Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by cc81 on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:15PM
(#20618412)
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.
Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by nesadi on Monday August 05, 2019 @11:07PM
(#20621749)
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.
Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by groundlogic on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:29PM
(#20618574)
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.
Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by dylz on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:58PM
(#20618873)
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..
Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by nisa on Monday August 05, 2019 @06:39PM
(#20619920)
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
Re:Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet
by LargoLasskhyfv on Monday August 05, 2019 @11:40PM
(#20621924)
Triple A rating as in absolute arrogant assholes. Not every single one of them, but enough. "Beamtenmentalität" (bureaucratic mentality).
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....