I recently did vacation at the North Sea (land side, not the islands). It was heartbreaking. In many areas the iPhone showed "No Service", in most areas we had "Edge" connection with virtually no data throughput. Even when it showed "3G" I was mostly unable to use WhatsApp. And this is a region where people live!
And let's not talk about the landline broadband.... our rented appartment had a meager 1MBit download speed and 10MBit upload (yes, the reverse from what you would expect).
On the Autobahn, on many, many kilometers we had Edge only.
Compare that to my last travel to Iran: we had very fast LTE almost everywhere especially in the middle of the desert (it was heavily censored, but the infrastructure was working).
Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.
> Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.
The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...
I have had the same experience both in Germany and in some areas of the UK, like downtown Cambridge which was shocking.
In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.
They also have a "Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure" as if expertise in one domain would easily transfer to the other. The only commonality seems to be that things are being transported from A to B via some network, but it pretty much ends there.
The crazy thing I think is how expensive internet is, in whatever form, in Germany compared to the rest of Europe while simultaneously being so terrible.
Germany guy living in Canada at the moment: German internet now seems super cheap for me. I had UnityMedia for years. 120Mbit/s and unlimited home phone for 25€ per month. You can triple that sum for Canada (90$ plus tax) if you don’t get any special deal. And deals are annoying, since internet providers randomly increase their prices even if you are on a contract. So even if are not constantly out on the watch for the next deal and complain regularly at customer service you will simply pay a lot.
Besides that the Canadian plans are capped (E.g. at 1 TB/month even at high prices), whereas I never had a capped plan in Germany.
Mobile phone plans are even worse, without even talking about coverage.
So yes, Germany is not great, but it can be worse.
I recently moved to Germany and now have 100mbit DSL for 25€/month (~$30) plus a phone contract with 6GB/month (more than enough since I have Wifi at home and work) including a phone flat for <€20/month. That's on par with the UK and cheaper than US and Canada.
It's far cheaper than the US. I get 6MB/s downloads for 15€/month. For mobile, there's a chart making the rounds on Twitter, and it seems to me Germany is very much in line with other countries. Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.
I'll get hate for this, but whenever things like cell service are suddenly shared with millions of people more, the connectivity is stressed out. Companies like AT&T spend at least 1.5 years from the planning of a tower to it's completion, so reliable growth models are required.
Oh, not just Iran. 10 years ago Cambodia had already better coverage than Germany. Either mobile or WiFi. Go figure... Positive thing in the Alps is you are quite often close enough to get coverage from Austria. No idea why it has to be that bad.
ok 1Mb down and 10 up means that there is a high speed line - probably capable of 80Mb down which has a problem - my guess would be a shunt or interference (REIN). The provider should know this and should be able to locate and fix. But this is an service issue, not a delivery issue.
I grow up in Germany and can completely agree with you. The landline network is crappy in many areas and the mobile network is one of the worst I have seen (traveled to many countries). My parents recently got a 16MBit connection installed. Currently I am living in Thailand and their mobile network coverage is amazing. Even on an island or in the jungle you get LTE.
Sure, but over here in California USA I routinely get no service at all Pretty much all of Skyline Boulevard, Route 1, large swaths of I-5 are big dead zones for me. All regional parks, state parks, national parks are dead too. I've had generally better cell service in Europe.
When I was visiting Germany 3 years ago, I bought a prepaid sim a second time from a 2nd company because the service was so mediocre. It didn't help. I was only in the major cities and I was lucky to get good 3G signal/speeds let alone LTE. It surprised me quite a bit. As a Canadian, where we pay extremely high rates for mobile, the signals and speeds are at least very good.
It was also surprising as I've had good service in France, UK, Belgium, Spain, UK, etc. I expected the Germans to be stereotypically efficient on this.
I agree with your comment but the same is true for San Francisco / Silicon Valley. The connection is often times terrible and try having a VOIP call on the 101.
Having recently visited the Yellowstone National Park, the situation you describe for the North Sea side of Germany applies but worse, the cell phone data connection being non-existent, and with the added issue that only one hotel offered wifi, and it was out of service for the entire duration of our visit.
It's a national park - this is an intentional policy. There is some cell service, but the park specifically does not want cell towers everywhere.
