It’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.
Does the ISP equipment even have a 10Gbps port? I know someone here (Ireland) who had an early consumer 1Gbps FTTP connection. The ISP provided equipment had 100Mbps ports and 802.11n...
Wow, I wish you could get a reliable 50mbps connection in Australia for that cheap. The government is still installing new Fibre to the node (DSL) there which can max out as low as 12mbps.
In a suburban area outside of Tacoma ~300mbps was about $50, and now just outside of Seattle I pay $75 for 1 gbps. The non-gigabit plans were south of $50.
I Googled a bit and most websites said Americans generally pay somewhere between $50-$60.
I'm upstate ny and pay $80 for internet. This gets me 100Mbit down and a paltry 10Mbit up. I don't consider this "broadband" as the upload speed is so slow. It's also highway robbery... there's no choice here.
Could you get slower for less? Because that's the standout characteristic of the German market, something like 16/1 is almost universally available at about 30€ or less, but going and faster, if available, comes at a steep premium.
I did a quick login online to search for current "offers", and they're only offering higher tier speeds. Now, it might be possible, but that takes calling them up and I'm not in the mood.
Also, the way they hide "offers" per customer/location is maddening. For my location, a new internet installation at my current speeds is $45 for 2 years. Meanwhile, look at me paying $80 per month -.- Thank you my senators and reps.
Locally, unlimited gigabit with taxes and all is ~$100 USD through ATT. The unlimited portion adds $30, but any TV package also makes the connection unlimited so that's what I did.
So! that's competitive for a 35Mbs (inc phone service) in the Uk - consumer broadband doesn't need more than 35-50Mbs any how.
At least "Duecherbuderpest" is not still fixated on making you all use ISDN. "Duecherbuderpest" is what other Telco's use to refer to the German PTT as.
Usually it's best to "cancel" the contract immediately after signing, then when the cancellation comes in effect a year later it's easy to get the new customer rate again.
Or if you don't mind the hassle and have another provider available at your location, switch to it via some broker like check24 and get it even cheaper. I'm currently on 30/6 mbits for 11€ for two years, before that I had 120/10 mbits for 17€ over two years. They would turn into 25€ and 35€ after two years.
It is kind of ridiculous how they actually punish loyal customers by making them pay more after two years if you don't do anything. Sure, enough people are lazy enough to make this model feasible, but just imagine the butcher you've been getting your meat at for years suddenly goes like "hey you come here all the time so I'm gonna charge you 30% more"
Not mind-blowing. Comparing to Romania, where internet is "cheaper" and faster, the salaries in Germany are much higher, so the cable guy costs more. Many times more. So in the end Internet is just faster in Romania, not cheaper, because compared to the salaries it is quite expensive.
Th exact prices you see seem to vary depending on where it thinks you are, and it requires a street address and unit number to quote you exactly what I get quoted. I’m not going to give you my address to verify my prices, because I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.
But if you google around you’ll see their pretty typical (eg. googling “telus internet 750 review” will give you a result that links to Telus’ page with Google adding that there’s a price range of $95-$140)
Do you think maybe that’s why I said “compared to elsewhere in Canada” and not “compared to every single other place in Canada”?
I have no clue how you convinced yourself I was unaware of this obvious fact. Two different links in my post clearly spell out every community it’s available in.
40 for 50 is not so bad. Some regional ISPs installing FTTB/FTTH offer 100mbps + voice for ~40€, which is a pretty good deal.
Due to heavy oversubscribing cable is an inferior product in Germany (on weekends actual speeds drop to a fraction of the advertised line speed), and the biggest cable provider by far (Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone) has serious user support and service quality issues, not to mention they only offer ipv6 dual-stack lite connectivity.
Interesting. Not sure if it's location dependent, but I've had a considerably better/faster/stabler experience with cable. With DSL the connection keeps breaking all the time. And yes, Vodafone definitely has support/quality issues.
The amount of regulator-enforced competition varies a lot between technology generations. The basic idea is that Telekom cannot deny renting out to resellers what they inherited from their government monopolist predecessor, but more recent infrastructure has no such strings attached (the details are slightly more complicated I think).
This was meant as an incentive for investment ("if you build new stuff it's all yours"), but it has cemented the usual premiums for higher bandwidth as a permanent fixture, instead of something that only hits early adopters before trickling down to entry levels. So now you have a situation where quite a few people would be able to upgrade to something like 50 mbps down, sticking to the 16 mbps contract that does the job as well (when you're not hooked to cloud services yet, something Germans might tend to be wary of anyways, given the data protection mindset). In a market where VDSL is widely rejected (because it would almost double the bill), who would invest in even faster infrastructure?
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.
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.
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.
And I can assure you that the trains are much much better than in other parts of the world (eg: India). In India, trains running on time are an exception, not the rule. At least all the German trains that I've been on were on time to the very minute.
I take the train in a big German city every day. If my train were to arrive on time one day, I would share that information with all my friends as something more than exceptional. This never happens. I can't wait till i've saved enough to buy a car and stop using the trains and subway.
I don't understand this German cliché, it's not insanely great but the amount of delays is the same as in France with better internet, cleaner toilets, and a descent price. Internet in Germany is a combination of shitty contracts, slow speeds, and deceptive ads. That is much worse than a descent service with clear pricings like Deutsche Bahn.
The source of the “data” is Speedtest.net tests, which is absolutely not an actual survey. At best, it represents the average speed of “enthusiasts who like to test their internet speed”. Who, not surprisingly, are going to have faster connections than the actual nationwide average.
Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.
Yep... I returned yesterday from Germany and it is awful. I thought the UK (rural) was bad, but Germany takes the cake. There are even (expensive) hotels which still ask money for using their wifi. When you go to have only a meal at a hotel, they tell you internet is just for guests (we had this 5 times in 2 weeks). And driving around with 3g/4g you notice massive patches without data reception. I live in the mountains of Spain where I have cheap 4g and even cheaper 'radio' uplinks. They are enough to download gigs a day (not that I need that; I need stable, not a lot of bandwidth, but it's both). I was used to drive out of London a just a little bit and everything dropping, but Germany is even worse. And when it does work, it's slow.
Compared to Thailand (including in the middle of the forest), Romania and other random countries I have been, it is strange to see such a difference.
Talking about Romania: in the modem Internet era I cabled (with my brother)the block of flats where we lived to share a connection. The wires were hanging between floors and were simply stitched to the walls internally. These types of cabling were then bought by ISP for cheap and they found themselves with cities cabled for pennies. Now they pulled fiber on public light poles (for free, of course) and interconnected all these networks, changed the switches to Gigabit and got cheap and fast Internet for the masses.
You cannot do this kind of shady work in Germany, you need to get permits, pull the wiring underground, these kind of things increase the cost a lot. Also the mobile Internet is fast in Romania because of the competition from the very fast land lines. In Germany both are missing.
Yeah bureaucracy and regulations is one of the reasons things suck here. Extending the network is ridiculously costly with all the planning, approvements required, the city having a say, some wavie complaining they get headaches, an old dude thinking the tower looks ugly, paying the construction company and finally having that thing certified after it's been built.
Come to Ukraine.
They have the cheapest internet, mobile plans and Uber in the world.
And likely the worst air, food and city structure quality.
There is always a choice.
