
Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet - mudil
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-grow-frustrated-with-their-slow-poke-internet-11565002666?mod=rsswn
======
geff82
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.

~~~
nesadi
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.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
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.

~~~
lazyguy
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.

~~~
rxhernandez
> 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.

~~~
icxa
I've experienced them all and across all various parts of the country. If you
want to know what phone plan to get, just ask a trucker.

~~~
oblongx
So, what phone plan should I get?

------
rayiner
Germany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling,
implemented poorly: [https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-
information/archive/f...](https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-
information/archive/faqs-on-the-unbundled-local-loop-ull--358710). 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...](http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_seminar/31_Model_Utility_Regulation.pdf).
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.

~~~
GordonS
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

~~~
walshemj
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

~~~
GordonS
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.

------
lonesword
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.

~~~
jotm
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).

~~~
nesadi
Coverage is pretty bad on anything that isn't D1 or Vodafone. O2 has okay
coverage in cities, but anywhere else it's mediocre to bad.

~~~
jotm
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

------
southerndrift
>“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.

[1][https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-
Kam...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kampf-um-die-
Glasfaser-oder-Der-verpasste-Breitbandausbau-in-Deutschland-3952581.html)

~~~
boyter
Hah! That’s exactly what happened in Australia.

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.

~~~
IntelMiner
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

------
hannob
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.

~~~
jrimbault
It seems to me France also has a comparable surface, although with more
concentrated population centers.

~~~
Glawen
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.

~~~
noja
Isn't Internet in France supposedly really cheap and very fast?

~~~
hocuspocus
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.

------
BjoernKW
There's a very obvious reason for why mobile Internet in Germany is flaky,
slow yet at the same time ridiculously expensive:

During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned
T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the
market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much
higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in
in the subsequent years.

In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the
sudden, unexpected windfall.

The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and
shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the
better.

The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years
and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary
infrastructure.

Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in
2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the
same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):

[https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-
raises-6-point-5...](https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany-
raises-6-point-55-billion-euros-in-epic-5g-spectrum-auction)

------
robert_foss
I'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable
connection for 40Eur/m.

I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_
worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad.

However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber
connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier
connection.

~~~
zepearl
4Eur/m is really really cheap... .

I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload
& download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using
another Internet provider).

My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for
unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and
installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank them enough as before the
copper cable often did not work at all) and if I remember correctly they're
paying ~60 CHF/month for symmetric 1Gb/s (sunrise.ch).

In general I think that in Switzerland we're currently all ok with having to
pay ~60 CHF/month for such a speed.

~~~
tribaal
That's only in big cities and some random gemindes though (your parents are
lucky).

I get my internet over 4g here because land lines are 10/1 mbps.

Still, 4g is 80/15 or so, so it's viable for now (sunrise too)

------
foepys
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.

~~~
gingabriska
When I worked for Audi in Germany, they had 1Gpbs internet.

Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies
instead of small ones.

~~~
penagwin
I mean it's _Audi_ I'm sure they can afford higher speeds.

~~~
dredmorbius
It meters high only when tested.

------
gok
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.

[1] [https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-
broad...](https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-
america/measuring-fixed-broadband-eighth-report#_Toc427484591)

~~~
Nimitz14
Yeah I checked the source out: [https://www.speedtest.net/global-
index](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index)

And the UK is 50th... I feel it should be higher than Germany.

------
tluyben2
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.

~~~
AdrianB1
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.

~~~
iforgotpassword
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.

------
franczesko
This is what economic protectionism (for which Germany is famous for) and lack
of competition leads to - no investments in the infrastructure.

~~~
alkonaut
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.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
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.

~~~
alkonaut
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.

------
dmix
> 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.

~~~
hannob
> 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.

------
shmerl
_> In Germany, for example, gigabyte connections—which handle more than 1,000
megabits per second—are rare._

Probably gigabit connections? More than 1000 megabits / second requires
hardware that is still rather uncommon in consumer grade routers and
computers.

 _> Telecom giants in France and Portugal were already rolling out all-fiber
networks early in the decade, in keeping with a 2010 European Union report
that recommended that national carriers invest in fiber. How Fast 5G Mobile
Internet Feels

But Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s dominant operator, took a less costly route in
2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called
vectoring._

Such kind of stupid short term greed driven decisions slow down progress by
decades. I've seen somewhere, that Australia suffered a similar problem, where
government decided that copper will be good enough, and halted deployment of
fiber optics. And now it's becoming a big problem.

