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Germany is downgrading
- rwmj 13y agoIt's depressing that many governments simply don't understand that providing high speed cheap internet should be the number 1 priority for encouraging growth in technology sectors.
- EvaK_de 13y agoThe German government DOES understand this and has already announced to Telekom that they will thoroughly investigate the plans, implying that they may find a way to prevent this.
- sgift 13y agoWe have campaign period at the moment. The government will talk about everything to look competent. If they do something after the election I may be inclined to believe that they really understand the issue. Prediction (based on their actions in the last years): That won't happen.
- luckystarr 13y agoThe German government just talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. They will rely on voluntary agreements of the Telekom and this will be it. The current government just don't care about the net, acts even hostile against it. They could just issue a mandate in the kind of "every citizen shall have 6MBit and no less" like they did with ISDN back in the 90s, but I don't think this will ever happen with CDU/CSU/FDP.
- shared4you 13y agoFinland does :) It is the first country in the world to make broadband access a fundamental right of every citizen! And the speed is ensured to be at least 100 Mbps by 2015.
- hamoid 13y agoLast summer we listened to music in a rowing boat in a lake in the middle of nowhere in Finland. Streaming from YouTube. It felt somehow wrong. Like "into the wild", with a 20€ unlimited data plan, and the ability to send live video from the forest. Later, when driving back to civilization, we spent 2 hours playing our favorite tracks in a moving car. Again streaming.
- Ras_ 13y agoLinus Torvalds: "Q: How do you know you are in the middle of nowhere in Finland? A: Sometimes your cellphone downgrades from HSPA to 3G." https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/LuhjmWpAgVi https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/LuhjmWpAgVi
- bluedino 13y agoIt doesn't prevent growth in tech sectors in the US.
- EvaK_de 13y agoBadly written article, lacking improtant facts and misrepresenting things (e.g. there is not just Telekom in Germany...) just to finally go all alarmist. :/
- sgift 13y agoIn many regions there is only the Telekom. Germany is not only Munich, Koeln, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. Many of my friends who do not live in a city have exactly the "choice" between Telekom or nothing.
- mars 13y agoThats not correct as other providers are leasing the infrastructure from DT. So you have a choice almost everywhere.
- mars 13y agoand cable is also available almost everywhere.
- sgift 13y agoAlmost anywhere besides my place of living (which happens to be Munich, but we have alternatives here) or big parts of eastern Germany (where friends of mine live) or various rural parts of Bavaria (where parts of my family live) and so on.
- darklajid 13y agoAgreed. The article's a rant with little content (the Telekom 'no flatrates anymore' move IS crap, but only mentioned once). There are usually good options available and usually you're up and running quite fast. I can recommend NetCologne (local, dsl/fiber), UnityMedia (cable) and 1&1 (Vodafone reseller) as providers of very nice, very dumb pipes. The author obviously is frustrated and annoyed. That's okay, it happens. A rant might even help. But I wonder why that ends up on this site here: The internet in Germany isn't going away and is, frankly, quite usable and widely available.
- mrkmcknz 13y agoI thought I had it bad with 3mb/s, perhaps that's because one mile down the road fiber means speeds of 120mb/s for roundabout the same price.
- shell0x 13y agoI had exactly the same experience when I still lived in Germany. I lived in a rural area and the fastest internet connection was DSL 1000. It wasn't possible to watch youtube videos fluently, software upgrades took ages and video calls were a pain.
- thomasjames 13y agoAs an American living and working in Germany as an engineer for the past year or so (in a large city, at that), this really shocked me actually. I thought that maybe my landlady was cheap, but it turned out there were actually virtually no better options available. It seemed kind of out of phase with the image Germany tries to project. So many other utilities and services here are really much better than their counterparts in the States. This was kind of a shock.
- _dmd 13y agowhy not use http://www.kabeldeutschland.de/ http://www.kabeldeutschland.de/? their service is available in most rural areas and goes up to 100Mb/s. i am actually surprised the author doesn't even mention them...