I don't have faith in that chart. Average US internet speed is 120 mbps?! Do they mean advertised max speed? No way the average internet household speed is that fast. Maybe half. Maybe. I like to live away from town, but even when I could get FiOS, the normal package was 50 mbps. I happen to have 400 mbps now (which flies in the face of my argument, I know).
EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes. That is more in line with what I would have thought.
The source is speedtest.net, which probably biases toward “users that care about speed and run tests”, but also average likely is mean, not median, and the mean can get to 120Mb/s pretty easily with a fairly small fraction of Gb/s-class connections. even if the rest are in the 1-20Mb/s range.
There are many areas where only 16Mbit are available max, some even only with 6Mbit. When buying a house, checking your potential internet connection with the providers is crucial, even for houses that are close to big cities. Where I live, in a city neighbouring Frankfurt, 50Mbit has only been available for about 4 years now.
> But Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s dominant operator, took a less costly route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called vectoring.
The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?
I thought Canada’s oligopoly was bad, but one company for a much bigger country sounds like the perfect recipe for this type of thing.
Not saying it's the case here but it was usually one public operator controlling the entire country, which then got privatised in the 90s or stuff. So they have access to 99.9% of the population.
> The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?
Pretty much, yes.
"Deutsche Telekom" is the company that came out of the former state telecom company. So they own the national telephone network.
Appart from a few local networks the only alternative is Internet through the tv cable network. However that never got complete coverage in Germany.
So for a lot of people Telekom is the only company that can offer them Internet connectivity. All the others are just reseller offers.
Also there have been some pretty nasty strategies where they actively prevent other companies from building parallel infrastructure: Places where Telekom didn't offer fast Internet for years, then a competitor builds a fiber network and coincidentally just shortly afterwards Telekom offers fast Internet, so the competitor looses because he can't get as much income as expected.
> Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?
For DSL, essentially, yes. Everybody else rents their infrastructure from them. Cable is a general competitor, but it suffers from other problems and will often be much slower than advertised during peak hours.
In most European countries, like in the U.S., there was a national telephone company. These are by and large privitized in the 1980s and 1990s, subject to various rules and regulations.
In the U.K., France, and Germany, the phone operator (BT, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom) were kept intact, but regulated. In the 1990s, they were required to lease out access to the phone network to competitors at regulated, wholesale rates. The idea is that you can't have effective competition for the last mile anyway, so you might as well put that into a monopoly, and require it to offer access to the last mile loops to competitors. (Obviously you then have to regulate the price of that wholesale service otherwise the monopoly can easily circumvent that by pricing wholesale access sky high.)
This approach is common, and theoretically sound. Something similar is used for the electric market in the U.S. (a local, rate-regulated monopoly owns the electric wire into your house, but it is required to buy electricity from competitive, wholesale markets.) But it's hard to do correctly--if you set the regulated rates too low, you kill off any incentive to invest. If you set them too high, consumers pay too much. Nobody really did it that great--of the largest five EU countries (the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy), all have slow Internet relative to the U.S. Spain and France are turning that around recently by investing a bunch of government money in building fiber.
The U.S. situation was better due to an accident of history. Unlike most of Europe, almost everyone already had two wires into their house (cable and telephone). The U.S. implemented unbundling for DSL service for a relatively short but key period (early 2000s). That set a floor--cable had to be better than DSL to compete.
That never happened in the big EU countries. If you look at the OECD statistics, the thing that really holds them back is very high DSL usage: https://data.oecd.org/broadband/fixed-broadband-subscription.... Germany, France, and the U.K. have 30 DSL subscribers per 100 people, versus just 7 for the U.S.
I live in Central Berlin and the issue is present here as well. I had to choose the Telekom, one of the most expensive providers, because they intentionally blocked requests from other providers to service me with internet in my apartment.
I ordered service from 3 service providers and each of them called me a month after ordering and told me that Telekom is telling them there are technical problems and my bandwidth target of 50 MBit is impossible to deliver, so they aren't able to serve me.
I called Telekom after that and they told me everything is fine and aggressively tried to convert me to a customer. Tried another provider after that, still failed, so I went with...Telekom...and who would've thought...a week after that I had internet again.
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.
Yes and no. Broadband is really hit or miss. You can live on a street where half the buildings have access to fiber (and therefore triple-play gigabit for <40€/month) while the other half is left with piss-poor DSL, that isn't even sold any cheaper. (At least in Germany the pricing reflects the speed).
Mobile isn't terribly better than in Germany (there are still many areas with fairly poor coverage) but it's way cheaper, yes. For instance I use a French SIM card for traveling, since it covers the entire EU, EFTA countries and North America. Unlimited calls/SMS and 15GB for 15€/month.
France has among the slowest Internet in the rich / highly developed countries group.
As recently as 2017 they ranked behind Russia in fixed avg mbps according to Akamai's report and were 5th slowest in Europe. They were #51 globally at that point and Germany was 50% faster and ranked #25 globally.
I'm sure it has improved some in the last two years, I doubt it has dramatically leaped forward.
They've also performed relatively poorly on mobile speeds (from early 2017):
"France got absolutely walloped by all its neighbours, and finished behind 21 other European countries"
The population difference is 16 million (67 million vs 83 million), and the France is about 80% larger than Germany (640679km^2 vs 357386km^2). But at the same time the population of France is much more concentrated into a few areas and the population of Germany is spread out more.
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.
Maybe I'm just behind the times, but I can't think of anything I'd do that would saturate my 20Mbps link, other than maybe downloading an iso or something. I'm using 1 und 1's ultra cheap plan, and browsing works fine, streaming works fine, video conferencing works fine, remote desktops work fine. I work remote, and only once have I experienced an outage.
I think 20Mbps is ok if you are the only user (I would rather 30 at least). But if you live with other heavy internet users it can get congested easily.
Someone streaming something, someone playing games, someone downloading something, this all adds up quickly and it starts to be noticeable.
One easy usage case - downloading steam games. Those things are now frequently >60gigs so speed can be the difference between try my new game tonight or only get a chance to play tomorrow after work.
Not necessarily the cloud, it can also be your own server.
That's my problem as a Dutchman in Germany. Server still in NL, hosted at my parents', because it would be impossible here to host at home without registering a company (volatile IP, forced to change very 24 hours, only business connections get a static IP). Right now I'm attempting an off-site backup a second time, which will take a week or so, just like last time. Due to the interrupts and resumptions every 24h, there are lots of unused pack files, which you can prune, but then the system ran out of RAM during pruning and the backup doesn't appear recoverable.
The 4.5MiB/s upload I'm getting is the fastest possible connection in the centre of a city of about 50k people. I checked what it would cost to have fiber installed, and I'm not even sure it would be worth it for a company, let alone for a private person. It's cheaper to hire a moving company and go somewhere else. In the village of 1k people that my parents live in, I can get symmetric 500mbps since 2012 or something, they give a static IP, a /48 IPv6 range, reverse DNS...
That speedtest graph in the article is a great example of why averaging statistics is often a bad idea. The US fixed broadband mean is ~120mbps, but the median is more like ~70 mbps [1]. A few people with gigabit-ish connections are hiding the many people stuck with crappy sub-25 mbps connections.
>“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
I used it in Recklinghausen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Koln, so yeah, within the cities. You're right, on the motorways the speed was sometimes atrocious, less than 1Mbps
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.
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.
actually they do not prohibit tethering just using the simcard in a 4G router for home wifi (to prevent users from using it as a replacement for crappy DSL). Tethering from the phone should be fine.
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.