------
padelt
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.

~~~
fluffything
Came here just to make this joke, the sad part of it is that it's so true.

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.

------
segmondy
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.

~~~
ravenstine
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.

~~~
segmondy
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.

------
siddhant
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.

~~~
WoodenChair
Why do you consider that expensive? If it’s reliable, it sounds very
reasonable to me. 1 dinner out.

~~~
lloda
I pay about that for ‘10 Gbps’ in CH. I don't even have a machine with a 10
Gbps port, but there isn't anything cheaper here that makes sense.

~~~
C1sc0cat
That's connection speed what payload do you get on average.

~~~
lloda
That's why I put the speed in quotes. I get about 900 Mbps both ways on my
computer that has only a 1 Gbps port.

------
sethammons
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.

So Germany averages 10mbps?! That is terrible.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

------
juskrey
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.

~~~
C1sc0cat
What percentage of homes get that speed ?

~~~
juskrey
Basically everyone who really wants to. All IT pros move to cities, because
anyway rural life is nothing like Western picture.

End even for suburban areas, there are options for high speed air links.

------
jupp0r
It's not only the average/median that's bad, it's the lower percentiles that
are the most embarrassing. My parents live in a central, fairly dense
neighborhood of a town of 40k people. Their only option until 2017 (!!!) was
64k dialup or very flaky 3G. It wasn't only their street that was affected,
but the whole part of town, including a newly developed (but mostly empty,
what a surprise) business park built from EU development grants. In my mind
the reason for disasters like this is a mixture of

1\. De facto monopoly of the state-owned telecom provider suffering from mind
boggling not-invented here syndrome. They've been pushing their proprietary
custom-built hardware and protocols for decades while the world largely moved
to china-built commodity which is orders of magnitude cheaper.

2\. Political resistance against declaring broadband as an essential utility.
There was a parliamentary vote in 2011 to declare a right for
households/businesses to get broadband connections (as is the case for
electricity/sewers/telephone). It was declined with votes of the
conservative/liberal coalition at the time. Nobody even talks about this
anymore, other culture war topics seem more important nowadays. Whether to
allow wolves to be hunted seems like a more important topic in the national
debates.

3\. In general there seems to be an unfortunate climate of hostility against
technology that reminds me of the Luddites. Smart phones and laptops are
banned in high schools, etc. People mostly focus on the dangers and downsides
of technology vs the benefits.

Source: Born in Germany, I moved to California a few years ago and can see the
difference.

~~~
patrickk
> They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols

Fritz!Box routers? I was shocked how expensive they are, and how widespread.

~~~
jupp0r
I'm more referring to the backend technology:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#VDSL2_vectoring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#VDSL2_vectoring)

------
xtf
In the 80s there were plans to roll out fiber every with a 30 year plan under
chancellor Schmidt, but with reunifiction plans got dismissed.

[http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/k...](http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/kap2_15/para3_6.html)

------
ayoisaiah
Let me tell you about slow internet.

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.

~~~
black_knight
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.

[0]: [https://youtube-dl.org/](https://youtube-dl.org/)

~~~
brixon
Also, use a scheduler to download this at night when you are a sleep or not at
home.

~~~
angott
Download schedulers, you brought up so many memories of my dial-up days...

------
sod
It doesn't help that German politicians think it's a good idea to let
companies bid on frequencies - 5g frequencies just went for 5.5 billion to 4
large companies. So those now have the monopoly on that plus they have to earn
it back from the customer. And the highest bidder got the best frequencies. So
good coverage can only be achieved by one company.

Same happened with 4g & 3g beforehand. Result being, only profitable areas are
covered and competition has no chance to get into the market.

Sadly in German politics it's easier to get voted for tax cuts (because they
get money by selling frequencies) then promising good internet coverage :(

------
crucialfelix
My wifi in Berlin is so bad that when I make video calls on my phone I turn
wifi off and use my mobile data.

------
danielh
Most of the discussions focus on end-users, here is an anecdote how this
affects businesses: my current client recently moved to Cologne, the 4th
largest city in Germany. They ordered a broadband connection from Deutsche
Telekom three months before the move. As it turns out, Telekom needs SIX
months to provide service. This is in one of the top-tier business centers,
which was built in 2009.

Depending on your mobile provider, you also only have edge connectivity in
most of the building.

------
MordecaiMaxwell
I mean, almost every country should. I live in Russia and it baffles me how
much faster and cheaper internet is here, compared to the most western
countries.

~~~
robert_foss
What speeds/types/prices are available where you're located?