> In 2009, Yellowstone completed a plan for wireless communications in the park. The plan dictates that cell phone and wifi will only be allowed for visitor safety and to enhance park operations. It restricts towers, antennas, and wireless services to a few limited locations in the park, in order to protect park resources and limit the impact on park visitors.
Germany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling, implemented poorly: https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/f.... Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway.
Contrasting Germany and the U.K. offers a really good illustration of how important it is to set incentives correctly. The U.K. also relies heavily on unbundling, through BT. But when British Telecom was privatized, the U.K. intensely studied the issue of how to set the appropriate incentives: http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_semin.... The end result was a regulatory structure where rates were set such that BT ended up being very profitable. (Last year, BT's profit margin was around 16%, versus 3% for Telekom.) That created the incentive for BT to invest in pushing fiber further into its DSL network.
I would not discount government 'incentives' to BT. Hundreds of millions have come the public purse for contracts that were supposedly put up for public tender. BT got about 95% of them.
edit: there are other issues in the UK, like fibre tax, that makes the situation even more difficult for competition.
Here in the UK, widely available fast internet access still feels fairly recent.
I've had a 80/20 FTTC connection (~£23/m) for 5 years or so, but before that it was ADSL, starting really crappy and ending up at something like 8/1 IIRC, and it took forever to get that - people were complaining for decades about BT and OpenReach's slow rollout of ADSL, and then FTTC. All the time I was painfully aware that people elsewhere had 100 or even 1000mbit connections (e.g. South Korea, various Nordic countries).
Now, widely available and inexpensive FTTH is the next goal here, although I'd say the availability of FTTC is "enough" for the vast majority of people to be happy with it. Which is just as well, as I'd guess we're 20 years aware from seeing FTTH. I realise 5g is starting to become a thing, but it's unlikely to ever be ubiquitous outside of major cities, and is bound to suffer once contention becomes an issue.
* FTTC: fibre to the cabinet
* FTTH: fibre to the home
Props to the engineers at BT/OpenReach for making the most of a pair of copper wires. Even at my parents place, built in the 80s, and a mile and a half from the local exchange/cabinet they can get 50mbit down with VDSL2.
However I feel BT as a company needs big changes. They are a monopoly because most people (especially older people) don't realise how easy it is to change. Their prices are consistently higher than competitors, and they get a lot of government incentives.
I now live in Lithuania where most households within city limits can get 1000/1000 FTTH, and even in remote areas you can get decent 4G speeds (50mbit+), and it's costs less than half of what BT charge for the cheapest BT Infinity package. This has all been rolled out in the last few years, and I can't see BT doing anything like that anytime soon in the UK.
I would agree Fiber to the CAB is really all that home users need. A lot of the whining in places like Faringdon Central London is one or two business wanting to do freeload off consumer BB.
I helped my last company move at super short notice < 2 weeks and we got Last mile ethernet 70Meg as a stop gap before our 100 Meg line was delivered a month early
Fast internet has been available to at least half the country for some time now. Virgin Media launched 50Mbps in 2008, and for most households that would still be enough today.
> Germany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling, implemented poorly: https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/f.... Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway.
Of course this applies to other providers too - why would you invest and add infrastructure if you have to share it with your competitors anyway? I think allowing providers to use their network contributions exclusively for a certain time, let's say 2 years, is a worthwhile incentive.
> Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway.
that's not always true. It's still not clear if they are allowed to upgrade without putting new cables in.
if the last-mile is on copper you can replace it with vectoring (FTTC+Vectoring) the problem is that it is only legally allowed if there is a second network, because LLU and vectoring is currently incompatible. and the telekom of germany needs to sublicense. and fttb (or better) is basically not feasible.
(exceptions prove the rule)
actually all cities between karlsruhe and freiburg will be gradually changed to use fttc+vectoring which will improve data rates up to 300mbit/40mbit (most often to 100/40 or 50/10)
I recently moved to Germany. I used to work as a software dev in India before this. I was horrified to learn that (urban) India has way better internet than Germany. When it comes to mobile data it's even more depressing - back in India I used to get 1.5GB _daily_ 4G mobile data for 200 rupees (around 2.5 euros) a _month_. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, 2.5 euros a month for virtually unlimited mobile data is super cheap. In comparison, I pay 10 euros a month for a _monthly_ quota of 1.5 GB with O2 here in Germany. Not to mention that it's slower, and yes, there are a lot of patches with no data reception.