The running gag of mobile internet in Germany is EU-roaming (no-charge use of you cellular internet service abroad in the EU): I can travel the 1-4 hours to any neighboring countries for the perfect cellular internet access I paid for. The only country where it doesn’t perfectly work is the one I live in. Germany.
Yeah the EU roaming thing is a godsend. The UK contracts in particular are great cause you get ones that extend data to a handful of other interesting countries beyond EU for another couple bucks
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.
I'm not sure that's the case, otherwise why would community driven projects like https://b4rn.org.uk/ exist if BT was serving low-value customers properly? In reality they're the company that doesn't see the value in investment there, completely counter to what the pubic purse was supposed to be supporting.
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
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
Yes, I do think it's enough for most homes, even myself who is an "IT professional" and "power user".
I have 80/20 FTTC, and the only thing bandwidth has ever been an issue for is first-time cloud backups, where I'm uploading 1-2TB of data.
I'd still like it to be cheaper though. I'd also like it to be faster, but perhaps part of that is just because I know it can be, and has been for decades in other parts of the world.
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.
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.
Afraid not, Virgin Media offers cable internet - cable is only available in large cities/towns in the UK. It might well be half of the population of England, but it's nowhere near half the area of the UK.
As an example, I just checked a postcode in the city centre of Aberdeen (Scotland) - no availability.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
For mobile I have unlimited 4G LTE for $55 dollars a month, including talk/text/etc. The 'real' cap is 60GB were they 'review your account for violations of terms and services'.
Just did a speed test and it's 31Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, but it varies wildly by location. But it's consistently fast enough that I can share out over Wifi from my cell phone so I can do my work and while my girlfriend watches youtube videos when we are travelling or the internet is down.
For home internet.. once it got faster then my wifi I stopped really caring a whole lot. 176Mbps on my last test.
If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.
Verizon tends to have the best coverage in the mid-west. If I was travelling a lot in the boonies I would get a second data-only account on Verizon's network just to increase my chances of always having internet.
Although nowadays that is less and less necessary as every hotel and most restaurants have wifi. Just look for a Mcdonalds and you can get internet most of the time.
> If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.
This really depends on who you are using. When traveling between NorCal and SoCal, Sprint is basically garbage and Tmobile works decently for most of the trip.
> If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.
Stretches of road in Utah would like to have a word with you. Specifically I-70.
For a while in Germany I was paying 30€/month for 10Mbps. Meanwhile other EU countries gave you 1Gbps for ~10€/month. Germany is definitely at the lower end of internet infrastructure.
This is probably the only thing I feel great about in the Indian communication domain! I pay <$2 a month for about 1.5GB 4G every DAY! Speeds generally vary from crap to 11 Mbps
> I pay <$2 a month for about 1.5GB 4G every DAY! Speeds generally vary from crap to 11 Mbps
Of course. But, you have to take into account the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to get the true picture. According to OECD data, Germany's PPP is 0.76 while India's is 18.128 (2019). On an average, there's a factor of 23.85 until prices reach a parity between them. Therefore, just because you pay ~ 2$ a month doesn't make it cheap for India.
Well, this difference exists between many EU countries and Germany as well, so I don't even think that's necessarily an apt comparison without some extra data.
(I'm referring to the comment which your comment was in response to, which I know you didn't post.)
> Meanwhile other EU countries gave you 1Gbps for ~10€/month. Germany is definitely at the lower end of internet infrastructure.
This sounds like eastern europe pricing, western tends to be quite a bit higher. We're talking 20+ for DSL or "slow" fiber (100M or so), GB you won't get below 30+ or even 40~50 depending on the country.
Despite all the griping on the internet, USA is consistently top 10 in broadband speed rankings, and costs are not that different from other countries.
From what I've seen, compared to France, the UK and Austria, which aren't poorer countries, Germany still has comparatively expensive plans with less volume.
> Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.
We might be poorer but our telco operators pay market prices for equipment. Wages and land lease is also quite expensive. Financial cost is higher with rates and currency risk vs euro.
In Poland telco market had been skillfully and actively managed by regulator forcing constant investments in infrastructure and encouraging competition.
I pay 75€ per year for 1TB of mobile plan (calls ans SMS included).
My parents broadband had been recently upgraded from 30Mbps to 150Mbps without any cost increase and without even asking for it. It is just the operator (UPC) trying to fend off competition (Orange, Netia). Cost is circa 10€ per month.
Around the place where I live there is a lot of housing developments. Operators are racing to build the infrastructure and sign the clients even before the houses are finished.
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.
Perhaps you'd like to explain how people driving through the country, or anyone else in fact, drives down ADSL speeds to single-digit or low tens of Mbit/s. Or indeed how population fluctuations of about 1-2% might cause cellular networks to develop dark patches or to regress from LTE to 3G or EDGE.
What if suddenly you have 30 times the number of people at every single internet cafe? Also people with less housing availability use their phones more on average not less, because making ideal housing arrangements on a daily to subdaily basis takes time. Willing to be wrong here but last time I looked, DSL was also driven by an oversubscription sales model, meaning they oversell the product and then try to keep ahead of the curve. Perhaps you've never been homeless so you don't realize these things.
Just a suggestion: Do some actual math. It's really not that difficult to not look like a racist asshole if you bother to actually calculate the size of whatever effect you are hypothesizing exists to check whether it could possibly actually be a thing, as opposed to your prejudice leading you to nonsense conclusions.
You're trying to cram a square peg into a round hole here.
Germany's growth rate in 2018 was 0.3%. The birth rate was 9.5/k versus a death rate of 11.3/k as of 2017, and the fertility rate been below replacement rate since the 1970s.
> Some countries don't even have a census every year
You don't need a census to get a population count. Governments definitely keep records of births/deaths, as well as immigration. Your own link provides population numbers for every year from 1900 through 2018.
So you mean to tell me there was an immigration crisis in Germany with only 500 thousand people? Germany must be the most backwards nation in the world, if this is true.
Especially when you tell me they are a strong nation of 80M people. They can't even tolerate a measly <1% immigration before hateful bigots begin to protest.
You've really shed a light to me on how extremely bigoted Europe really is! I don't think I'll ever visit that awful place for the rest of my life.
Let alone buy things! We shouldn't buy a single thing from Europe ever again! Thank you, good sir!
What other nations are this bigoted besides these awful nations? I've heard that many nations in the middle east don't accept refugees at all. Is this true? And what about all of Asia?? There really is so much hate in all the world.
I don't doubt Germany has continued to take in refugees, but we're not comparing like-to-like here; they're different population estimates, as the 2018 number in your link differs from that in mine.
The point remains: Germany has almost the same population it had 20 years ago. Blaming internet troubles on rapid population expansion is clearly false.
By what measure is Germany's growth in population large? I get that 1 year is too short. Give us an example where it looks like it's growing fast. We'll wait.
Quite a lot: In the 80ies in western germany the then responsible person at the ministry for postal issues (Postministerium) had family connections to a copper producer so everything was build with copper, besides at that time it was clear that there is no long-term future for the technology.
