10 ms·

Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet

636 points by tietjens 9mo ago

chpatrick 9mo ago
I know about this issue so it's great that something is being done about it, but the page really needs a text explainer instead of the just a video.
- dewey 9mo ago
  Isn't that exactly what is below the video in the "What is this about?" section?
  - chpatrick 9mo ago
    That's only a very vague description.
- usr1106 9mo ago
  Reading a couple of pages of the full complaint, starting from page 15 is surprisingly accessible (assuming German is accessible at all to the reader). They claim Telekom keeps their transit access points intentionally underdimensioned. In order to be reachable at decent speed by Telekom customers, internet services need a direct, paid contract with Telekom. Edit: The section numbering is weird. Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? On my phone, don't have a good overview.
  - Dilettante_ 9mo ago
    >Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? Ask the paper how many 'r's in strawberry
- tietjens 9mo ago
  This is the best text explainer I have found: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/no-two-tier-internet-coalition-files-complaint-against-deutsche-telekom/ https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/no-two-tier-inter...
sighansen 9mo ago
The only ISP I have access to is Deutsche Telekom and I often have problems with websites loading slowly. A few more years before other ISPs can provide internet in my new development area. I can't understand, why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas.
- zhouzhao 9mo ago
  >why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas because no other ISP can enter for a reasonable price. Germany should have made the infrastructure open-access for all providers, just like they did in Switzerland.
anthonj 9mo ago
Germany always surprise me with continuous contradiction in their society. Largest economy in eu but very unstable and riddled with wierd burocracy. Strongest worker protection, but very large amount of lobbysm. Most advanced railway system in eu, transformed into a joke by interdiction from said lobbies. You have to pay a "radio tax" to help funding press and keep it independent, but then fuck net neutrality. And I could continue with more point, but I don't want to get too political.
- borlox 9mo ago
  Do you know similarly large, democratic societies without contradictions?
  - anthonj 9mo ago
    my impression is that other countries like Italy or France are much more consistent in what they are bad or good at. But it's possible it's just my personal bias.
    - fc417fc802 9mo ago
      I have the same (possibly mistaken) impression of Germany as an outsider. The US is also remarkably contradictory in its supposed values. I think it would be interesting if there were a semi-objective measure of this quality.
      - f1shy 9mo ago
        Maybe that is the point. The contradiction about what you expect, and reality. Like in Italy is expected to go and find out this or that is messy. But Germany has a strong image of responsibility, seriousness, efficiency, etc. And when you see closer, is not. Also, what I'm not sure, I'm trying to find out, if there was a change in the last 1 or 2 decades, or was always like that. Like now, except for things like you here a siren and cars open like Moises opened the water, in many other things, seems to be not more organized that any other country. Hell, sometimes compared with Bangladesh seems to be lagging behind (point example: birth certificates)
tannhaeuser 9mo ago
Complaining about net neutrality in 2026 with yt videos. What a joke by pseudo-"hackers."
- dewey 9mo ago
  It's called being pragmatic, are you going to sponsor the bandwidth needed so it can be hosted on a sustainable indie server?
  - 6r17 9mo ago
    please. I don't understand how the fuck we still don't have p2p social networks and private sharing groups. The amount of possibilities to f* up any kind of control are massive - it's just that we end up writing some convoluted distributed mainframe when all people need is p2prss.
- egeozcan 9mo ago
  In life, you have to pick your battles.
ccozan 9mo ago
Telekom is well known for the crappy service - but they have a de facto monopoly. For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live. Solution: I got my Starlink. 3x speed. No crappy service. Weather independent. And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) . [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
- heraldgeezer 9mo ago
  >For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live. Sounds like an access line issue with DSL (lol) DSL is so old you can't even order it in Sweden anymore. Also, the post above would be a core issue not access.
  - blauditore 9mo ago
    Excuse me, I remember when DSL was the latest and greatest, it can't possibly be this old. :')
    - jillesvangurp 9mo ago
      That would be ~25 years ago. I remember getting my first ADSL connection around 2000 in the Netherlands when that stuff was still very new.
      - retired 9mo ago
        KPN MXstream! Thanks for making me feel old. I got flashbacks of spending multiple evenings configuring PPTP in Linux without being able to access the internet just to get internet access. I remember having to walk to a buddies home just to check the tutorial: https://rj.home.xs4all.nl/mxstream/ https://rj.home.xs4all.nl/mxstream/
    - heraldgeezer 9mo ago
      I mean yes me too, but that was in 2005. I feel like "everyone" got fibre here 10 years ago and if not there is 4/5G mobile broadband.
haunter 9mo ago
Not sure it’s the same issue but in Hungary they (DT) refuse to use/pay Cloudflare so in peak hours every single site outside the country loads incredibly slow because of the constant re-routing. Everything has to go through Frankfurt even though CF would have alternate direct routes https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-telekom-nemzetk%C3%B6zi-peering/ https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-te... https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt/a_telekom_m%C3%A9g_mindig_itt_tart/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt... https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudflare-internethalozat https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudfl... At least they are cheap. 25€ a month for 2gbps/1gbps so I can’t complain about that They also offer 4gbps/2gbps for 40€ but at this point I’m not even sure what to use that for (besides torrent seeding)
