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Comment by not_a_cop75 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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