~~~
MordecaiMaxwell
I pay around 8 dollars per month for unlimited internet. Speed varies between
90-100 Mbps + they gave me a free Wi-Fi router.

I live in Moscow. I've heard you can find even better deals here, but it all
depends on your location. One block of a city is usually covered by 3-4
internet providers, so you have a choice, most of the time.

Customer support is top notch, they installed it the same day, never had any
problems.

My providers is OnLime is you are interested.

------
kstenerud
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.

~~~
Nimitz14
Transferring data to and from the cloud.

~~~
lucb1e
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...

------
Mo3
I really cannot concur. I live in the depths of Bavaria in a small village
with ~2000 residents. Our apartment is connected by two 100MBit/s DSL and
500MBit/s Cable lines, set up in failover configuration in case one goes down
(which always only happens on Cable for a few minutes, and that setup exists
only because I work 100% remote). The village is located in a mountainous
region, yet everywhere I go, I have +100Mbit/s LTE available, safe for the
completely unpopulated areas between mountains.

For all of this I pay

\- 39,99 for the cable \- 29,99 for the DSL \- 30,00 for unlimited LTE

On the other hand, there are very small villages with population < 500 with
only 10 or 20Mbit/s DSL available. However, I think that this is to be
expected in these areas and any complaint about it is, at least in this day
and age, a first world problem and your own fault for living in the middle of
nowhere.

~~~
paule89
Sorry but your setup seems to be outragouesly unique. Often times you have
either cable or dsl. But not both. Also what about your upload speeds?
probably only 20MBit/s or 40 max.

I dream of a land with 10Gbit symmatrical networking for an affordable price.
It would be future proof. I could role my own server. Heck i could probably
start a cloud business and scale up if i wanted to somehow by buying more
fiber lines.

~~~
Mo3
There are a lot of places where you can get both. Upload is 50Mbit/s on DSL
and 50Mbit/s on Cable

------
swimfar
This is an old anecdote (~2010), so not completely relevant to the current
discussion. But I was living in Germany and the only internet option I had was
dial-up. I could hardly believe that such a thing still existed anywhere in
Europe, but even more surprising was that it was pay-by-the-minute. There were
a bunch of different providers that had different pricing plans where
sometimes there would be a connection fee, but lower per-minute rates, and
sometimes the rates would go down after so many minutes of connection. The
landlord set me up with some software that would try to minimize the cost of
an internet session. It would tell you which provider to go with based on an
estimated connection duration that you gave it. You could also configure it to
hang up and dial into another provider if rates changed enough based on the
time of day.

------
Causality1
It's been a long time since I cared or noticed how fast my internet was.
Experientially, there's not much difference between 25 megabit service and 200
megabit service. You can stream 4K video on either, and both will require you
to go do something else while your 60 gigabyte game download completes. One
does it in 5 hours and the other in 40 minutes, but neither are instant-
access. There's no escaping from the 1TB data cap I've had for ten years and
until that's dead for good I won't be moving my media archive to the cloud.

Now, offer service that cuts my average ping to multiplayer servers in half
and I'll get excited. Give me a plan with guaranteed 4G coverage no matter
where in the US I go and I'll get excited. That's not going to happen though.

------
davidkuennen
I'm from Germany and it's very frustrating. I'm already using the provider
with the best network here (Deutsche Telekom). Having a fast connection
outside of cities is still the exception.

It's so bad that I can't even call many times during my daily commute.

------
hendry
Took my cameras to Berlin in the hope of making a couple of YouTube videos.

Spent a day trying to upload my first vlog & just gave up. The cable based
modem was not only slow, but unstable in the heat. ️

Same video takes seconds to upload on a Singapore gigabit connection.

------
ctas
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.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
How did they do that? _No port free_? Do you know about
[https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerd...](https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerde/SVNr10_Versorgung/node.html)
?

~~~
ctas
I don't know about that. Thanks for the link.

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.

------
punnerud
If you get bufferbloat at 20Mbit/s and have a 300Mbit/s line, I would argue
that you only have a 20Mbit/s line for most practical purposes except
downloading large files. Strange how little focus this gets.

------
deisner
For what it's worth, the price/bandwidth in Cologne isn't bad:
[https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon-
internet/tari...](https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon-
internet/tarifuebersicht/). And not surprisingly, it appears to be fiber (FTTB
and HCF):
[https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_...](https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_ENGLISH.pdf)

------
shakermakr
Brit living in Germany here. I just bought a new home, and it came with Fiber
to the Home. Great I thought! Then I tried to get connected...

I have zero choice of ISP: I had to first go to a small company who maintain
my line, who then pointed me at another company for the contract.

Though rated at 1gbit, I can only get max 500mbit from my ISP, and then that
costs a whooping 90 EUR a month, without any phone or TV service.

In the end I took 300mbit at just under 70 EUR a month. Happy enough here,
Netflix is great in HDR, but the costs and choice are ridiculous even when you
have full fiber in Germany...