After reunification most areas in eastern germany were rebuild using fibre-optic but the system was a technical failure, too expensive to maintain as the last-mile was still copper mostly and hardware to translate was not available for too expensive - so no fast internet for most east german cities and villages until the mid-2000 as the state did not care anymore:
In the 90ies neoliberal privatisation wave, the privatisation of Bundespost created the Telekom AG that also got most of the infrastructure instead of playing it clever and keep infrastructure in state control like Sweden did and of course they have no incentive to invest in infrastructure because they want to generate profits and opening the ground is expensive - so copper it was again with fiber to the curb at the moment (VDSL) in most cities. The same idiocy was done with the Bundesbahn (rails) - instead of keeping the infrastructure in public hand it was given to the new Bahn AG that destroyed most of it in an insane effort to go public (I'm not joking, destroying trains to avoid having to sell them to the competition, stopping to service rail-tracks to spare some money... the problems are still felt)...
Telekom now behaves much the same way: Unfortunatly they are asshats and when another rural ISP or fibre ISP develops a city the Telekom comes shortly after and attempts to kill their profit instead of doing something about underdeveloped areas. Also the regulators failed to open their new VDSL lines for the market, so you'll have to pay their premium prices.
So that's it for landlines.
I learned that Sweden did the clever thing and build the fiber-infrastructure with public money only once and ISPs can rent the lines and compete with services / price but there is a fiber line to your home.
I don't know about mobile market in Sweden but in Germany there was a huge auction on the start of the 3G technology that cost most ISPs billions of euros for licences, this money is missing and the result are higher rates and less coverage.
Besides that there are 3 big corpoorations having 3 distinct networks (with no roaming, even in sparse areas) - Telefonica with the most budget prices and most users but only good coverage in bigger cities and basically non-existent 4G in rural areas, Vodafone (better, depending were you are) and Deutsche Telekom (best coverage but far from perfect)
Regulators did nothing and so the shitshow goes on....
You had a similar spectrum auction with 5G recently and that got very expensive as well. That seems to be a problem in a lot of Europe and something the hardware providers like Ericsson complains about as that hinders the service providers ability to buy things from them because they spend so much money on the auction.
It's telling that only the four biggest providers in Germany were able to take part in the auction because of how expensive it is. Not a lot of companies can throw billions at some spectrum before even building any towers or other infrastructure. It really distorts the market and makes it far less competitive.
I have not had fun with DTAG - they seem to adamantly refuse to peer like most other networks and demand additional cost for bandwidth requested by their users..
Yes, their peering policy was and still is? infamous for being vile. They even had no ports at de-cix for a long time. However as ISP regarding reliability and technological improvement they are pretty good but they won't and/or can't build new fiber infrastructure and try to make the existence for competition in this space difficult...
Politics has no good ideas and mostly follows their wishes (as with subsidiaries for copper/fiber to the curb) probably because costs for fiber to the home would be way worse - so we'll stay at 16mbit (most villages) /50mbit (if you are lucky) /250mbit (innercity / dense population districts)
Cable market is owned mostly by Vodafone and a total mess due to being crazily overbooked in most cities...
But it's not so bad, for 40-50€ you can get 100/40mbit in a lot of places
Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started...
The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.)
Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.
In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.)
It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs.
And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...
It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.
In Stockholm it was decided to connect all public housing, which was ~25% of the housing stock at the time. Owned apartments being coops, and presumably being able to make majority decisions, probably helped as well. That said, I don't think it is that impressive these days. Most digital or infrastructure things are very "1.5" compared to for example some parts of Asia.
> Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.
From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.
Germany guy living in Canada at the moment: German internet now seems super cheap for me. I had UnityMedia for years. 120Mbit/s and unlimited home phone for 25€ per month. You can triple that sum for Canada (90$ 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.
Well german telecom tried to introduce caps into internet plans ~5 years ago at around 200GB. But that caused so much outrage, that they rolled back on that decision and ultimately you only get a cap on the cheapest of providers.
I mean try downloading GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption for PS4/PC, and you have already used up your datacap.
Mobile Plans are so expensive, because we germans auction away the licenses for the Frequencies for billions.
I can attest to that, having stayed in Canada for 2 years. US is also expensive. Germany is dirt cheap, but slow.
When people say Germany is expensive to the rest of Europe I think they need to check the salary levels in the rest of Europe. German internet and cell is probably cheaper going by percentage of average income.
It's only the lack of coverage (and maybe the blocked YouTube videos) that bother me in Germany.
> When people say Germany is expensive to the rest of Europe I think they need to check the salary levels in the rest of Europe. German internet and cell is probably cheaper going by percentage of average income.
The nordic countries have higher salaries. It's really against the trend: Pretty much everything is more expensive in sweden and denmark, except Internet connectivity.
Compare that to the roughly 8€ I pay for gigabit connection for my apartment in Stockholm. Which is a better deal than normal since the deal is that the whole house also have it, without being able to opt out, but still.
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.
Averages can be deceiving. Plenty of places in Berlin and Germany have great internet connections. The problem is that for every 1Gbps link there are 20 5Mbps links and the average will still show up as a decent 50+Mbps. ("decent" meaning you can get by just fine for most activities an average consumer would perform).
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.
I think that's fairly common in a lot of the bigger and more remote national parks. Death Valley has decent cell reception at Furnace Creek (the main visitor center and lodging area) but AFAIK there's none in the rest of the 3,000 square miles.
Death Valley is also in a valley surrounded by tall mountains loaded with cell tower equipment so the signal propagates pretty easily because there are minimal line-of-sight obstructions.
I can't say I've ever noticed cell phone reception outside of the immediate Furnace Creek area but it's possible you can pick something up from whatever is up on the mountains in some locations.
Last time I was in Death Valley in December I could barely get any signal outside of Furnace Creek. Even in FC it was terrible. I had two cellphones on T-Mobile and AT&T for that matter.
But this is the place where you might get lost and without cell service, you are really lost.
This is quite annoying in the US, that national parks or deserts have no cell service. The places that need it most (life and death situations) - this is basically a health service there.
In comparison to Europe the mobile density is quite sparse there.
There’s a reason it’s called wilderness. One should have basic orienteering skills if they venture away from the popular, touristy locations. If things really do go awry, bring (and use) an EPIRB.
I would never rely on a cellular phone for safety in the wilderness. Cellular service and geolocation was never be 100% reliable, and batteries die. A paper map, a compass, basic skills, and knowledge of one’s limits go a long way.
I'm not sure how big I am on even encouraging everyone who gets off the beaten track to carry an EPIRB. However, if I'm being honest, if I did any amount of solo backpacking--especially in less traveled areas--I'd probably consider it these days.
Indeed, though the problem is often people activating them for situations not truly life-threatening. In some cases, misuse has resulted in hefty fines. Most people don’t need them because most people don’t actually do “backcountry”, let alone solo it.
It should be understood that an EPIRB should only be used in the most dire of circumstances.
Cell Towers have no place in National Parks/Forests and other nature preserves. If you're in the middle of the ocean you're not going to have cell phone service either, and you should plan accordingly.
Do roads have place in national parks? If so then cell towers also.
I mean if I see asphalt then it is quite reasonable to expect also cell service.
I was i national parks in Europe and I always got cell service. I might be lucky (considering the article and posts about Germany) but in US I was in one park (actually two, but I don't remember situation with mobiles in one) and I did get cell service even before the gates.
I don't expect to have cell service if the park doesn't have roads, just hiking tracks.
Please. If your attitude is that if you get in some kind of trouble, you can just use your cell phone and have someone come get you, you should just stay out of wilderness areas.
You're endangering yourself which I wouldn't care that much about but you're also potentially endangering any search and rescue teams that have to come looking for you.