Considering that Germany has otherwise superb infrastructure, the internet was a let down.
For what it's worth, on O2 there are a ton of better deals than that. Just checked winsim.de for example, 3GB for 8€, 6GB for 13€ a month with no minimum runtime. If you're a power user, Freenet Funk offers unlimited data at 1€/day used (so around 30€/month tops). Don't get me wrong, the situation here is still embarrassing, I just wanted to provide some pointers.
Post Jio, India has one of the cheapest data rates in the world. Sometimes when you go elsewhere, one tends to accidentally turn on data and use it the same way as in India, and I have been bitten like this once. Luckily it was prepaid, so the damage was contained.
I also roam in Germany. I would like to point out that this. situation with speed depends on the city where you are at. Munich has much better coverage than Berlin for some reason. Pricing is the same obviously.
If you have friends in EU countries consider getting a foreign phone contract through them. I'm in DE with an FR contract, 4 euros for 40gb a months and I can connect to any carriers. It's still slow as hell though.
You're getting ripped off on O2 or Vodafone. Get an Ay Yildiz Prepaid card, 25 Euros for 12GB and there's an option to top up of you run out. It's an EPlus MVNO, speeds are pretty good on 3G (~8Mbps).
>“The whole problem in Germany is the lack of fiber-to-the-home strategy by Deutsche Telekom DTEGY -0.52% and other carriers,
No, it is not. The problem could have been solved decades ago. Helmut Kohl of the CDU (conservative party) turned back a decision of his predecessor to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. Germany could have had fiber to the home for 20 years at the least reachable areas and for 35 in major cities.
Rumor has it that nowadays, Telekom is postponing fiber because they don't want to sublicense their network to other carriers so they wait until they are getting a better deal. This is funny because Telekom is owned by many German small sharesholders (since that's how they have privatized the former public agency) - which has led to a situation where Germans don't get better internet because they are hoping for higher profits.
There is legit talk about changing the hugest plans here from 100/40 to 120/20. It’s that bad. Which is moot anyway because 40% of the “new” network probably cannot get that speed anyway.
Australia's situation is fairly different. And reeks of all the wrong steps of privatization of infrastructure
Telstra (at the time "Telecom Australia") was drawing up plans to roll out FTTH all the way back in 1994(!) before being privatized whole cloth in 1998
Some of their delightful missteps leading up to (and during) the NBN rollout included
- Selling Dial-Up services cheaper than competitors by virtue of not needing to pay line rental or other fees
- Describing ADSL as a "fetish" and saying ISDN was "good enough"
- Running a competitor's (Optus) HFC rollout into the ground. Large swathes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to this day have "Telstra Cable" on one side of a street and "Optus Cable" on the other, simply because Telstra wanted to bankrupt Optus out of trying to avoid using their copper network, and thus, paying fees
- Breaking the ADSL 1 standard to prevent having to buy more DSLAM backhaul. The 8/1 ADSL standard was changed to "at most" 1.5/256
- Attempting to roll out FTTN across the country in 2006, on the provision that they NOT be required to allow competing providers access to their equipment (this was a large part of what precipitated Labor's original NBN vision in 2007)
- Stalling NBN negotiations as long as possible while gold plating their "4G" network, along with NewsCorp (which owns a 33% stake in Telstra) parroting the "WIRELESS IS THE FUTURE!" line, complete with ads for the "FASTEST 4G NETWORK IN AUSTRALIA"
- Staffing the entire NBN board after the LNP victory in 2013 with "ex" Telstra executives, whom were not required to divest their shares in Telstra, while actively negotiating terms to use Telstra's network(!)
There's many other egregious Telstra incidents like charging 5x the market rate for peering on their network (being the biggest ISP has its "perks") and repeated nation-wide outages of their services due to outsourced network operations, but these are the ones directly related to the NBN today
German internet didn't seem so bad to me, and I suspect it is because I am Australian. The parallels between Telstra and Telekom were uncanny.
In Germany eventually I ended up with 50mbit VDSL which was fine, but having to get Telekom out to connect a phone line in a new building was not fun. Lots of hoops had to be jumped through.
Coming back home to Sydney, stuck on 3mbit ADSL2+ (4km from exchange) was also not fun, but at least it was upgraded to HFC NBN a year later. We're making progress... but as in Germany, it all depends on where you live.