~~~
patrickk
I'll be moving within Germany at some point in the next 12 months, and one of
my top considerations will be what broadband options already exist in the
area, because of the reasons you mention. If you move to an area with slow/no
broadband, you'll be stuck in that situation for years.

------
IloveHN84
It's not only a matter of speed..the prices are really high compared to
neighborhood.

For instance, you pay 10€ / month in Italy and you get 50 GB of LTE data. In
Germany you pay 10€ and you get at most 3GB

------
kriro
Promises made

2009: Widespread broadband for everyone by 2010

2010: At least 50 MBit/s for most households by 2014

2011: 50 MBit/s everywhere by 2018

2014: Let's hope we can reach this

2015: Digital Agenda -> 50 Mbit/s by 2018

2016: The goal cannot be reached

2016: Gigabit nets by 2025, fastest internet on the planet

2018: The goal cannot be reached

I have a whopping 3 Mbit/s at my home. It's so slow the technician that wanted
to sell me a 10 MBit line didn't believe me when I said that I decline because
it's not possible. Mind you, I live in an area where most houses are from 2010
or newer so it's not like they had no opportunity to set up decent
connections.

On my daily train commute there are two 10 minute patches where I cannot make
phone calls...the list goes on.

Pretty embarrassing for a so called industrial nation. I had better
connections in every single country I have been to.

A common excuse that you hear is that Telekom had plans to roll out fibre
everywhere in the 1990s but had to cut that plan due to the cost of setting up
a phone system in East Germany.

tl;dr: it's pretty bad

------
dangom
It's particularly interesting crossing the border from Germany to the
Netherlands and seeing how the internet speed can increase so much after
riding 20km.

------
newprint
I came back from Germany in April. Infrastructure (trains, roads, airports)
are wonderful, compare that with crawling slow internet.

~~~
ofrzeta
I can assure you that trains are as bad as Internet.

~~~
lonesword
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.

~~~
fluffything
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.

------
cyborgx7
The promise of privatization of the Telekom was higher speeds and lower
prices. The opposite of that happened. This country is now far behind many
comparable countries in Internet speed and penetration. And the state, in
selling the Telekom, lost the ability to do it themselves when private
industry fails. Terrible development.

------
dtaht
Do keep hoping everybody complaining here about their speed, also check their
latency on dslreports.com. Bufferbloat makes slow internet a lot slower than
it needs to be, and there's cures for it (sqm/fq_codel,sch_cake etc) -
deploying that on your link can be a rather nice upgrade.

------
Scoundreller
As a Canadian, I'm very disappointed about the graph showing that Canada has
the 3rd fastest mobile data rates in the world.

It's fast because prices are 50-100x as pricey as other OECD country. ~$10/gb
in Canada vs. $25 for a 100gb plan in France.

Of course it's fast when utilizing it has heavy costs.

So much wasted capacity...

------
coolg54321
In India i had a BSNL prepaid plan for 2€ a month for 2GB 4G data "per day"
which worked fast even in the rural villages there. But in Germany with O2 I
get 2GB 4G data for 10€ a month which goes "No Service" or switches to Edge
many times if i goes out of the city.

------
blunte
Some Netherlands internet is garbage too, even the 4G. And a whole lot of US
internet is garbage.

Meanwhile, I've experienced reliable high speed (both direction) internet in
Thailand and even Bali. Perhaps I got lucky, but imo there's no excuse for
shit internet in US or NL (or Germany).

------
znpy
I can understand this. I literally lost interest in moving to Düsseldorf when
I realized that for a higher price than I currently pay I would get just a 60
Mbps down / 5mbps up internet connection, whereas I can get a 1gpbs down /
200mbps up FTTH connection.

------
paule89
The only Good Thing about German Internet access is the FRITZ!Box. Best basic
Internet Router with minimal required setup. Still missing some things, but
they do their job much better than what any provider can give you (or they are
rebranding the FRITZ!Box itself)

------
nothis
Wait, _average_ internet speed in the US is 120 Mbits? About a gigabyte in 1
minute?