As for the lost scenario specifically. I don't know. Maybe carry a (paper) map and compass? In addition (not instead of) a GPS doesn't need cell reception to operate and works most places. (Some exceptions, like narrow canyons.)
I'm not sure what "that situation" is. inReach-type devices are probably prudent for certain activities in remote areas.
Though if someone is unresponsive after falling in a gorge, I suspect S&R arriving many hours later--and many more hours getting to a hospital--isn't going to be of much help.
It's certainly not routine for individuals or even groups to carry such devices in wilderness areas even if cell phone reception is spotty. I can go 2 hours north of where I live and hike on steep trails where there's no guarantee of cell phone reception.
The didn't. If you fell down into a crevice, you died. You could apply the same spurious argument to anything - how did people ever get by for thousands of years before antibiotics/vaccines/electricity/water purification existed? They didn't, they lived their nasty, brutish and short lives, and died.
I could argue that cell phones (etc.) are technology that is basically: "Come rescue me." There are plenty of other technologies that we can use to help ourselves (maps, compasses, matches, and so forth). I'm at least somewhat uncomfortable with saying that calling for help is quite in the same category.
There are options these days like the inReach that I would recommend for hikers that will be out in the wilderness for an extended period of time and/or might be away from easy access to help. Of course standard protocol still applies like telling someone what path you will take, when they should expect you back etc. but I would feel much safer with an inReach with me just in case.
Part of me dislikes the availability of equipment that puts you in contact from pretty much anywhere--in part because it creates the expectation that you'll avail yourself of such equipment.
But, if I'm being sensible and I'm off by myself in a remote area, yeah, I'd probably take one.
ADDED: And, yes, it's nice to be able to call for help if you really need it. But way too many folks think they can just get in trouble because they're really not prepared, call 911, and everything will be great. A number of states actually collect costs from people if they were negligent these days.
Wait, how could you possibly get really lost in Yellowstone? If you are leaving your car and heading off into the back country then presumably you have the skills to do so. If you are staying on the normal roads then you will have no problem finding a ranger, a ranger station, an information booth, etc. I've probably been to Yellowstone 10 times and I can't fathom anyone getting really lost.
It's also recommended reading if you go to the US West and your expectations are mostly informed by tooling around the countryside of Western Europe (or the eastern US for that matter).
Other articles by Tom Mahood are a great read as well. Highly recommend subscribing to his blog. There is lots to learn from his piddling around the American Southwest.
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. I seriously doubt there is cell service in the interior of the Greenlandic ice cap. Does this mean the Kingdom of Denmark has shitty infrastructure?
The only reason you find mobile coverage sparse in the US is because the US has large, nearly unpopulated areas, whereas Europe doesn’t.
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.
> 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...
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.
I think the money comes from the same budget, and it's both cases infrastructure. At the end of the day you don't need that much expertise to allocate funds, it's more about politics.
His predecessors from CDU/CSU also. Infrastructure ministry is dominated by a history of politicians hellbent on kissing the automotive industry's butt...
Ultimately they are both "realtime logistics" and the minister better have expertise in longterm public projects then either. But yea, sure they better be seperate.
it does kind of make sense if you consider that roads and rail lines are good places to put data cables, and that you have to dig up roads for the cables to be placed. so having the authority do do so within one ministry sounds like a good idea.
Fair point, but they do invoke this ludicrous metaphor of the data highway, also why isn't it then simply called "infrastructure". There are surely other large scale planning decisions that could be subsumed e.g. pipelines, power lines etc.; why would they not be mentioned?
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.
Some Southern European countries still have pretty crappy internet overall - average to low for mobile, and really bad for landline (Italy, Greece, Croatia).
Eastern European countries mostly have great internet (especially landline, probably above average for mobile). I always assumed it must be because they came later to the party and went directly for modern technologies. As opposed to Germany who had telephone lines all over and then decided to get the most out of them because rebuilding with fiber would cost the companies too much.
The state-owned telcos were privatized in 90-ties, because the state is a bad owner, by ...state owned telcos from the west (Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica, etc). Of course, the first thing they tried was to move the obsolete equipment from their home countries to Eastern Europe for the price of a new one and for the money to get the new equipment in their home countries.
That didn't work out, because new competitors appeared, that built FTTH/Tripple Play networks from the scratch, with very low red tape at the time. That made the old DSL equipment not competetive in the cities (some even wanted to charge based on data transferred via DSLAM, making the flat-rate FTTH even better deal), so the ILECs had to do something with it - which meant to build their own FTTH network. DSLAMs were relegated to country side.
That's how Eastern Europe got fast and cheap fixed-line Internet in their cities. In the country, it is still mixed bag, better bet is LTE & 3G.
That story isn't really the full story for some of the countries. For example, Romania had a really huge build it yourself boom (which have since consolidated into proper companies since, if I have understood it correctly) and at least for a while ended up with more people having fiber than running water.
It is partly down to inept politicians and the concessions they dictated to the mobile networks.
In Norway, they demanded the networks cover 97% of the geographic areas. It's why you might get 3G or even 4G in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain, wherever you might drive.
However, in the UK the inept politicians demanded 97% of the population, not geographically.
So all the UK networks just built perfect coverage for all the cities and towns, and could mostly ignore everywhere else.
Which means even in the populous South East England whenever I drive slightly outside my town towards one of the bigger cities 20-30 minutes away I can not have a conversation in my car as the connection is always lost. Nor on the train into London. And also must be a nightmare for the small villages that fall outside the 97%.
(On the plus side whenever we go to the country pubs around here, I can not be reached, and noone can look at the phone during dinner...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just Germany. Tons of places in the US have crappy internet connection. I'm average 2-3Mbps on really good days, on a bad day, I see below 1. On Comcast, $40 a month plan, suppose to be at least 10Mbps, it's not my modem. I was getting up to 15Mbps when I was paying $80 and suppose to get 50Mbps. It's oversubscribed or capped by Comcast. No competition, no other providers.
Good grief! I'm using a small ISP that gets me ~250Mbps, but it would be more like 500Mpbs if I didn't buy a cheap router. In fact, they told me they'll be offering gigabit plans next year.
And I thought I was getting screwed when I could only get 120Mbps with Spectrum Cable.
I'm in a major city too, not in a rural area. It's freaking ridiculous. I have learned to live with it. At one point, I was using my phone. Downloading things to a VPS and when I visit my folks, I'll download from my VPS to a usb stick. In 2020! If I liked downtown tho 15 minutes away where there's competition, I'll have Wow cable or fiber and much better service. Comcast is garbage.
Mercedes is what I have the most experience with. There is actually a class action lawsuit against them in the US because of their faulty AC. This is insane, a supposedly premium brand cannot install a working AC. I think I just keep purchasing Asian brands for now.
National backbone level internet should be large government infrastructure projects. It’s like roads and railways. Competition works on the roads, but works poorly for constructing them. Infrastructure within cities and to premises can work though.
Germany has at least a dozen "backbones" from different companies. The problems mentioned result from stupid last mile politics and practice, which factually deny affordable access for endusers to these.
Regional nets should be regional politics. Just like for national infrastructure, the best thing for a city to do is probably to invest in subsidizing fiber and then have companies compete providing the service. Having providers dig their own cables and then get a monopoly in them is pretty bad in comparison.
Which germans? All of them? The rural "Landeier"? The suburbians? The failed capital Berlin?
