Re:German draft proposal would subsidize smaller firms to en...
by mschuster91 on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:37PM
(#26019488)
> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.
German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government:
1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad.
2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government:
1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad.
2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...