- zhouzhao 9mo ago
  It's similar. The DT is not doing cost neutral peeing with Cloudflare. Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX. I pay 80 EUR for 1Gbps/300mbps and it's behind GPON or if you can get more XGS-PON. Not even real ethernet. It's a shame.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - LargoLasskhyfv 9mo ago
    > Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX. Why would they? There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex not that far away from the former https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralamt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... , something like HQ of the former Gov-telco. While those have been torn down, or brought to other uses meanwhile, the Deutsche Telekom has still a massive presence in Karlsruhe. Still not that far away from the Dagger Complex. Get what I mean?
RHab 9mo ago
I just ended my contract with them. I could not reach my own raspberry pi Homepage which uses cloudflare. They called me and asked why I ended the contract, I told them about cloudflare, but that my cancellation is final, and magically my Homepage now works again!
usr1106 9mo ago
237 pages, wow...
dzogchen 9mo ago
I unfortunetely have Deutsche Telekom as my ISP and I can confirm that in the evening websites that use Cloudflare have a latency of one minute or simply do not load at all. I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
- kybernetyk 9mo ago
  >Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way. Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization). It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
- stanac 9mo ago
  One minute latency? Sound like worse experience than dial-up.
- lwde 9mo ago
  Just switch to 1und1 with good peering (:
  - the8472 9mo ago
    Do 1&1 customers get CGNAT or a native v4 address? I have had issues with the AFTR's port mapping tables running full when I was on Unitymedia coax.
    - xioxox 9mo ago
      I get proper IPV4 and IPV6 addresses with Easybell on VDSL. I've been with them a long time and they've been pretty good.
    - arximboldi 9mo ago
      They switched me to CGNAT in my last speed upgrade, but I wrote to them about it and they moved me to native v4 straight away. Their service is good on a technical level but they have the most aggressive and obnoxious sales reps. They scammed me twice with open lies on the phone (probably abusing also the fact that german is not my mother tongue) and had to fight for ages with their customer service later to get the issue resolved. If you wanna go with them, buy on their website and hang up if anyone from 1und1 ever calls. They are official 1und1 reps and they will prove it you yet behave like scammers.
heraldgeezer 9mo ago
??? Yes its called peering agreements
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  DT famously does not use them. They prefer to shut down their peers to make them become customers or fuck off, and by doing so, deliver crappy service to everyone and lose customers, except they have a monopoly so they don't lose as many customers as they should.
  - brynx97 9mo ago
    We have many BGP workarounds to avoid interconnection points with some of our tier 1 providers and DT because as our providers tell us, discussions with DT to add capacity are a non-starter. We've been relatively stable through a tier 2 provider through Lumen to DT though... for now. Very similar to Cogent in some regions.
tannhaeuser 9mo ago
Why are you leading your visitors to your channel on a monopolist site? To bring ad revenue? There's no need for video for your type of content in the first place. I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of the last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.
- trinix912 9mo ago
  Because they're betting on the video finding its way onto people's feed, thus raising awareness among non-techy people. Hard to do that with a random website.
shevy-java 9mo ago
The laws should be changed. Corporate overlords thinking they can milk citizens should have mandatory jail times - something reasonable like a full decade or so. That way their'll behaviour would quickly change too and they'd have to stop those "we can slow them down and they can not do anything about it" shenanigans.
madduci 9mo ago
I own a FTTH connection to Telekom since 2018, as the only provider in my street, allowed to install an internet connection (only glass fiber). Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220be44c https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b... I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list. The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home
- retired 9mo ago
  Is it possible to use a media converter from glass fiber to RJ45/Ethernet? Those are commonly available and then you can use whatever modem/router you like.
  - progbits 9mo ago
    They most likely use GPON so the optic is going to see return traffic for your neighbors. So they make it hard (but not impossible) to bring your own optic or media converter.
    - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
      AFAIK GPON uses encryption, so you actually get the traffic intended for all your neighbors but can't do anything with it. If you bring your own converter, you wouldn't be able to handle your own traffic either.
      - progbits 9mo ago
        Usually yes, but it depends: https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-11-01-gpon-ftth-networks-insecurity.html https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-11-01-gpon-ftth-networ... Also the authentication might rely on weak secrets. I know my ISP provided FTTH router has a six letter password and a guessable username (derived from my last name), and I can't change either. Though the research is quite old now. Couldn't find anything recent specifically for DT.