In my personal experience they are mostly too lazy or anxious to switch because of FUD, and/or stingy. The situation is complicated because in most places the so called last mile is in the hands of the former state monopolist, which now is playing a joint-stock company, while the state holds about one third of shares directly and indirectly via the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW
Then there are the tv-cable companies and the really complicated "Netzebene 4", the last mile equivalent for anything Docsis in .de
Complicated because of ownership, and non-sharing. This all feels really backwards, and IT IS!
Nonetheless i got away from the Deutsche Telokom ASAP when i had the chance.
A few anecdotes...
Lived in a not so large town about 199x. Got ISDN and payed them insane amounts of money for dual-channel (128Kb/s). Flatrate? Not existent. Moved to a smaller town some years later, first DSL available, but not in my part of smalltown.
Too far away from the exchange. Well, there was another option from Versatal. ISDN Flatrate(which Telekom didn't even offer!) for 40 or 50 DM a month. Most people didn't even knew, or didn't dare, because the company had some mishaps(years) before. I didn't care and had an excellent experience for the time, one could see the way the packets went via traceroute, which was very different from the way the telekom routed. Of course! Different company, different network. Anyways, blazingly fast(for ISDN). The € came, DSL didn't. I moved to Hamburg and had the option to choose
DSL from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet
Again, excellent service, the speeds went slowly up without getting more expensive! Then they've been bought by Telecom Italia and it was renamed Alice. Didn't matter, speeds went up further without getting more expensive(€29,90 flat with landline flat to other german landlines)
Some years later Telekom Italia sold Alice/former Hansenet
to spanish Telefonica, which is branded O² in .de
That was a sad story because one could see how a good company with a good product went bad. Slower speeds, crappy routing/peering, disconnects, changing dsl-standards without announcing them, or sending a modem capable of handling that. One hand not knowing what the other does.
What to do? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel to the rescue! Another local provider born out of a public utility, very progressive since its beginnings, best thing i ever had. I even got more instead of the announced up to.
Fibre to the basement and some VDSL with 100/31 for the usual €29,90 flat with landline to german landlines phone flat included. Excellent peering, latencies, whatever.
Which will be upgraded to fiber to the home until end of the year, begin next year with gigabit, which i don't really need.
Anyways, this is not the only provider apart from the big, mostly crappy ones, or resellers of them. There are
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetColognehttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-nethttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TELhttps://www.dokom21.de/https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAach...
In Ilorin, Nigeria, I can get 500kbps on good days. Most times, the speeds hover around 100kbps. I can hardly watch YouTube at anything more than 360p. Even that resolution buffers too much sometimes.
Not saying that slow Internet doesn’t suck – it does. But when I ever I am stuck on a slow network i download YouTube videos (the command line tool youtube-dl [0] also downloads a lot of other streaming sites). This trades some time for quality: You have to wait while downloading, but you can download whatever quality you have patience for.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadIn a suburban area outside of Tacoma ~300mbps was about $50, and now just outside of Seattle I pay $75 for 1 gbps. The non-gigabit plans were south of $50.
I Googled a bit and most websites said Americans generally pay somewhere between $50-$60.
Also, the way they hide "offers" per customer/location is maddening. For my location, a new internet installation at my current speeds is $45 for 2 years. Meanwhile, look at me paying $80 per month -.- Thank you my senators and reps.
At least "Duecherbuderpest" is not still fixated on making you all use ISDN. "Duecherbuderpest" is what other Telco's use to refer to the German PTT as.
It is kind of ridiculous how they actually punish loyal customers by making them pay more after two years if you don't do anything. Sure, enough people are lazy enough to make this model feasible, but just imagine the butcher you've been getting your meat at for years suddenly goes like "hey you come here all the time so I'm gonna charge you 30% more"
For $120 I could bump that up to 750 up & down.
And a bit more about the 750 plan here https://www.telus.com/en/deals-and-bundles/internet-750. The 150 404s on their website at the moment https://www.telus.com/en/shop/home/product/internet-150-150 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Th exact prices you see seem to vary depending on where it thinks you are, and it requires a street address and unit number to quote you exactly what I get quoted. I’m not going to give you my address to verify my prices, because I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.
But if you google around you’ll see their pretty typical (eg. googling “telus internet 750 review” will give you a result that links to Telus’ page with Google adding that there’s a price range of $95-$140)
edit: more info, if you’re really curious https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30805481-Telus-fibre-towns...
Do you think maybe that’s why I said “compared to elsewhere in Canada” and not “compared to every single other place in Canada”?
I have no clue how you convinced yourself I was unaware of this obvious fact. Two different links in my post clearly spell out every community it’s available in.
Due to heavy oversubscribing cable is an inferior product in Germany (on weekends actual speeds drop to a fraction of the advertised line speed), and the biggest cable provider by far (Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone) has serious user support and service quality issues, not to mention they only offer ipv6 dual-stack lite connectivity.
This was meant as an incentive for investment ("if you build new stuff it's all yours"), but it has cemented the usual premiums for higher bandwidth as a permanent fixture, instead of something that only hits early adopters before trickling down to entry levels. So now you have a situation where quite a few people would be able to upgrade to something like 50 mbps down, sticking to the 16 mbps contract that does the job as well (when you're not hooked to cloud services yet, something Germans might tend to be wary of anyways, given the data protection mindset). In a market where VDSL is widely rejected (because it would almost double the bill), who would invest in even faster infrastructure?
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.
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.
Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies instead of small ones.
Take a train in Japan and you will weep because no matter what country you are from, your trains suck in comparison.
I live a 40 minute drive from London but it costs £45 for a day ticket on decades old, cramped trains.
Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.
Compared to Thailand (including in the middle of the forest), Romania and other random countries I have been, it is strange to see such a difference.
End even for suburban areas, there are options for high speed air links.
EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes. That is more in line with what I would have thought.
So Germany averages 10mbps?! That is terrible.
The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?
I thought Canada’s oligopoly was bad, but one company for a much bigger country sounds like the perfect recipe for this type of thing.
Pretty much, yes.
"Deutsche Telekom" is the company that came out of the former state telecom company. So they own the national telephone network.
Appart from a few local networks the only alternative is Internet through the tv cable network. However that never got complete coverage in Germany.
So for a lot of people Telekom is the only company that can offer them Internet connectivity. All the others are just reseller offers.
Also there have been some pretty nasty strategies where they actively prevent other companies from building parallel infrastructure: Places where Telekom didn't offer fast Internet for years, then a competitor builds a fiber network and coincidentally just shortly afterwards Telekom offers fast Internet, so the competitor looses because he can't get as much income as expected.
For DSL, essentially, yes. Everybody else rents their infrastructure from them. Cable is a general competitor, but it suffers from other problems and will often be much slower than advertised during peak hours.
In the U.K., France, and Germany, the phone operator (BT, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom) were kept intact, but regulated. In the 1990s, they were required to lease out access to the phone network to competitors at regulated, wholesale rates. The idea is that you can't have effective competition for the last mile anyway, so you might as well put that into a monopoly, and require it to offer access to the last mile loops to competitors. (Obviously you then have to regulate the price of that wholesale service otherwise the monopoly can easily circumvent that by pricing wholesale access sky high.)
This approach is common, and theoretically sound. Something similar is used for the electric market in the U.S. (a local, rate-regulated monopoly owns the electric wire into your house, but it is required to buy electricity from competitive, wholesale markets.) But it's hard to do correctly--if you set the regulated rates too low, you kill off any incentive to invest. If you set them too high, consumers pay too much. Nobody really did it that great--of the largest five EU countries (the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy), all have slow Internet relative to the U.S. Spain and France are turning that around recently by investing a bunch of government money in building fiber.
