The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...
In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.
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.
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.
You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.
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..
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.
Mobile Plans are so expensive, because we germans auction away the licenses for the Frequencies for billions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
It was also surprising as I've had good service in France, UK, Belgium, Spain, UK, etc. I expected the Germans to be stereotypically efficient on this.
> In 2009, Yellowstone completed a plan for wireless communications in the park. The plan dictates that cell phone and wifi will only be allowed for visitor safety and to enhance park operations. It restricts towers, antennas, and wireless services to a few limited locations in the park, in order to protect park resources and limit the impact on park visitors.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/park/cell-phone-wifi-yellows...
To me that would be what a national park ... just is.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
The only reason you find mobile coverage sparse in the US is because the US has large, nearly unpopulated areas, whereas Europe doesn’t.
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).
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.