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.

And the article's graph proudly shows Canada having the 3rd fastest mobile speeds.

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.

Yeah, I'm wondering the range. With 5g, imagine a typical limit in germany is 15gb. With 5g you blow though it within minutes in a bad scenario...

That's what they want... But still... A bad joke..

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.

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.

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.

Slow? Yes. Expensive? No.

I recently moved to Germany and now have 100mbit DSL for 25€/month (~$30) plus a phone contract with 6GB/month (more than enough since I have Wifi at home and work) including a phone flat for <€20/month. That's on par with the UK and cheaper than US and Canada.

It's far cheaper than the US. I get 6MB/s downloads for 15€/month. For mobile, there's a chart making the rounds on Twitter, and it seems to me Germany is very much in line with other countries. Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.

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.

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.

So, what phone plan should I get?

> 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.

> 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).

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.

I don't think the US is the country to compare against in this case.

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.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

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.

> 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.

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.

https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

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.)

Is the 6MB/s or 6Mbps? Is that the average or minimum guaranteed?

Can you ever really have a minimum guaranteed speed when often times the limiting factor is the remote's ability to upload?

At 6 MB/s, you won't hit that limit yet, with most services.

I guess atleast the speedtest numbers are high.

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.

What did Sweden get so right with internet that Germany got so wrong??

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

The difference between Sweden and Germany in terms of RF spectrum license auctions has typically been:

Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue.

Germany goes for government revenue alone.

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

Triple A rating as in absolute arrogant assholes. Not every single one of them, but enough. "Beamtenmentalität" (bureaucratic mentality).

My bandwidth regressed some 60x upon moving to France from Poland.

I thought that Germany(or at least Berlin) has become a IT hub. How could that happen with bad connections?

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).

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.

Sudden population influxes produce problems.

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.

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> It looks like Germany's population grew by over 20 million just recently.

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.

Germany Population 2019: 83,547,429

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/germany-populatio...

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.

Are you talking about refugees??

I think that is what just happened...

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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.

What on Earth are you talking about?