Just a bit more background from Germany:
This article largely focusses on broadband connections. It doesn't even begin to adress the even bigger issue, which is that mobile internet is extremely bad compared to most other european countries.
Also interesting that even the reporter fell for one of the lamest excuses: "Among them are the country’s large geographic area". Northern neighbor Sweden, which happens to be one of the countries with fiber connections even in very rural areas, is larger and much less densely populated.
France has 30 millions less people and is 50% bigger than germany (550000km2 vs 350000km2), so no, it is not comparable. Germany is way denser than France, with a lot big cities.
I have the feeling with 4G it gets better. Sadly the costs are rather prohibitive.
For example, I pay 35€ for 16GB LTE.
Also, while the Vodafone net is rather good, I read they are replacing their 3G with 4G, which means stuff gets faster, but only for people with newer phones.
There's a very obvious reason for why mobile Internet in Germany is flaky, slow yet at the same time ridiculously expensive:
During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in in the subsequent years.
In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the sudden, unexpected windfall.
The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the better.
The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary infrastructure.
Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in 2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):
I'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m.
I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_ worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad.
However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier connection.
I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload & download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using another Internet provider).
My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank them enough as before the copper cable often did not work at all) and if I remember correctly they're paying ~60 CHF/month for symmetric 1Gb/s (sunrise.ch).
In general I think that in Switzerland we're currently all ok with having to pay ~60 CHF/month for such a speed.
I'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m.
We lived near Tübingen and internet was pretty terrible. The options were 50MBit downstream (not guaranteed) VDSL or cable internet. With cable internet we had 200/20MBit, downstream was as promised, but upstream was often actually around 2MBit. Then there were regular service interruptions throughout the region. At some point, internet would be down for a few hours at least one Saturday/Sunday per month or so. (Maybe during the week as wel, but I was at work.)
We moved to The Netherlands a year ago, we have synchronous fiber of up to 500/500 (we currently use 200/200, and fiber is not available everywhere). It hasn't been down a single time over the last year.
I'm in Canada and my plan is 20Mbps down/1Mbps up for $193/month but with TV, no cap since I am grandfathered in. Then I see my ISP has 100Mbps (up is ?) for $85 and a cap of 1TB. I guess I should look at my ISP website more often.
Most of my friends are moving toward pirate TV boxes.
I'm thinking about it for my mom: the cableco's STB shows every channel in the guide, whether you get it or not. And you only realize it when you try to go to the channel.
They have updated the box to show more ads in the guide though... Argh.
It's really expensive for companies, too. The company I work for (small to medium sized) has a 34/34 Mbit/s fiber connection and it costs us 600€ per month. Included are 8 IPv4 addresses and an 8h response time (which has never been met and when we sued after a week of non-working internet, we lost in court).
It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection and we are located in a larger city near the center, not even in a rural area that needs an extra fiber just for us.
So it doesn't come as a surprise that German companies are so much behind Americans in the tech sector. My company has a lot of manufacturing customers and we don't even need to think about a cloud strategy because most of them are still on 6/0.6 MBit/s DSL connections. So it's on-premises or nothing.
That company must have been in the middle of nowhere, because in every major city you can at least get a 100/40 connection for ~45 euros / month. Not super amazing, but decent at least.
I didn't work for the company back then but when I asked I was told that the fine print said they have longer if they acknowledged the issue. It turned out that our provider is just renting the fiber and has a 48 hour response contract with the actual owner of the fiber and our provider waited for the owner to confirm that it wasn't a hardware issue on the owner's side.
I would've probably never signed such a contract but I'm not the boss and maybe other providers are just as bad. But I certainly wouldn't have kept them as my provider after that.
Readit News
And let's not talk about the landline broadband.... our rented appartment had a meager 1MBit download speed and 10MBit upload (yes, the reverse from what you would expect).
On the Autobahn, on many, many kilometers we had Edge only.
Compare that to my last travel to Iran: we had very fast LTE almost everywhere especially in the middle of the desert (it was heavily censored, but the infrastructure was working).
Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.
The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...
In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.
Besides that the Canadian plans are capped (E.g. at 1 TB/month even at high prices), whereas I never had a capped plan in Germany.
Mobile phone plans are even worse, without even talking about coverage.
So yes, Germany is not great, but it can be worse.