~~~
mrpippy
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.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
ISPs boost traffic caps to speed test sites so they are completely useless for
any real assessment.

------
paule89
It is so bad that one German Minister does not take a call anymore, if he is
driving on the Autobahn. Because it would be too embarassing to redial again
and again because the call will drop. Not might. It will!

------
breadandcrumbel
I'm not an expert in economy but it just shows that there's a monopoly in the
internet industry in Germany

It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow
internet.

~~~
Brotkrumen
There is no monopoly in the internet industry in Germany.

------
imtringued
I was frustrated 8 years ago. I upgraded from 16mbit to 32mbit to 50mbit and
every 2 years the internet speeds keep getting higher until I stopped caring.

------
RandyRanderson
Canadians have slow AND more expensive Internet but are, for some reason, not
frustrated. :<

------
gigatexal
I’m in Hamburg and it’s not great, not terrible but not great.

------
jillesvangurp
I live in Berlin. Mobile networks are indeed a bad joke here. Most third world
countries have much better networks. I always joke that I live about 1 km from
the biggest FFing antenna in Germany (the TV tower, 350m tall, a major
landmark and tourist destination) and yet cannot seem to get a reliable
connection. I consistently get edge only near touristic areas because all of
the base stations in those areas are apparently over provisioned. E.g. on the
Alexander Platz right next to the before mentioned TV Tower I get edge only.
That's the very definition of an incompetent operator. There is no excuse for
being allowed to get away with that poor level of service. They just don't
care here. In case you are wondering, the operator here is O2. I'd switch but
doing so takes quite a lot of hassle (and paper work because Germany) and
there is little evidence of other operators actually doing a much better job.

To fix this, the country needs lots of investments. E.g. they lack fiber optic
cables in most of the country because the state monopolist pretending to be an
actual company simply chose not to invest in this and the German government
was completely OK with this for decades. This probably is part of the reason
why 4G sucks here because there simply is nothing decent to connect the base
stations to in most of the country. Fixing this will take ages and there are
very little signs of this actually happening. E.g. most of Berlin has no
access to fiber optic cable even though most of former East Berlin has gone
through 25 years plus of heavy construction, renovation, etc. Apparently it
never occurred to anyone here that stuffing some fiber optic cable in the
ground would have been a clever idea. This is a key difference with e.g. the
Netherlands where they've been putting cables in the ground for decades
whenever there was any opportunity to do so. As a consequence, you can get
fiber to your home in most places and reliably fast 4G in most of the country.
This is the case across most of Europe with the exception of Germany.

The German government meanwhile is pretty hopeless. They have a "digitization"
minister even. No idea what that means but it does not seem to yield more than
weird photo opportunities for politicians without any apparent clue babbling
about digitization (which is an actual word they keep on using with a straight
face as if it means something). Also this minister is apparently not actually
responsible for straightening out the dysfunctional mess that is the Deutsche
Telekom, O2, and Vodafone kartel. That apparently is the responsibility for
the traffic minister: [https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet-
digit...](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet-digital-
progress-with-new-digital-affairs-minister/a-42872383).

------
excowboy
That also includes Germans in New Zealand

------
LargoLasskhyfv
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](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](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](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/NetCologne](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne)
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net)
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL)
[https://www.dokom21.de/](https://www.dokom21.de/)
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen)
These were the ones i remembered, i'm sure there are more. Then there is this
comparison site
[https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/](https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/)
And to be honest, if you are a business, ask COLT, Zayo, BT, KPN, or something
like that? So, that was the wired side of things. Mobile is more expensive and
patchy. Depends on region, again. Shit happens. Maybe waiting for Starlink?
Though i don't believe in that because of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-
crystal_fiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber)

~~~
iso-8859-1
Needs more newlines.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Why? how does it look? I'm typing this in Firefox on desktop. Are you on
something mobile and need to scroll sideways?

~~~
thirdsun
Not OP, but I'm on desktop and it's the type of comment I'd scroll past since
this wall of text looks rather unreadable - it lacks structure.

------
jokinko
nearby post-communist country...Slovakia...the coverage and quality they have
is outstanding.

------
gingabriska
I am in Yoga city of India and this hilly region, I am getting 50mbps up and
down.

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.

------
durnygbur
I can assure you that their slow-poke internet is a reason of a feeling of
entitled superiority over their neighbours, especially eastern ones.

------
whatshisface
Germany sounds like it's about in line with suburban America.