xg15 9mo ago
I like the subtle bit of trolling they did with the page color: DT had registered that shade of magenta as a trademark, made it a core part of their brand and generally was VERY vocal in public about "owning" that color. [1, 2] Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3] So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own. [1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-exclusive-rights-color-magenta/2212556/ https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl... [2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German) [3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-of-its-magenta-color-trademark https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...
- mjlee 9mo ago
  That's the first thing I saw too. dataJAR (an Apple MDM service company in the UK) were targetted in the UK for using a different shade of pink in a different industry. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-44107621 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-44107621
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
andreldm 9mo ago
I have a contract with a smaller German ISP (Pyur), they do throttling too, uploading to Backblaze quickly gets capped to a few hundred bytes, sometimes the connection gets aborted. Using Mullvad or Tor gets around that. I considered switching to Telekom or Vodafone, gave up because they are even more expensive and now this.
coretx 9mo ago
Nothing will come out of this unless all former state monopolists are targeted at the same time.
fbcpck 9mo ago
I literally could not ssh into several of my servers since last week, and could only do so through my berlin server. Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.
0xcb0 9mo ago
Telekom is a bunch of strange folks. I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working. I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail. Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems. Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)? Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1 https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>): "There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
- Avamander 9mo ago
  That policy of theirs has existed for a long time now. It's a really odd one at that. They also don't enforce DMARC, nor do DKIM. It's stuck nearly four decades in the past.
  - 7bit 9mo ago
    That's Germany in a nutshell.
    - lippihom 9mo ago
      2026 - 40 = 1986 was right before more mainstream internet adoption. Yep checks out, Germany today.
yayachiken 9mo ago
Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues: * Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic) * Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers) * Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit) * Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements) I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers. Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago. What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point. And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out. For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.
- sgjohnson 9mo ago
  > For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting. Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions. T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.
Elfener 9mo ago
ISPs are the worst. Currently I use Telekom's 5G for my home internet connection in Hungary as Telekom is the only company who has a cable in my street, but they refused to sell me wired internet due to the hole they use to take their underground cable up to the houses being already over capacity (it turns out this "hole" serves like the entire street with cables being run across everyone's attic...). I previously used yettel/telenor's 4G (basically as fast as Telekom's 5G because their 5G is a scam, although Yettel's 5G is even more scammy, it is slower than their 4G) but they broke their routers, I had comical packet loss and they refused to fix it (technically, when you pay for a cellular connection, the required uptime in the contract is zero). They also started CGNAT-ing in order to supposedly "improve security" (wtf..) just before I switched (this now means that their "internet-focused" plans have just CGNAT-ed IPv4, while their "non-internet focused" cellular plans have CGNAT-ed IPv4 AND IPv6 (makes sense). In any case, I now use Telekom's 5G with CGNAT-ed IPv4, just a single /64 IPv6 and forced separation (it is illegal to have a stable internet connection, they disconnect you just before reaching 24h of uptime).
- sgjohnson 9mo ago
  > ISPs are the worst. DTAG is not just a run-of-the-mill consumer ISP. They are a global Tier-1 carrier. Which of course makes their behavior all that much worse.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP because they are severely limited in connectivity — they only connect to paying customers and other tier 1s. They are to be used as a last resort by the tier 2 ISPs, who provide good packet routing by selecting the best routes from among several backbones. Never thought I'd see this play out in practice, especially with a consumer ISP. Normally this comes up with server hosting, not consumer ISPs.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      > You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP The best part about ISPs, is that usually who have very few choices, sometimes only one! Where I grew up, we had the choice of "broadband" (via antennas between an island and mainland) with one ISP, or modem with any telephone company. Eventually, proper cables where put, and we had a choice between 6 different operators. Where I live now, I only have 3 options for ISPs with fiber, even though I live right outside a huge metropolitan area.
metanonsense 9mo ago
Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.
- oytis 9mo ago
  I am on o2 and didn't have any problems with availability that I would notice.
jesprenj 9mo ago