- wolfgke 13y agoAs a German I say: German engineering is still of really high quality and there are lots of companies (especially in mechanical engineering) that make use of this knowledge. But the German gouvernment has missed the information revolution and many powerful companies (Deutsche Telekom, TV companies, etc.) see anything that has to do with the internet as danger for their business models - thus they lobby a lot for laws against anything that endangers their business models and especially internet startups. See for example > http://www.uni-muenster.de/Jura.itm/hoeren/materialien/Skript/Skript_Internetrecht_Oktober_2012.pdf http://www.uni-muenster.de/Jura.itm/hoeren/materialien/Skrip... to see how complicated the law has become there - full of legal mines. For the same reason the idea to found a public corporation that builds a modern fiber network which internet providers can rent on equal terms (an idea that is discussed) will probably never be done.
- raverbashing 13y agoAt the same time that I think it's important to complain, the post seems too much like a spoiled complaint. "Don't move your startup there"? Is the poster aware that several startups work with internet worse than that? Internet quality is one important factor, but it is not the only one. I'd even say there are more important factors. Complains about D-Telekom but offers no alternative? (and that's why government monopolies are BS) Disclaimer: I may be moving to Germany in a couple of weeks so I may still regret this post
- walshemj 13y agoA serious start up should not be using consumer grade DSL lines.
- kybernetyk 13y agoIt's not about what lines your startup uses in the office. It's about what lines your customers have available to them. Try getting something like a video streaming service running if your main consumer base has a traffic limit of several gigabytes a month.
- walshemj 13y agoTrue but thats a separate issue maybe you need to ask your MEP why they cut the budget for BB rollout to rural areas in the EU - But didn't cut the CAP subsidy for farmers
- raverbashing 13y agoDefine 'consumer grade' and 'serious startup' Code is not big, other resources like images, etc, may take more space, but that's often not an issue. More importantly, 'consumer grade DSL' may be all that's available depending on the location. Of course, the website is not being served from there.
- walshemj 13y agoYou can't get business ADSL, SDSL or a leased line in Germany I woudl be surprised if that is the case. In fact knowing Germany I am not surprised that using a consumer line for business is not breaking some rule.
- madmaze 13y agoI somewhat disagree with this article, at least from my experience. From my experience internet has always been cheaper, faster and more reliable than any time I have had a connecting on the US. I have mostly had experience with Kabel BW and Telekom. For example in the US at the moment it costs me ~$80 for a reasonable cable connection from comcast 20Mb/s. I can expect my connection to go down for a few seconds/minutes about once a day and once or twice a month it'll be out for longer. I have had this and similar issues up and down the east coast in 5 different locations. Maybe the experiences with Telekom in Frankfurt and with Kabel BW have been above the norm, but for I never/rarely had connectivity issues and it has always been much cheaper.
- grobmeier 13y agoI had 5 yrs. Telekom with 350 kb/s. Frankfurt is a huge city, game is different than outside these kind of cities.
- daliusd 13y agoIt would be interesting to hear how much cheaper we are talking here about. E.g. here in Lithuania (Eastern Europe) I pay about 15$ for 100Mb/s (for 30$ I could get 300Mb/s).
- madmaze 13y agonot "that" cheap, my father currently pays 40 euros (~$50) for TV service and a 50/10 Mb/s connection in southern Germany. In comparison I pay $80 for 20/2 Mb/s Internet only. For me to add basic cable TV it would go up to $120
- kybernetyk 13y agoI had similar internet when I was living for 3 years in Poland (Gdansk). 125mbit for ~50 PLN (which was around EUR 15). Now I'm back in Germany and have fabulous 16mbit for nearly 50 Euros. (Fastest internet I can get here.) Also it's ridiculous that my internet access in Poland was set up within 2 days and here I had to wait 6 weeks for everything to work properly.
