the assumption that municipalities must treat their internet services as a second-rate utility? Many local governments are competently run. If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water.
  - markdown 11mo ago
    > If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water. More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
    - VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
      I don't find that it is usually even possible to have internet without power. How would that work?

binome 11mo ago

Interesting take, but generally large, incumbent eyeball networks have refrained from open peering at IX's for decades at this point. They maintained presences, but usually just to grab a few specific peers they wanted, not to peer broadly with everyone across the exchange, and the bulk of traffic from large providers into eyeball networks comes across PNIs or on-net CDN nodes, not IX. If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.

meibo 11mo ago

The Telekom story mentioned in this article is 100% as bad as they make it out to be, most of the users we support with issues reaching our services are with Telekom Germany. Or in an authoritarian nation that blocks access to western services.

amaccuish 11mo ago
Can confirm, recently moved to o2, it was insufferable. For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/ EN https://netzbremse.de/en/ https://netzbremse.de/en/
- mft_ 11mo ago
  Would you recommend o2?
  - amaccuish 11mo ago
    Can't complain so far, reddit loads in the evenings again.
    - inemesitaffia 11mo ago
      Isn't 02 Telefonica? I don't believe they peer either

ThinkBeat 11mo ago

Using Starlink as your Internet provider does not protect you in any way when it comes to changes in pricing, speed or connectivity.

Jackson__ 11mo ago
Yeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for his $1T payment.
- PhilKunz 11mo ago
  except the only infrastructure to replace is the satellite dish, and not the fiber that goes into your home. Or am I wrong here.

pimeys 11mo ago

Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants. What a time to be alive.

immibis 11mo ago
Deutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000€ per month per gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still at their sole discretion.
mtmail 11mo ago
The issue here seems to be the landlord.
- socksy 11mo ago
  Part of the issue is that the landlord gets any say whatsoever about a public utility.
- pimeys 11mo ago
  Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable. I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
  - lifestyleguru 11mo ago
    How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.

naIak 11mo ago

Refusing to peer directly is not “killing the free internet”. This level of hyperbole doesn’t help your argument.

immibis 11mo ago
yes it is? This level of normalcy bias doesn't help your argument, either.

globular-toast 11mo ago

When can we start doing meshnets again? I was excited about it in '05 long before I could afford networking equipment. 20 years later and we've only regressed.

immibis 11mo ago
Right now. There's Freifunk in Germany. But we're all terrified of laws now. There was a time when hackers would dare to sticky-tape cables out their window and across the street. Not any more, everything's all nice and regulated and a strict order is harshly enforced. If I place a fiber anywhere outside of my apartment I expect to be deported.

everfrustrated 11mo ago

Inter.link is openly peering on IX's tho. So I'm unclear why the angst. https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/ https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/

inemesitaffia 11mo ago
No guarantees of performance to peers, no one's carrying peered traffic to other peers or upstreams. That's giving free transit/route leaks

metanonsense 11mo ago

Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“

IlikeKitties 11mo ago
Do not switch to Vodafone. Even without their peering it's still a horrible ISP

ElijahLynn 11mo ago

Thank you for writing this article. It is a rare take on what is happening, and not everyone has the expertise to write it. It seems easy enough to share to consumers who may be affected by this. And it does have some action steps too.

trvz 11mo ago

Even the first paragraph is wrong: > There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free. When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.

vitorsr 11mo ago

Telefonica does this. Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it. I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away. So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well. To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.

inemesitaffia 11mo ago
The logic is money. Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

weinzierl 11mo ago

I think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.

20after4 11mo ago
Mesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with, it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet without some major technical breakthroughs.
- sunshine-o 11mo ago
  I do not think this is about replacing the current Internet and watching Youtube or Netflix using a mesh network. It would be more about having a slow, free and backup internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the same time as the grid). I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.

fortranfiend 11mo ago

Wow, thanks I hate it.

lxgr 11mo ago

> Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much data they send to Vodafone customers. As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)

1a527dd5 11mo ago

Germany is on a weird path; first the nuclear power withdrawal and now this. It's all a bit topsy turvy.

lxgr 11mo ago
Germany has had a weird approach when it comes to the Internet for several decades, but sure, it must somehow be related to recent nuclear power policies.
glitchcrab 11mo ago
It doesn’t make sense to conflate a decision made by the government with that of a private company, just because they happen to be in the same country.

Starlevel004 11mo ago

> When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is abandoning. Tab closed

cachius 11mo ago
Why?
- Dilettante_ 11mo ago
  AI writing cadence I presume. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683
  - cachius 11mo ago
    Thanks. I thought it was something factually wrong.
    - galaxy_gas 11mo ago
      It is also likely factually wrong as most major ISPs use GGC for popular traffic
      - marcusb 11mo ago
        After using Deutsche Telekom as an example of how great direct peering is, a few paragraphs later the article uses Deutsche Telekom as an example of the dangers of using peering provider intermediaries.
        PhilKunz 11mo ago
        Is it the only peering of Starlink though?

mft_ 11mo ago

Is anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone or Telekom?

rurban 11mo ago
No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster. We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
- inemesitaffia 11mo ago
  Use the same provider

Nevermark 11mo ago

Companies claim mergers of competitors are good because they increase efficiency, to get permission to centralize markets to a far greater degree than any cartel could. Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense. The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure. And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR. -- It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.) A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed. But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater. Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant. Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc. Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type. (I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)

lorenzk 11mo ago

I have had sporadic problems with Vodafone Germany’s IPv4 routing for months, sent detailed analyses and refused in advance to pay for any technicians they might send because the problem could not be on my property. They sent two technicians who confirmed my view. Then they charged me 160 EUR for them without fixing the issue.

noAnswer 11mo ago
You have to go to forum.vodafone.de: 1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router. 2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router. 3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error. 4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times. After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone. I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
0xbs 11mo ago
They are NATing the IPv4s, i.e. multiple customers are sharing the same IPv4, which can cause problems. I called them and told them that I absolutely need to do port forwarding and asked nicely if I could get an exclusive IPv4. The support said „Of course, let me check the box in the UI for your account, should be active by tomorrow“ and done. You have to get lucky to get someone who understands your problem and is willing to fix it, though.

ExoticPearTree 11mo ago

Greed. The shortest explanation. There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe. And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra. I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.