Slovenian ISP T-2.net also violates local network neutrality laws here by requiring customers to pay extra to unblock some special TCP ports, like 25 and 53, meaning they block selfhosting email and dns servers without additional payment. I filed a complaint to the national regulator AKOS. They first responded with agreeing with me, but nothing was fixed for many months, and upon emailing the regulator again, I received a different response from another employee claiming that charging more for unblocking special applications is legal (it's not).
- sgjohnson 9mo ago
  Blocking port 25 is perfectly reasonable. There are no sane and legitimate reasons for running an SMTP server on a residential connection. Even most server providers will block it unless you give them some very good reasons. Blocking 53 is just weird though.
  - daneel_w 9mo ago
    I'm not sure you read the OP's comment in full. They are talking about inbound traffic from the Internet. It's certainly a lot more common a case to self-host an MX than running an open DNS resolver or authorative name server.
    - B1FIDO 9mo ago
      You may be surprised to learn that there are many types of botnets out there, and many use DNS queries for the C&C. Although the GP wrote "53/tcp" that is a weird situation, because most (not all) DNS is over UDP. One day I suddenly found my DNS resolver logs were very active with veritable gibberish. And it seems that my router had been pwned and joined some sort of nefarious botnet. I only found this out because I was using NextDNS at the time, and my router's own resolver was pointed there, and NextDNS was keeping meticulous, detailed logs of every query. So I nipped it in the bud, by determining which device it was, by ruling out other devices, and by replacing the infected demon router with a safe one. But yeah, if your 53/udp or 25/tcp is open, you can pretty much expect to join a botnet of the DNS or SMTP-spam varieties.
nottorp 9mo ago
DT owned for a long time what remained of the former state phone operator in Romania. They were the only provider that hijacked DNS lookup failures to redirect to their own page. They're gone out of this market now, fortunately.
- zhouzhao 9mo ago
  Glad to hear again, that Romania is living in the future of the Internet.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    It looks good still, but we're down to 3 major providers. The future may bring entshitification yet...
micw 9mo ago
Fun fact: Deutsche Telekom just started their ad campaign "being better in the best network" (https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail/besser-im-besten-netz-1100974 https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...). While they have the worst network of all, especially when it comes to peering (30% of the internet is just slow over Telekom but fast over Telekom + any VPN).
- hermanzegerman 9mo ago
  Yeah, but they're the only network when you want to have cellphone reception outside of dense cities. You can completely forget O2 and Vodafone if you go hiking/skiing in the Black Forest, or on the Beach at the German Islands. Also Vodafone outsourced their peering to a subcontractor, and doesn't do any public peering at all anymore. So I guess Telekom still isn't the worst Network at all
  - zhouzhao 9mo ago
    That is sadly the truth. They also charge the most per GB, but you can use any of their resellers like Congstar. Just checkout DTAG's 5G network coverage on Breitbandatlas.
    - hermanzegerman 9mo ago
      It's not that bad, I pay 8.60€ per month for 30GB, and they also threw in a cheap Android Phone in the 12 Month Contract. Also Switzerland being included is at least for me a nice perk that O2/Vodafone don't offer. But compared to other European Countries offerings it's obviously shit. Also Fraenk is even cheaper than Congstar
      - zhouzhao 9mo ago
        8.60€ per month? Certainly not from DTAG themselves, right?
        9mo ago
MORPHOICES 9mo ago
[dead]
syntaxing 9mo ago
I’m on Comcast and I strongly believe they’re selling my data to brokers from the targeted ads I see. I paid for WARP+ from cloudflare and the targeted ads dropped noticeably.
chorizoking 9mo ago
Commenting from my alt to avoid doxxing myself. Have spent over a decade in various 'large' streaming video companies, the ones you absolutely know about today. DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached. I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)
- zhouzhao 9mo ago
  >I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users The ones not on HN probably just notice that their internet is getting slow after 5 p.m Trust me, I know how much they suck and I still had to enter a 2-year contract just to get fiber optics in my house.
  - pimeys 9mo ago
    They tried to install it to our home too, but our landlord just didn't do anything to help them to open doors and now we've been soon waiting two years for the connection. The more I read about DTAG the happier I feel like using our cable connection which, upstream excluded, works quite well. We're about to buy our apartment in Berlin and that changes things. I hope we have soonpre choice on the fiber operator.
  - mikigraf 9mo ago
    I thought I was crazy for thinking that Reddit LinkedIn and half of the internet becomes unusable past 6pm.. now I know why
    - everfrustrated 9mo ago
      Cloudflare has a speed test. Try comparing it to other speed tests around the same time. Should reveal if Dtag is congested/throttling your traffic to Cloudflare sites vs others. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/
ainiriand 9mo ago
Their standard plan offerings could be already be considered throttling. I moved to Spain and I have 1gbit up/down.
sampage64 9mo ago
[dead]
cheese_van 9mo ago
My offhand impression is that when I was in Germany, consumers were oddly suspicious of the Internet in general and very suspicious of social media in particular. That suspicion was somewhat translated into a lackadaisical attitude about service quality. Perhaps that attitude is finally changing because DT simply won't care unless there is a sufficiently large enough vocal public to force the issue.