The U.S. situation was better due to an accident of history. Unlike most of Europe, almost everyone already had two wires into their house (cable and telephone). The U.S. implemented unbundling for DSL service for a relatively short but key period (early 2000s). That set a floor--cable had to be better than DSL to compete.
That never happened in the big EU countries. If you look at the OECD statistics, the thing that really holds them back is very high DSL usage: https://data.oecd.org/broadband/fixed-broadband-subscription.... Germany, France, and the U.K. have 30 DSL subscribers per 100 people, versus just 7 for the U.S.
I ordered service from 3 service providers and each of them called me a month after ordering and told me that Telekom is telling them there are technical problems and my bandwidth target of 50 MBit is impossible to deliver, so they aren't able to serve me.
I called Telekom after that and they told me everything is fine and aggressively tried to convert me to a customer. Tried another provider after that, still failed, so I went with...Telekom...and who would've thought...a week after that I had internet again.
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.
Mobile isn't terribly better than in Germany (there are still many areas with fairly poor coverage) but it's way cheaper, yes. For instance I use a French SIM card for traveling, since it covers the entire EU, EFTA countries and North America. Unlimited calls/SMS and 15GB for 15€/month.
As recently as 2017 they ranked behind Russia in fixed avg mbps according to Akamai's report and were 5th slowest in Europe. They were #51 globally at that point and Germany was 50% faster and ranked #25 globally.
I'm sure it has improved some in the last two years, I doubt it has dramatically leaped forward.
They've also performed relatively poorly on mobile speeds (from early 2017):
"France got absolutely walloped by all its neighbours, and finished behind 21 other European countries"
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170224/we-all-knew-frances-mobile-...
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.
Someone streaming something, someone playing games, someone downloading something, this all adds up quickly and it starts to be noticeable.
Uploading anything took freaking ages on DSL, I even used mobile data to do it, it's an important part of life today.
Would rather investment went into getting more areas up to a reasonable speed.
Silly example I know but real.
That's my problem as a Dutchman in Germany. Server still in NL, hosted at my parents', because it would be impossible here to host at home without registering a company (volatile IP, forced to change very 24 hours, only business connections get a static IP). Right now I'm attempting an off-site backup a second time, which will take a week or so, just like last time. Due to the interrupts and resumptions every 24h, there are lots of unused pack files, which you can prune, but then the system ran out of RAM during pruning and the backup doesn't appear recoverable.
The 4.5MiB/s upload I'm getting is the fastest possible connection in the centre of a city of about 50k people. I checked what it would cost to have fiber installed, and I'm not even sure it would be worth it for a company, let alone for a private person. It's cheaper to hire a moving company and go somewhere else. In the village of 1k people that my parents live in, I can get symmetric 500mbps since 2012 or something, they give a static IP, a /48 IPv6 range, reverse DNS...
Have children
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...
And the UK is 50th... I feel it should be higher than Germany.
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.
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.
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
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents/webcon...
I have bette mobile internet and call quality on every tiny village of every other country in Europe than what I have in a large German city.
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
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
I have 80/20 FTTC, and the only thing bandwidth has ever been an issue for is first-time cloud backups, where I'm uploading 1-2TB of data.
I'd still like it to be cheaper though. I'd also like it to be faster, but perhaps part of that is just because I know it can be, and has been for decades in other parts of the world.
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.
As an example, I just checked a postcode in the city centre of Aberdeen (Scotland) - no availability.
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)
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.
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.
Just did a speed test and it's 31Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, but it varies wildly by location. But it's consistently fast enough that I can share out over Wifi from my cell phone so I can do my work and while my girlfriend watches youtube videos when we are travelling or the internet is down.
For home internet.. once it got faster then my wifi I stopped really caring a whole lot. 176Mbps on my last test.
If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.
Verizon tends to have the best coverage in the mid-west. If I was travelling a lot in the boonies I would get a second data-only account on Verizon's network just to increase my chances of always having internet.
Although nowadays that is less and less necessary as every hotel and most restaurants have wifi. Just look for a Mcdonalds and you can get internet most of the time.
This really depends on who you are using. When traveling between NorCal and SoCal, Sprint is basically garbage and Tmobile works decently for most of the trip.
Stretches of road in Utah would like to have a word with you. Specifically I-70.
Of course. But, you have to take into account the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to get the true picture. According to OECD data, Germany's PPP is 0.76 while India's is 18.128 (2019). On an average, there's a factor of 23.85 until prices reach a parity between them. Therefore, just because you pay ~ 2$ a month doesn't make it cheap for India.
https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...
(I'm referring to the comment which your comment was in response to, which I know you didn't post.)
This sounds like eastern europe pricing, western tends to be quite a bit higher. We're talking 20+ for DSL or "slow" fiber (100M or so), GB you won't get below 30+ or even 40~50 depending on the country.
https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
We might be poorer but our telco operators pay market prices for equipment. Wages and land lease is also quite expensive. Financial cost is higher with rates and currency risk vs euro.
In Poland telco market had been skillfully and actively managed by regulator forcing constant investments in infrastructure and encouraging competition.
I pay 75€ per year for 1TB of mobile plan (calls ans SMS included).
https://biuroprasowe.orange.pl/blog/az-1-tb-danych-nielimito...
My parents broadband had been recently upgraded from 30Mbps to 150Mbps without any cost increase and without even asking for it. It is just the operator (UPC) trying to fend off competition (Orange, Netia). Cost is circa 10€ per month.
https://www.upc.pl/internet/kup-internet/
You can easily get 1Gbs in mayor cities.
Around the place where I live there is a lot of housing developments. Operators are racing to build the infrastructure and sign the clients even before the houses are finished.
Sudden population influxes produce problems.
Germany's growth rate in 2018 was 0.3%. The birth rate was 9.5/k versus a death rate of 11.3/k as of 2017, and the fertility rate been below replacement rate since the 1970s.
Uh, that'll be the fall of the Soviet Union adding ~16M East Germans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification
> Some countries don't even have a census every year
You don't need a census to get a population count. Governments definitely keep records of births/deaths, as well as immigration. Your own link provides population numbers for every year from 1900 through 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statis...
> Facts are so unpopular.
Indeed.
German population in 1998: 82,024,000.
German population in 2018: 83,000,000.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/03...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis#/media...
Especially when you tell me they are a strong nation of 80M people. They can't even tolerate a measly <1% immigration before hateful bigots begin to protest.
You've really shed a light to me on how extremely bigoted Europe really is! I don't think I'll ever visit that awful place for the rest of my life.
Let alone buy things! We shouldn't buy a single thing from Europe ever again! Thank you, good sir!
What other nations are this bigoted besides these awful nations? I've heard that many nations in the middle east don't accept refugees at all. Is this true? And what about all of Asia?? There really is so much hate in all the world.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/germany-populatio...
The point remains: Germany has almost the same population it had 20 years ago. Blaming internet troubles on rapid population expansion is clearly false.