I recently moved to Germany and now have 100mbit DSL for 25€/month (~$30) plus a phone contract with 6GB/month (more than enough since I have Wifi at home and work) including a phone flat for <€20/month. That's on par with the UK and cheaper than US and Canada.
Sudden population influxes produce problems.
It was also surprising as I've had good service in France, UK, Belgium, Spain, UK, etc. I expected the Germans to be stereotypically efficient on this.
> In 2009, Yellowstone completed a plan for wireless communications in the park. The plan dictates that cell phone and wifi will only be allowed for visitor safety and to enhance park operations. It restricts towers, antennas, and wireless services to a few limited locations in the park, in order to protect park resources and limit the impact on park visitors.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/park/cell-phone-wifi-yellows...
To me that would be what a national park ... just is.
Contrasting Germany and the U.K. offers a really good illustration of how important it is to set incentives correctly. The U.K. also relies heavily on unbundling, through BT. But when British Telecom was privatized, the U.K. intensely studied the issue of how to set the appropriate incentives: http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_semin.... The end result was a regulatory structure where rates were set such that BT ended up being very profitable. (Last year, BT's profit margin was around 16%, versus 3% for Telekom.) That created the incentive for BT to invest in pushing fiber further into its DSL network.
edit: there are other issues in the UK, like fibre tax, that makes the situation even more difficult for competition.
I've had a 80/20 FTTC connection (~£23/m) for 5 years or so, but before that it was ADSL, starting really crappy and ending up at something like 8/1 IIRC, and it took forever to get that - people were complaining for decades about BT and OpenReach's slow rollout of ADSL, and then FTTC. All the time I was painfully aware that people elsewhere had 100 or even 1000mbit connections (e.g. South Korea, various Nordic countries).
Now, widely available and inexpensive FTTH is the next goal here, although I'd say the availability of FTTC is "enough" for the vast majority of people to be happy with it. Which is just as well, as I'd guess we're 20 years aware from seeing FTTH. I realise 5g is starting to become a thing, but it's unlikely to ever be ubiquitous outside of major cities, and is bound to suffer once contention becomes an issue.
* FTTC: fibre to the cabinet * FTTH: fibre to the home
However I feel BT as a company needs big changes. They are a monopoly because most people (especially older people) don't realise how easy it is to change. Their prices are consistently higher than competitors, and they get a lot of government incentives.
I now live in Lithuania where most households within city limits can get 1000/1000 FTTH, and even in remote areas you can get decent 4G speeds (50mbit+), and it's costs less than half of what BT charge for the cheapest BT Infinity package. This has all been rolled out in the last few years, and I can't see BT doing anything like that anytime soon in the UK.
I helped my last company move at super short notice < 2 weeks and we got Last mile ethernet 70Meg as a stop gap before our 100 Meg line was delivered a month early
Of course this applies to other providers too - why would you invest and add infrastructure if you have to share it with your competitors anyway? I think allowing providers to use their network contributions exclusively for a certain time, let's say 2 years, is a worthwhile incentive.
that's not always true. It's still not clear if they are allowed to upgrade without putting new cables in.
if the last-mile is on copper you can replace it with vectoring (FTTC+Vectoring) the problem is that it is only legally allowed if there is a second network, because LLU and vectoring is currently incompatible. and the telekom of germany needs to sublicense. and fttb (or better) is basically not feasible. (exceptions prove the rule)
actually all cities between karlsruhe and freiburg will be gradually changed to use fttc+vectoring which will improve data rates up to 300mbit/40mbit (most often to 100/40 or 50/10)
Deleted Comment
No, it is not. The problem could have been solved decades ago. Helmut Kohl of the CDU (conservative party) turned back a decision of his predecessor to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. Germany could have had fiber to the home for 20 years at the least reachable areas and for 35 in major cities.
Rumor has it that nowadays, Telekom is postponing fiber because they don't want to sublicense their network to other carriers so they wait until they are getting a better deal. This is funny because Telekom is owned by many German small sharesholders (since that's how they have privatized the former public agency) - which has led to a situation where Germans don't get better internet because they are hoping for higher profits.
[1]https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...
There is legit talk about changing the hugest plans here from 100/40 to 120/20. It’s that bad. Which is moot anyway because 40% of the “new” network probably cannot get that speed anyway.