636 points by tietjens 9mo ago

I know about this issue so it's great that something is being done about it, but the page really needs a text explainer instead of the just a video.

dewey 9mo ago
Isn't that exactly what is below the video in the "What is this about?" section?
- chpatrick 9mo ago
  That's only a very vague description.
usr1106 9mo ago
Reading a couple of pages of the full complaint, starting from page 15 is surprisingly accessible (assuming German is accessible at all to the reader). They claim Telekom keeps their transit access points intentionally underdimensioned. In order to be reachable at decent speed by Telekom customers, internet services need a direct, paid contract with Telekom. Edit: The section numbering is weird. Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? On my phone, don't have a good overview.
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago
  >Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? Ask the paper how many 'r's in strawberry
tietjens 9mo ago
This is the best text explainer I have found: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/no-two-tier-internet-coalition-files-complaint-against-deutsche-telekom/ https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/05/no-two-tier-inter...

sighansen 9mo ago

The only ISP I have access to is Deutsche Telekom and I often have problems with websites loading slowly. A few more years before other ISPs can provide internet in my new development area. I can't understand, why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas.

zhouzhao 9mo ago
>why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas because no other ISP can enter for a reasonable price. Germany should have made the infrastructure open-access for all providers, just like they did in Switzerland.

anthonj 9mo ago

Germany always surprise me with continuous contradiction in their society. Largest economy in eu but very unstable and riddled with wierd burocracy. Strongest worker protection, but very large amount of lobbysm. Most advanced railway system in eu, transformed into a joke by interdiction from said lobbies. You have to pay a "radio tax" to help funding press and keep it independent, but then fuck net neutrality. And I could continue with more point, but I don't want to get too political.

borlox 9mo ago
Do you know similarly large, democratic societies without contradictions?
- anthonj 9mo ago
  my impression is that other countries like Italy or France are much more consistent in what they are bad or good at. But it's possible it's just my personal bias.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    I have the same (possibly mistaken) impression of Germany as an outsider. The US is also remarkably contradictory in its supposed values. I think it would be interesting if there were a semi-objective measure of this quality.
    - f1shy 9mo ago
      Maybe that is the point. The contradiction about what you expect, and reality. Like in Italy is expected to go and find out this or that is messy. But Germany has a strong image of responsibility, seriousness, efficiency, etc. And when you see closer, is not. Also, what I'm not sure, I'm trying to find out, if there was a change in the last 1 or 2 decades, or was always like that. Like now, except for things like you here a siren and cars open like Moises opened the water, in many other things, seems to be not more organized that any other country. Hell, sometimes compared with Bangladesh seems to be lagging behind (point example: birth certificates)

tannhaeuser 9mo ago

Complaining about net neutrality in 2026 with yt videos. What a joke by pseudo-"hackers."

dewey 9mo ago
It's called being pragmatic, are you going to sponsor the bandwidth needed so it can be hosted on a sustainable indie server?
- 6r17 9mo ago
  please. I don't understand how the fuck we still don't have p2p social networks and private sharing groups. The amount of possibilities to f* up any kind of control are massive - it's just that we end up writing some convoluted distributed mainframe when all people need is p2prss.
egeozcan 9mo ago
In life, you have to pick your battles.

ccozan 9mo ago

Telekom is well known for the crappy service - but they have a de facto monopoly. For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live. Solution: I got my Starlink. 3x speed. No crappy service. Weather independent. And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) . [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]

heraldgeezer 9mo ago
>For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live. Sounds like an access line issue with DSL (lol) DSL is so old you can't even order it in Sweden anymore. Also, the post above would be a core issue not access.
- blauditore 9mo ago
  Excuse me, I remember when DSL was the latest and greatest, it can't possibly be this old. :')
  - jillesvangurp 9mo ago
    That would be ~25 years ago. I remember getting my first ADSL connection around 2000 in the Netherlands when that stuff was still very new.
    - retired 9mo ago
      KPN MXstream! Thanks for making me feel old. I got flashbacks of spending multiple evenings configuring PPTP in Linux without being able to access the internet just to get internet access. I remember having to walk to a buddies home just to check the tutorial: https://rj.home.xs4all.nl/mxstream/ https://rj.home.xs4all.nl/mxstream/
  - heraldgeezer 9mo ago
    I mean yes me too, but that was in 2005. I feel like "everyone" got fibre here 10 years ago and if not there is 4/5G mobile broadband.