After reunification most areas in eastern germany were rebuild using fibre-optic but the system was a technical failure, too expensive to maintain as the last-mile was still copper mostly and hardware to translate was not available for too expensive - so no fast internet for most east german cities and villages until the mid-2000 as the state did not care anymore:
In the 90ies neoliberal privatisation wave, the privatisation of Bundespost created the Telekom AG that also got most of the infrastructure instead of playing it clever and keep infrastructure in state control like Sweden did and of course they have no incentive to invest in infrastructure because they want to generate profits and opening the ground is expensive - so copper it was again with fiber to the curb at the moment (VDSL) in most cities. The same idiocy was done with the Bundesbahn (rails) - instead of keeping the infrastructure in public hand it was given to the new Bahn AG that destroyed most of it in an insane effort to go public (I'm not joking, destroying trains to avoid having to sell them to the competition, stopping to service rail-tracks to spare some money... the problems are still felt)...
Telekom now behaves much the same way: Unfortunatly they are asshats and when another rural ISP or fibre ISP develops a city the Telekom comes shortly after and attempts to kill their profit instead of doing something about underdeveloped areas. Also the regulators failed to open their new VDSL lines for the market, so you'll have to pay their premium prices.
So that's it for landlines.
I learned that Sweden did the clever thing and build the fiber-infrastructure with public money only once and ISPs can rent the lines and compete with services / price but there is a fiber line to your home.
I don't know about mobile market in Sweden but in Germany there was a huge auction on the start of the 3G technology that cost most ISPs billions of euros for licences, this money is missing and the result are higher rates and less coverage.
Besides that there are 3 big corpoorations having 3 distinct networks (with no roaming, even in sparse areas) - Telefonica with the most budget prices and most users but only good coverage in bigger cities and basically non-existent 4G in rural areas, Vodafone (better, depending were you are) and Deutsche Telekom (best coverage but far from perfect)
Regulators did nothing and so the shitshow goes on....
Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue.
Germany goes for government revenue alone.
Politics has no good ideas and mostly follows their wishes (as with subsidiaries for copper/fiber to the curb) probably because costs for fiber to the home would be way worse - so we'll stay at 16mbit (most villages) /50mbit (if you are lucky) /250mbit (innercity / dense population districts)
Cable market is owned mostly by Vodafone and a total mess due to being crazily overbooked in most cities...
But it's not so bad, for 40-50€ you can get 100/40mbit in a lot of places
The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.)
Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.
In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.)
It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs.
And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...
From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.
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.
Oh great, I can go through my monthly allotment in 5 minutes by clicking on the wrong link. So useful.
I've turned off LTE just so I get a chance to cutoff a click that turns out to be a 300pg PDF.
That's what they want... But still... A bad joke..
Mobile Plans are so expensive, because we germans auction away the licenses for the Frequencies for billions.
When people say Germany is expensive to the rest of Europe I think they need to check the salary levels in the rest of Europe. German internet and cell is probably cheaper going by percentage of average income.
It's only the lack of coverage (and maybe the blocked YouTube videos) that bother me in Germany.
The nordic countries have higher salaries. It's really against the trend: Pretty much everything is more expensive in sweden and denmark, except Internet connectivity.
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.
> 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.
This is quite annoying in the US, that national parks or deserts have no cell service. The places that need it most (life and death situations) - this is basically a health service there.
In comparison to Europe the mobile density is quite sparse there.
I would never rely on a cellular phone for safety in the wilderness. Cellular service and geolocation was never be 100% reliable, and batteries die. A paper map, a compass, basic skills, and knowledge of one’s limits go a long way.
It should be understood that an EPIRB should only be used in the most dire of circumstances.
I mean if I see asphalt then it is quite reasonable to expect also cell service.
I was i national parks in Europe and I always got cell service. I might be lucky (considering the article and posts about Germany) but in US I was in one park (actually two, but I don't remember situation with mobiles in one) and I did get cell service even before the gates.
I don't expect to have cell service if the park doesn't have roads, just hiking tracks.
You're endangering yourself which I wouldn't care that much about but you're also potentially endangering any search and rescue teams that have to come looking for you.
As for the lost scenario specifically. I don't know. Maybe carry a (paper) map and compass? In addition (not instead of) a GPS doesn't need cell reception to operate and works most places. (Some exceptions, like narrow canyons.)
[1]: https://www.rei.com/c/emergency-electronics
It's certainly not routine for individuals or even groups to carry such devices in wilderness areas even if cell phone reception is spotty. I can go 2 hours north of where I live and hike on steep trails where there's no guarantee of cell phone reception.
https://explore.garmin.com/en-US/inreach/
But, if I'm being sensible and I'm off by myself in a remote area, yeah, I'd probably take one.
ADDED: And, yes, it's nice to be able to call for help if you really need it. But way too many folks think they can just get in trouble because they're really not prepared, call 911, and everything will be great. A number of states actually collect costs from people if they were negligent these days.
It's quite the read.
It's also recommended reading if you go to the US West and your expectations are mostly informed by tooling around the countryside of Western Europe (or the eastern US for that matter).
The only reason you find mobile coverage sparse in the US is because the US has large, nearly unpopulated areas, whereas Europe doesn’t.
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...
You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.
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.
Eastern European countries mostly have great internet (especially landline, probably above average for mobile). I always assumed it must be because they came later to the party and went directly for modern technologies. As opposed to Germany who had telephone lines all over and then decided to get the most out of them because rebuilding with fiber would cost the companies too much.
The state-owned telcos were privatized in 90-ties, because the state is a bad owner, by ...state owned telcos from the west (Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica, etc). Of course, the first thing they tried was to move the obsolete equipment from their home countries to Eastern Europe for the price of a new one and for the money to get the new equipment in their home countries.
That didn't work out, because new competitors appeared, that built FTTH/Tripple Play networks from the scratch, with very low red tape at the time. That made the old DSL equipment not competetive in the cities (some even wanted to charge based on data transferred via DSLAM, making the flat-rate FTTH even better deal), so the ILECs had to do something with it - which meant to build their own FTTH network. DSLAMs were relegated to country side.
That's how Eastern Europe got fast and cheap fixed-line Internet in their cities. In the country, it is still mixed bag, better bet is LTE & 3G.
In Norway, they demanded the networks cover 97% of the geographic areas. It's why you might get 3G or even 4G in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain, wherever you might drive.
However, in the UK the inept politicians demanded 97% of the population, not geographically.
So all the UK networks just built perfect coverage for all the cities and towns, and could mostly ignore everywhere else.
Which means even in the populous South East England whenever I drive slightly outside my town towards one of the bigger cities 20-30 minutes away I can not have a conversation in my car as the connection is always lost. Nor on the train into London. And also must be a nightmare for the small villages that fall outside the 97%.
(On the plus side whenever we go to the country pubs around here, I can not be reached, and noone can look at the phone during dinner...)
Which is completely backwards. You don't need mobile where you live (as long as you can get a landline), you need it everywhere else.
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.
And I thought I was getting screwed when I could only get 120Mbps with Spectrum Cable.
So yea, it's finally getting better in India?
Food delivered in middle of nowhere in 20 minutes.
Everything is soo good here except the heat but now with monsoon it's more bearable.
I wonder what Germany will do. Maybe Germany wants everyone to work for big automobile companies because when I worked at Audi, we had 1gbps internet.
No single person ever said "I'll pay a premium for an M3"!
https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
In Ilorin, Nigeria, I can get 500kbps on good days. Most times, the speeds hover around 100kbps. I can hardly watch YouTube at anything more than 360p. Even that resolution buffers too much sometimes.
[0]: https://youtube-dl.org/