Ask HN: Why is internet access so expensive in Germany?
Their neighbors crush them in access per dollar. Why?
The question at hand was not for wireless internet access, but for internet access. That includes all forms of carriers. Not so long ago, I found wireless internet access to be very steep in price, too, but since it has changed a little. Wired access is usually carried over either ADSL or VDSL or cable here. In some areas (metroploitan, mostly) the introduction of fibre has begun.
Prices range from 20€-50€, with speeds ranging from 16mb/s to 100mb/s in the downstream and 1mb/s to 40mb/s in the upstream. Most of these offers include unlimited landline calls within Germany (flatrate), some of them add extras, like WiFi on the go or IPTV.
I don't find this to be expensive. Especially, since there is seldomly horror-stories like the ones coming from Verizone customers, etc.
On the mobile-side, pure data-flatrates can be had for below 10€, including 3GB of bandwidth. All-Net-Flats, which include a flatrate for national calls into all networks, 4GB data (>40mb/s), flat SMS, are to be had at a starting 30€/month, when contracted for 2 years.
And, in the end, let's be honest: Most people do not need more than 5mb/s. At least not per person. Small multi-user households may be fine with 16mb/s, people reading HackerNews, however, obviously need much, much more ;-)
I am writing this comment from an S-Bahn train going through the Berlin center right now, on iPhone SE, no cover cases, no jailbrake.
My mobile operator is contract Congstar and at the moment connection status is switching back and forth from "no service" to Edge to 3G. 3g is present only about 60% of the time.
I had similar quality problems with T-Mobile as well before I quit it.
Their LTE was present only in the city center, but not inside buildings.
And I tested it with few different phones.
Everyone I know complains about mobile internet quality.
My friends back in Ukraine have been making video calls on their phones for at least 3 years now and me, living in the center of Europe, cannot load a HN page sometimes.
The question at hand (see the title) was not about mobile-internet-quality, but about high prices for internet in Germany in general. That is two different topics. Just now I read on Golem.de, that 1&1 Versatel offers 200MBit/s for 30€. I don't think that is expensive.
As @zmix states, my experience with internet to the home is pretty good and reasonable (to me anyway). It's even a little faster in FFM (120 down from Unity and you actually get that whens speed testing too) for the same price. I've lived in Austria and Switzerland and I don't find that they are "crush"ing Germany. Switzerland offers a tantalizing 1gb down service, but when you actually plug in an address it's hard to find buildings that are wired for that (and they seem to know it because the plans that step down from that are only nominally less even though the speed is massively different).
Speaking specifically of mobile, I don't find access to be that expensive (unless you go with Telekom), but I will second (or third) the lack of coverage. I have O2 and find that it basically doesn't work outside of cities. The train ride between FFM and Mannheim is a signal desert for me which is crazy because this is a very busy corridor. If this is what you meant by access, then I would probably agree since mobile data coverage outside of cities seems to at least exist in other places.
But the huge cost for 3G did not end with this. Every provider was required to use it's frequencies and deliver 3G to a specified percent of the population. So on top of the high auction prices they had very high costs for actually putting many transceivers.
And this is, why wireless is so insanely expensive in Germany. It all started with an auction and companies paying too much...
Germany and the U.K. got over €600 per capita, several others less than half that. Part of that seems to be that companies are more eager to win in larger markets; part of it also is timing and/or the design of the auctions.
One can argue that getting more money out this action is a loss for the governments selling the spectrum licenses, as it made it left the winners with less money to roll out a network that covers the country, and left consumers with higher prices. That's why page 17 judges the NL auction to be a "moderate fiasco (?)"; with, basically, 5 buyers buying 5 licenses that weren't that different, it didn't bring in that much, but it didn't drive up prices later.