haunter 9mo ago

Not sure it’s the same issue but in Hungary they (DT) refuse to use/pay Cloudflare so in peak hours every single site outside the country loads incredibly slow because of the constant re-routing. Everything has to go through Frankfurt even though CF would have alternate direct routes https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-telekom-nemzetk%C3%B6zi-peering/ https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-te... https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt/a_telekom_m%C3%A9g_mindig_itt_tart/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt... https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudflare-internethalozat https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudfl... At least they are cheap. 25€ a month for 2gbps/1gbps so I can’t complain about that They also offer 4gbps/2gbps for 40€ but at this point I’m not even sure what to use that for (besides torrent seeding)

zhouzhao 9mo ago
It's similar. The DT is not doing cost neutral peeing with Cloudflare. Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX. I pay 80 EUR for 1Gbps/300mbps and it's behind GPON or if you can get more XGS-PON. Not even real ethernet. It's a shame.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- LargoLasskhyfv 9mo ago
  > Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX. Why would they? There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex not that far away from the former https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralamt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... , something like HQ of the former Gov-telco. While those have been torn down, or brought to other uses meanwhile, the Deutsche Telekom has still a massive presence in Karlsruhe. Still not that far away from the Dagger Complex. Get what I mean?

RHab 9mo ago

I just ended my contract with them. I could not reach my own raspberry pi Homepage which uses cloudflare. They called me and asked why I ended the contract, I told them about cloudflare, but that my cancellation is final, and magically my Homepage now works again!

usr1106 9mo ago

237 pages, wow...

dzogchen 9mo ago

I unfortunetely have Deutsche Telekom as my ISP and I can confirm that in the evening websites that use Cloudflare have a latency of one minute or simply do not load at all. I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.

kybernetyk 9mo ago
>Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way. Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization). It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
stanac 9mo ago
One minute latency? Sound like worse experience than dial-up.
lwde 9mo ago
Just switch to 1und1 with good peering (:
- the8472 9mo ago
  Do 1&1 customers get CGNAT or a native v4 address? I have had issues with the AFTR's port mapping tables running full when I was on Unitymedia coax.
  - xioxox 9mo ago
    I get proper IPV4 and IPV6 addresses with Easybell on VDSL. I've been with them a long time and they've been pretty good.
  - arximboldi 9mo ago
    They switched me to CGNAT in my last speed upgrade, but I wrote to them about it and they moved me to native v4 straight away. Their service is good on a technical level but they have the most aggressive and obnoxious sales reps. They scammed me twice with open lies on the phone (probably abusing also the fact that german is not my mother tongue) and had to fight for ages with their customer service later to get the issue resolved. If you wanna go with them, buy on their website and hang up if anyone from 1und1 ever calls. They are official 1und1 reps and they will prove it you yet behave like scammers.

heraldgeezer 9mo ago

??? Yes its called peering agreements

direwolf20 9mo ago
DT famously does not use them. They prefer to shut down their peers to make them become customers or fuck off, and by doing so, deliver crappy service to everyone and lose customers, except they have a monopoly so they don't lose as many customers as they should.
- brynx97 9mo ago
  We have many BGP workarounds to avoid interconnection points with some of our tier 1 providers and DT because as our providers tell us, discussions with DT to add capacity are a non-starter. We've been relatively stable through a tier 2 provider through Lumen to DT though... for now. Very similar to Cogent in some regions.

tannhaeuser 9mo ago

Why are you leading your visitors to your channel on a monopolist site? To bring ad revenue? There's no need for video for your type of content in the first place. I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of the last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.

trinix912 9mo ago
Because they're betting on the video finding its way onto people's feed, thus raising awareness among non-techy people. Hard to do that with a random website.

shevy-java 9mo ago

The laws should be changed. Corporate overlords thinking they can milk citizens should have mandatory jail times - something reasonable like a full decade or so. That way their'll behaviour would quickly change too and they'd have to stop those "we can slow them down and they can not do anything about it" shenanigans.

madduci 9mo ago

I own a FTTH connection to Telekom since 2018, as the only provider in my street, allowed to install an internet connection (only glass fiber). Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220be44c https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b... I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list. The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home

retired 9mo ago
Is it possible to use a media converter from glass fiber to RJ45/Ethernet? Those are commonly available and then you can use whatever modem/router you like.
- progbits 9mo ago
  They most likely use GPON so the optic is going to see return traffic for your neighbors. So they make it hard (but not impossible) to bring your own optic or media converter.
  - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
    AFAIK GPON uses encryption, so you actually get the traffic intended for all your neighbors but can't do anything with it. If you bring your own converter, you wouldn't be able to handle your own traffic either.
    - progbits 9mo ago
      Usually yes, but it depends: https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-11-01-gpon-ftth-networks-insecurity.html https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-11-01-gpon-ftth-networ... Also the authentication might rely on weak secrets. I know my ISP provided FTTH router has a six letter password and a guessable username (derived from my last name), and I can't change either. Though the research is quite old now. Couldn't find anything recent specifically for DT.

