Zero G: Some German mobile users still waiting for a signal

Yessir, same thing in Denmark. Ordered Wi-Fi for my new apartment two weeks before I moved there, just so I knew it would be activated when I moved in. Ridiculous.

I do think some of the new fiber companies are same-day, though.

It's even worse: when you cancel a contract, they can turn it off remotely, but when you get a new contract, a technician has to come out and turn it on.

I had the same in Cambridge, UK. Probably not 3 weeks but at least 2. Ridiculous.

Same in Perth, Australia, a major city -- and IIRC, Canberra too. This was 2013-ish. I was amazed, appalled, and confused -- a service visit was unnecessary. I think if you signed up for the massively overpriced privatized carrier Telstra, it was faster -- but any competitor ISP using their copper had that two-week setup delay.

If you already have the connect with the company, comcast can switch it in 20 minutes. (I did a direct move from one comcast to another comcast location)

(a wired connection, just to clarify)

Yes, it is ridiculous, and very common with Telekom (though there is a difference wrt. existing vs. new connection, that takes a couple of days usually everywhere) but of course the old tenant didn't have internet on the appt. Of course.

to be fair i always got the exact date and somewhat accurate time for when the switch will be made. I think when switching providers this is mandatory by law to ensure of the continuation of services...

Here in Canada, depending on your ISP (Rogers, in this instance), the activation is instant. In fact, they only give you a two-hour window to get home and plug your modem in, otherwise you have to call and have them re-send the activation ping.

Internet in Germany is abysmal, and not only in the countryside. I live in Berlin, our capital. I can't work from my studio since internet is too slow there. I know whole companies having moved their offices to different districts because they did not get sufficient internet. At the place I am currently at, I have LTE and officially it's listed to be in the highest category in terms of speed: I have about 1 mbit/s download. Some base station seems to be broke, but that is the case for months, and I would not even know where to complain about this. I’m actually only writing this while waiting for my software to update, so I can finally start doing something. And again, this is central Berlin, not somewhere remote.

For the "why?": in 2013 our chancellor Merkel said (on the NSA scandal) "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland." which translates to "The internet is unchartered territories for all of us." – in 2013! As far as I know, they only have Wifi in the Bundestag (the parliament) for like two or three years, and I would not be surprised, if most of our politicians still read their emails printed out on paper. Seriously, it is that bad. Germany is in the stone age in this regard.

It is a problem, but not in the extent this article or people make it out to be.

There are 3 nation wide 4G networks, every home has old landlines.

What is a true problem however is the political unwillingness to force cell providers to cover areas with very little population.

It is not economically useful to invest in very rural areas, if you would have to invest 2x to go from 95% population coverage to 99% (numbers made up).

The conservative party (CDU) is "business friendly" to the persistent detriment to quality of life of a majority of citizens in a lot of areas.

T-Mobile was part of the Deutsche Post when it was still a government organization and it is still a big shareholder.

The existing alternatives (e.g. DSL pushed to and beyond its limits) are "good enough" in the short term, especially for dense population centers, making it hard to justify the cost of an actually good fiber solution.

> These two factors makes me think there is something else at play. (Germany would be able to afford doing it all over again, but right this time.)

Conservatives in politics. Since 1982 the Conservatives were in government 30 of 38 years (Kohl 1982-1998, Merkel 2006-now). Many of their members of parliament still have their employees print out emails. Technophobic lot they are.

We could afford a lot of things in theory, in practice conservatives love their tax cuts and helping the auto industry to live off of ICEs instead of incentivizing them to go green. Same for solar and wind energy, more jobs got lost in that sector in the last years than the fucking brown coal industry still has remaining, and they've still decided to grift billions to the brown coal / energy companies.

Seriously, Conservatives are a plague, no matter the nation, and especially in times of widespread drastic changes.

>the providers had to take out huge loans and had to re-pay them instead of being able to invest in building out the networks or offer affordable services!

What's your alternative? Should the licenses have been given away to some blessed companies? I hardly think you can fault the regulator for holding a proper auction. The failing here was clearly on the companies' part as they overestimated the impact UMTS would have. That the companies then have the audacity to try to get the money back from the government is slightly shocking - "plz socialize these losses lol".

The problem is clearly solvable. The government could just pay for the coverage to be built out (payment pending operational towers, obviously).

I find it weird how rarely Germany ends up in British/American media, however how many similar issues they have...

But frankly not many people speak of 5G nutcases in Britain either.

There are dead spots even in Berlin proper. I had more reliable signal in developing countries than in Germany.

@rini17, you might want to edit your post. An "effluent" suburb is perhaps not quite what you meant ! ;-)

>> I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities

Did you use a local SIM?

Maybe is your network/roaming data plan. Some(most) networks throttle/restrict your bandwidth when in you are in roaming.

This aligns with my experience in London.

I spent a good couple hours troubleshooting my phone until someone told me the entire telecom had an outage.

Something I've never seen in the US.