- kayoone 13y agoIts not really as bad as this article claims. - In my city (not that large, about 200k residents), i have access to 16-50Mbit DSL connections or cable connections of up to 150 MBit/s (uncapped). Its the same in many other bigger cities - i hardly know anyone who cannot get some type of broadband. My mom lives in a VERY rural area (one neighbour and then a half a mile of NOTHING) and she still gets 3Mbits DSL, not great but ok. - the situation in the US is even worse, still alot of people on dialup in rural areas - traffic caps are a step backwards i agree, but its just one ISP doing this right now and there are many other countries where this is common practice as well
- dorznak 13y agoPopulation density is a problem in Germany. In contrast to, for example France (?), the state does not nearly enough to bring internet to the countryside. Broadband access is defined as 380kbit/s and customer service is terrible. By the way: T-Mobile is part of "Telekom". But if you choose the right street in the right city, getting 100mbit for 50euros (flatrate) is not a problem.
- corporalagumbo 13y agoGermans love complaining. It's the national addiction.
- sergiosgc 13y agoShocking! I had no idea... It does not fit Germany's image. Portugal has most cities covered with fiber, at prices of around 30eur/month for 50mbps and about 40eur/month for 100mbps. Smaller cities are covered with coaxial cable, with last miles at 30mbps. Only in remote areas do you get stuck with ADSL (speed varies wildly with distance to POP). No traffic capping, and I'd wager the first provider that introduces capping will disappear from the market. ISDN is not common at all for individuals. I guess the big difference here is that monopoly regulation went rather well. Many providers appeared in the late nineties, protected by laws mandating that Portugal Telecom rented last mile loops. Nowadays, the market, while not perfect, is competitive enough. (fiber and coaxial networks are private, these are not the public debts you are looking for ;-)
- walshemj 13y agoOh German telecoms in the DBP days was always very much you get what you are given citizen.
- Vivtek 13y agoT-Mobile in the States is, if possible, even worse. I visited Puerto Rico in February and decided on a T-Mobile stick because the one I use in Budapest works perfectly. In PR, though, there were URLs that simply didn't go through - and there is literally no support. None; you simply can't get support at all. No phone, no email - just a "community support" forum where you can post things if you feel like blowing off steam. And it still cost $10/GB. Not only that, you can only purchase a new block of 5 GB after your current one has already been used up. Before then they simply don't take your money - unless you set up autopay. And you can't purchase time online, because the URL forwards to nowhere - see above lack of any support facility. You can't even report this breakage. So you have to do it by phone. But there are two systems; first you have to load money onto your account, then you can use the money on your account to pay for a new 5GB block - but these are two different systems with two different numbers and they each require you to punch in your phone number and a PIN code. Different PIN codes, if I recall. And again, no human support at all. But then let me tell you about our T-Mobile cell phones here in Budapest. My phone started sending me "premium" SMS messages at 1500 ft a pop (about $7.50 per premium message) until the entire balance was used up. As service messages so they don't show in the Inbox. T-Mobile was able to block that, but my wife's phone started mysteriously "accessing the Internet" (it's not a smart phone), again at something like 500 ft per access, invisibly, until her balance was used up. The only recourse is to go to a T-Mobile store and stand in line for half an hour, because they do kind of have phone support here in Hungary, but the only thing they can tell you is to go to the store and wait in line. The store has no permission to escalate to technicians. The people in the store "disabled" Internet on my wife's phone three separate times; the theft continued each time. Sometimes they'd refund some money and apologize and swear up and down that everything was disabled. Finally, it seems to have stopped on its own. Maybe it was a system misconfiguration, maybe not. It's impossible to know, because clearly T-Mobile itself has no idea. Their Internet stick (in Hungary) works great, though. So I continue to use them - it's just that if there's ever a problem they are entirely unable to fix it. The entire company is so Balkanized and so incredibly poorly managed that they can only barely function if nothing goes wrong.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]