xg15 9mo ago

I like the subtle bit of trolling they did with the page color: DT had registered that shade of magenta as a trademark, made it a core part of their brand and generally was VERY vocal in public about "owning" that color. [1, 2] Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3] So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own. [1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-exclusive-rights-color-magenta/2212556/ https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl... [2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German) [3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-of-its-magenta-color-trademark https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...

mjlee 9mo ago
That's the first thing I saw too. dataJAR (an Apple MDM service company in the UK) were targetted in the UK for using a different shade of pink in a different industry. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-44107621 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-44107621
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

andreldm 9mo ago

I have a contract with a smaller German ISP (Pyur), they do throttling too, uploading to Backblaze quickly gets capped to a few hundred bytes, sometimes the connection gets aborted. Using Mullvad or Tor gets around that. I considered switching to Telekom or Vodafone, gave up because they are even more expensive and now this.

coretx 9mo ago

Nothing will come out of this unless all former state monopolists are targeted at the same time.

fbcpck 9mo ago

I literally could not ssh into several of my servers since last week, and could only do so through my berlin server. Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.

0xcb0 9mo ago

Telekom is a bunch of strange folks. I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working. I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail. Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems. Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)? Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1 https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>): "There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."

Avamander 9mo ago
That policy of theirs has existed for a long time now. It's a really odd one at that. They also don't enforce DMARC, nor do DKIM. It's stuck nearly four decades in the past.
- 7bit 9mo ago
  That's Germany in a nutshell.
  - lippihom 9mo ago
    2026 - 40 = 1986 was right before more mainstream internet adoption. Yep checks out, Germany today.

yayachiken 9mo ago

Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues: * Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic) * Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers) * Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit) * Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements) I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers. Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago. What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point. And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out. For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.

sgjohnson 9mo ago
> For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting. Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions. T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.

Elfener 9mo ago

ISPs are the worst. Currently I use Telekom's 5G for my home internet connection in Hungary as Telekom is the only company who has a cable in my street, but they refused to sell me wired internet due to the hole they use to take their underground cable up to the houses being already over capacity (it turns out this "hole" serves like the entire street with cables being run across everyone's attic...). I previously used yettel/telenor's 4G (basically as fast as Telekom's 5G because their 5G is a scam, although Yettel's 5G is even more scammy, it is slower than their 4G) but they broke their routers, I had comical packet loss and they refused to fix it (technically, when you pay for a cellular connection, the required uptime in the contract is zero). They also started CGNAT-ing in order to supposedly "improve security" (wtf..) just before I switched (this now means that their "internet-focused" plans have just CGNAT-ed IPv4, while their "non-internet focused" cellular plans have CGNAT-ed IPv4 AND IPv6 (makes sense). In any case, I now use Telekom's 5G with CGNAT-ed IPv4, just a single /64 IPv6 and forced separation (it is illegal to have a stable internet connection, they disconnect you just before reaching 24h of uptime).

sgjohnson 9mo ago
> ISPs are the worst. DTAG is not just a run-of-the-mill consumer ISP. They are a global Tier-1 carrier. Which of course makes their behavior all that much worse.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP because they are severely limited in connectivity — they only connect to paying customers and other tier 1s. They are to be used as a last resort by the tier 2 ISPs, who provide good packet routing by selecting the best routes from among several backbones. Never thought I'd see this play out in practice, especially with a consumer ISP. Normally this comes up with server hosting, not consumer ISPs.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP The best part about ISPs, is that usually who have very few choices, sometimes only one! Where I grew up, we had the choice of "broadband" (via antennas between an island and mainland) with one ISP, or modem with any telephone company. Eventually, proper cables where put, and we had a choice between 6 different operators. Where I live now, I only have 3 options for ISPs with fiber, even though I live right outside a huge metropolitan area.

metanonsense 9mo ago

Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.

oytis 9mo ago
I am on o2 and didn't have any problems with availability that I would notice.

jesprenj 9mo ago

Slovenian ISP T-2.net also violates local network neutrality laws here by requiring customers to pay extra to unblock some special TCP ports, like 25 and 53, meaning they block selfhosting email and dns servers without additional payment. I filed a complaint to the national regulator AKOS. They first responded with agreeing with me, but nothing was fixed for many months, and upon emailing the regulator again, I received a different response from another employee claiming that charging more for unblocking special applications is legal (it's not).