Telstra (at the time "Telecom Australia") was drawing up plans to roll out FTTH all the way back in 1994(!) before being privatized whole cloth in 1998
Some of their delightful missteps leading up to (and during) the NBN rollout included
- Selling Dial-Up services cheaper than competitors by virtue of not needing to pay line rental or other fees
- Describing ADSL as a "fetish" and saying ISDN was "good enough"
- Running a competitor's (Optus) HFC rollout into the ground. Large swathes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to this day have "Telstra Cable" on one side of a street and "Optus Cable" on the other, simply because Telstra wanted to bankrupt Optus out of trying to avoid using their copper network, and thus, paying fees
- Breaking the ADSL 1 standard to prevent having to buy more DSLAM backhaul. The 8/1 ADSL standard was changed to "at most" 1.5/256
- Attempting to roll out FTTN across the country in 2006, on the provision that they NOT be required to allow competing providers access to their equipment (this was a large part of what precipitated Labor's original NBN vision in 2007)
- Stalling NBN negotiations as long as possible while gold plating their "4G" network, along with NewsCorp (which owns a 33% stake in Telstra) parroting the "WIRELESS IS THE FUTURE!" line, complete with ads for the "FASTEST 4G NETWORK IN AUSTRALIA"
- Staffing the entire NBN board after the LNP victory in 2013 with "ex" Telstra executives, whom were not required to divest their shares in Telstra, while actively negotiating terms to use Telstra's network(!)
There's many other egregious Telstra incidents like charging 5x the market rate for peering on their network (being the biggest ISP has its "perks") and repeated nation-wide outages of their services due to outsourced network operations, but these are the ones directly related to the NBN today
In Germany eventually I ended up with 50mbit VDSL which was fine, but having to get Telekom out to connect a phone line in a new building was not fun. Lots of hoops had to be jumped through.
Coming back home to Sydney, stuck on 3mbit ADSL2+ (4km from exchange) was also not fun, but at least it was upgraded to HFC NBN a year later. We're making progress... but as in Germany, it all depends on where you live.
Also interesting that even the reporter fell for one of the lamest excuses: "Among them are the country’s large geographic area". Northern neighbor Sweden, which happens to be one of the countries with fiber connections even in very rural areas, is larger and much less densely populated.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
For example, I pay 35€ for 16GB LTE.
Also, while the Vodafone net is rather good, I read they are replacing their 3G with 4G, which means stuff gets faster, but only for people with newer phones.
During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in in the subsequent years.
In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the sudden, unexpected windfall.
The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the better.
The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary infrastructure.
Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in 2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):
https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-raises-6-point-5...
I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_ worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad.
However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier connection.
I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload & download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using another Internet provider).
My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank them enough as before the copper cable often did not work at all) and if I remember correctly they're paying ~60 CHF/month for symmetric 1Gb/s (sunrise.ch).
In general I think that in Switzerland we're currently all ok with having to pay ~60 CHF/month for such a speed.
I get my internet over 4g here because land lines are 10/1 mbps.
Still, 4g is 80/15 or so, so it's viable for now (sunrise too)
We lived near Tübingen and internet was pretty terrible. The options were 50MBit downstream (not guaranteed) VDSL or cable internet. With cable internet we had 200/20MBit, downstream was as promised, but upstream was often actually around 2MBit. Then there were regular service interruptions throughout the region. At some point, internet would be down for a few hours at least one Saturday/Sunday per month or so. (Maybe during the week as wel, but I was at work.)
We moved to The Netherlands a year ago, we have synchronous fiber of up to 500/500 (we currently use 200/200, and fiber is not available everywhere). It hasn't been down a single time over the last year.
I'm thinking about it for my mom: the cableco's STB shows every channel in the guide, whether you get it or not. And you only realize it when you try to go to the channel.
They have updated the box to show more ads in the guide though... Argh.
I lived that way for a decade. It was terrible.
The 500Mbps is at 99€/month
It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection and we are located in a larger city near the center, not even in a rural area that needs an extra fiber just for us.
So it doesn't come as a surprise that German companies are so much behind Americans in the tech sector. My company has a lot of manufacturing customers and we don't even need to think about a cloud strategy because most of them are still on 6/0.6 MBit/s DSL connections. So it's on-premises or nothing.
Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies instead of small ones.
I would've probably never signed such a contract but I'm not the boss and maybe other providers are just as bad. But I certainly wouldn't have kept them as my provider after that.
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