This happened twice in the short time I was there and this was with their largest network provider.

> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.

Most of the land area in the US is wilderness, though (okay, maybe half? Certainly at least a third).

We’re used to having coverage along major highways through long stretches of the country - yes - but as soon as you make a turn for a rural road and drive for a few miles you’ll lose signal.

Funny thing then: I did a 1 hour video conference at pretty high resolution from roughly the Belarusian border a few weeks ago. It definitely qualified as 'the edge of nowhere' rather than the middle and it worked flawlessly. This was using a cellular hotspot so yet another hop. The counter party was in Amsterdam.

In the major cities I've never had a single problem bandwidth wise either so I really don't know how you are set up for roaming but I'd be looking at my provider rather than at the infrastructure, which as far as I can see is pretty good.

> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.

Don’t have a dog in this, but just wanted to say this is not at all true. There are so many places nowhere near wilderness where you would struggle to find a useable 4g connection.

(I’ve lived near some places like this in the northeast - I have to guess that the avalys has not traveled around that much in the US)

> every time I go to Europe

Seems to me you go to only a specific part of Europe, i.e., central Europe.

I live in Europe and spend the last 3 years traveling/working around it. It is not one entity, and cellular infrastructure in one country implies nothing on that of another country.

So yes, Germany internet infrastructure and cellular prices is terrible, but Poland, Czech Republic, Ireland and many others got fantastic infrastructure, at least from my experience.

The US is worse still. We had 1.5 days continuous driving without signal, including one town (Page). Also California, which is probably not the end of the world, I recall a tech centered region is there, right?, so it has more blind spots than people.

> Zurich

Switzerland's cell coverage is consistently ranked in the European top 5, along Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. I work at a company where hundreds of employees get to commute and work on the train, sometimes 3-4 times a week (pre-covid), and I don't know anyone who complains about cell coverage or speed.

I personally live next to a cow field and have access to 10 Gbps FTTH and 5G from two carriers.

Cell phones were widespread in Europe before they become so in the US.

In the "Bell System" phase US landline phone service really was "best in the world" because you had some public oversight over a private monopoly.

In 2000 in the U.S. you could pick up a landline phone that wasn't paid for, call the operator, and get your service turned on that day. At that time you could wait a few weeks in Germany to get a line installed or you could go to a cell phone shop and walk out with "a handy".

In the mobile age Europe pulled far ahead of the U.S. where mobile phones were held back by the stigma that texas oil wildcatter rich jerks had car phones in the 1970s.

> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.

Hah. I live on a hilly forested island. One of the secondary shopping centers has basically no coverage for at&t, no coverage indoors for t-mobile, and weak verizon coverage. Sprint has basically zero coverage of the whole island. When I bike around the island, I go in and out of coverage although I mostly follow the roads.

When we lose power, the towers shut off after 3-5 hours. Of course, that's better than my DSL which turns off instantly (I have a generator and a UPS for the DSL modem, but the remote terminal apparently doesn't)

We're in commuting distance to Seattle.

My experience is that Milan and Paris are great, and London is terrible as far as mobile coverage goes. None of the other cities I have visited were remarkable. The countryside is somewhat variable, mostly depending on terrain (there are few spots genuinely without coverage).

I never had issues in the US, but I never ventured into the countryside either. At least mobile plans tend to be much cheaper in Europe compared to the US.

Afaik, your international coverage depends on the agreements your provider has with local networks.

Not really. Though this was 7-11 years ago, I went to college in rural mass and the entire town had no cell signal. No data, no calling. Only dial-up for internet. The school itself paid for a cable line and a symmetric 10 mbit/s line was shared by the entire college. It was a shit show, to say the least.

> I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities (I’ve been in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Zurich in the past year)

Are you using an American phone? For Europe you'll ideally want something that supports bands 1, 3, 7 and 20; not all phones sold in the US necessarily will. Also, were you roaming? Some telcos will send all roaming traffic back to the home country (though this is no longer strictly necessary with LTE); this can indeed be pretty slow.

FWIW (using a European phone, on a network that does roaming sensibly), I've found LTE in Paris to be pretty good, and LTE in Germany to be a bit meh. And _awful_ in San Francisco (I'm not sure if it was a band issue, or if AT&T, who my network roams with, is just terrible).

If you've been to Zurich and your mobile reception was bad, you either were using a bad provider or your phone has issues. I'm on the swisscom network, and the only time I lose 4G is when I go to the mountains.

And if what you say is true I suspect the provider dependency is also true in the US as I hit quite a few holes when using an AT&T sim card on a road trip through the US.

You probably have a phone with a limited coverage of European 3G/4G frequencies and/or need to change a setting on your phone.

These cities all have ok to good coverage, but if your phone can't match the frequencies you might have an issue (yes, it's ridiculous, and it's the same for some people visiting the US from Europe)

I can take you to various streets on Long Island, NY that get no or extremely unreliable 4G from all carriers.