sgjohnson 9mo ago
Blocking port 25 is perfectly reasonable. There are no sane and legitimate reasons for running an SMTP server on a residential connection. Even most server providers will block it unless you give them some very good reasons. Blocking 53 is just weird though.
- daneel_w 9mo ago
  I'm not sure you read the OP's comment in full. They are talking about inbound traffic from the Internet. It's certainly a lot more common a case to self-host an MX than running an open DNS resolver or authorative name server.
  - B1FIDO 9mo ago
    You may be surprised to learn that there are many types of botnets out there, and many use DNS queries for the C&C. Although the GP wrote "53/tcp" that is a weird situation, because most (not all) DNS is over UDP. One day I suddenly found my DNS resolver logs were very active with veritable gibberish. And it seems that my router had been pwned and joined some sort of nefarious botnet. I only found this out because I was using NextDNS at the time, and my router's own resolver was pointed there, and NextDNS was keeping meticulous, detailed logs of every query. So I nipped it in the bud, by determining which device it was, by ruling out other devices, and by replacing the infected demon router with a safe one. But yeah, if your 53/udp or 25/tcp is open, you can pretty much expect to join a botnet of the DNS or SMTP-spam varieties.

nottorp 9mo ago

DT owned for a long time what remained of the former state phone operator in Romania. They were the only provider that hijacked DNS lookup failures to redirect to their own page. They're gone out of this market now, fortunately.

zhouzhao 9mo ago
Glad to hear again, that Romania is living in the future of the Internet.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  It looks good still, but we're down to 3 major providers. The future may bring entshitification yet...

micw 9mo ago

Fun fact: Deutsche Telekom just started their ad campaign "being better in the best network" (https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail/besser-im-besten-netz-1100974 https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...). While they have the worst network of all, especially when it comes to peering (30% of the internet is just slow over Telekom but fast over Telekom + any VPN).

hermanzegerman 9mo ago
Yeah, but they're the only network when you want to have cellphone reception outside of dense cities. You can completely forget O2 and Vodafone if you go hiking/skiing in the Black Forest, or on the Beach at the German Islands. Also Vodafone outsourced their peering to a subcontractor, and doesn't do any public peering at all anymore. So I guess Telekom still isn't the worst Network at all
- zhouzhao 9mo ago
  That is sadly the truth. They also charge the most per GB, but you can use any of their resellers like Congstar. Just checkout DTAG's 5G network coverage on Breitbandatlas.
  - hermanzegerman 9mo ago
    It's not that bad, I pay 8.60€ per month for 30GB, and they also threw in a cheap Android Phone in the 12 Month Contract. Also Switzerland being included is at least for me a nice perk that O2/Vodafone don't offer. But compared to other European Countries offerings it's obviously shit. Also Fraenk is even cheaper than Congstar
    - zhouzhao 9mo ago
      8.60€ per month? Certainly not from DTAG themselves, right?
      - 9mo ago

MORPHOICES 9mo ago

[dead]

syntaxing 9mo ago

I’m on Comcast and I strongly believe they’re selling my data to brokers from the targeted ads I see. I paid for WARP+ from cloudflare and the targeted ads dropped noticeably.

chorizoking 9mo ago

Commenting from my alt to avoid doxxing myself. Have spent over a decade in various 'large' streaming video companies, the ones you absolutely know about today. DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached. I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)

zhouzhao 9mo ago
>I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users The ones not on HN probably just notice that their internet is getting slow after 5 p.m Trust me, I know how much they suck and I still had to enter a 2-year contract just to get fiber optics in my house.
- pimeys 9mo ago
  They tried to install it to our home too, but our landlord just didn't do anything to help them to open doors and now we've been soon waiting two years for the connection. The more I read about DTAG the happier I feel like using our cable connection which, upstream excluded, works quite well. We're about to buy our apartment in Berlin and that changes things. I hope we have soonpre choice on the fiber operator.
- mikigraf 9mo ago
  I thought I was crazy for thinking that Reddit LinkedIn and half of the internet becomes unusable past 6pm.. now I know why
  - everfrustrated 9mo ago
    Cloudflare has a speed test. Try comparing it to other speed tests around the same time. Should reveal if Dtag is congested/throttling your traffic to Cloudflare sites vs others. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/

ainiriand 9mo ago

Their standard plan offerings could be already be considered throttling. I moved to Spain and I have 1gbit up/down.

sampage64 9mo ago

[dead]

cheese_van 9mo ago

My offhand impression is that when I was in Germany, consumers were oddly suspicious of the Internet in general and very suspicious of social media in particular. That suspicion was somewhat translated into a lackadaisical attitude about service quality. Perhaps that attitude is finally changing because DT simply won't care unless there is a sufficiently large enough vocal public to force the issue.