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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

Those stories about how Kohl messed up the "future of Internet in Germany forever" by going for his buddy's copper instead of fiber in the late 90s never made sense to me. How about just trying again instead of just giving up?

a) Germany has a very high population density (232 people per km^2)

b) Germany is kind of rich

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.)

And then there is this - wow, lack of GSM coverage in such a densely populated country?

In my experience this would would only be explained by systematic incompetence, systematic corruption or a combination of the two.

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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.

If you travel through Germany it feels like huge problem to be honest.

My girlfriend lives in northern Germany and going around in Germany by train is just a big waste of time, because most of the time you have 0 signal as soon as you are outside of a city. For example traveling by train from Vienna to Bremen takes around 8 hours, but I basically need to stop working as soon as I cross into Germany. 0 Signal.

If you are in the Netherlands, Czech Republic or Austria and you cross into Germany it's like traveling back in time. Very often you are lucky to have some EDGE reception, while at the other side of the border you had high speed LTE.

Traveling by ICE (German high-speed train) it feels like this has improved a lot over the last years. I am traveling through Hamburg, Berlin to the south in the direction of Munich and most of the time I have 4G coverage, even with O2/Telefonica, the worst of the three providers coverage wise.

Anecdata of course, however i once had to be online while on the ICE from Augsburg to Dortmund (that's a 6hr ride).

In preparation of a demo, i spotted one last bug in our system, which i tried to squash together with a few programmers from the manufacturer, being online in Skype and Teamviewer basically the moment i sat down in Augsburg and managed to work around it when i had to exit the train 6 hours later.

This was around 2016, and at least on this ride there weren't much areas without reception.

Not denying the base problem though, once you get used to LTE you'll begin to notice if you ever drop back to 3G, or god forbid, Edge...

ICE is the worst transport, compared to the local lines that are now provided by commercial companies - I'm not talking about being on time (it's a fantasy), but Internet in the train itself in 2019th doesn't work at all. I used it regularly in 2018th, and it was ok - I could use that time to write a report in google docs, push some code, find information, etc. In 2019th, it simply doesn't work - I gave up, and either tether from my phone (if there is a signal), or just sit and read.

The coverage in Germany is really bad outside of the cities, area between Kassel and Fulda, and then further to the south is just a black hole. But when you enter into Austria on a train, you can say this just by seeing how fast internet is in the train, and there is a strong mobile signal...

Another issue on the third generation of ICE is that the windows have a coating meant for blocking out heat which is also very good at blocking cell signal. The provided wifi is done via external antennas and multiple carriers and usually quit a bit better, however there are still long parts where it's unavailable as well. Also quite limited at 200MB of volume.

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

Never been to very rural Germany. But OTOH in every flat I lived in Berlin, I had problems getting signal. So it's not about density.

Or it is but in the opposite direction. There's just not enough capacity to provide to all the city residents.

The CDU is business friendly in the same way the Republicans are business friendly - it sure appears that way at first, with tax breaks or lowering regulations, but in the end it bites everyone in the ass, even businesses, when that means this allowed everyone to not progress and be left behind while around you other countries improved and got their shit together. Internet is one of these things, photovoltaics another (we used to be good in Germany, then the CDU (and to an extent the SPD) needed to protect the 20k workers in coal and created laws and regulations for that, in the same way killing off the PV industry with around 70k workers).

I agree hence the quotes. It's nepotism, backroom deals, lobbying and vying for cushy jobs in the industry.

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.

I'm Swedish. Have family in Berlin, so I have some exposure to that reality too.

Trying to figure out how things got kinda right here and kinda wrong there. The 90s was a while ago. The way I heard and remember it: it started with someone really, really prescient in the Stockholm water/sewage department figuring out that it would be kinda smart to lay some dark fiber when they were digging up the streets for maintenance, anyway. This would probably be like 1994-1996 or so. Then this continues to happen in smaller cities, etc etc.

I'm probably missing some critical steps.

It was a weird bottom-up-thing happening. Would love to get a deeper understanding from someone who was there.

There is some history here (PDF) https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Nyheter%20bilagor/Stokab_eng...

"One important part of Stockholm’s modern ICT history is the company Stokab, founded by the City of Stockholm in 1994. The deregulation of the telecom market, which had taken place the year before, was the reason for establishing the company. Despite proposals by a number of national parliamentary parties to divide up what was then the Telecommunications Admin- istration into an independent, neutral infrastructure organisation and a service organisation, it remained intact and instead became the company Telia. Stockholm’s politicians believed that a neutral stakeholder was needed who could provide basic IT infrastructure to all on equal terms in order to generate competition, diversity and a range of choice within telecommunications and data. To achieve this, the IT infrastructure company Stokab was formed through a political consensus. The company’s mission is to build, lease and maintain a passive fibre-optic network to help foster favourable conditions for IT development and the positive development of the Stockholm region."

> 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.

This is just crazy talk. On the one hand, Merkel gets constant praise for being a scientist, on the other hand she's a conservative (questionable by any standards) that is technophobic. Please.

Additionally, Merkel never ruled alone, it's been either a coalition with the SPD or the FDP, neither are conservatives.

Please don't spread misinformation and if you actually believe "Conservatives are a plague", go see a mental health professional, because you're dangerously radicalized.

Merkel also shut down nuclear power plants didn't she, causing Germany to increase dependency of coal? (At least until solar/wind can take over completely). So much for her environmental ideas. I would take a German nuclear power plant any day over coal.

Yes, a lot of her policies were closer to the Green party in Germany, who have been asking for the immediate end of nuclear power for a long time.

I'd prefer nuclear of coal as well, but there's a significant number of people that are terribly afraid of it on a pre-rational level. From what I understand, it's the idea of a run-away process that "doesn't feel natural", i.e. can't stop it burning by just not putting in more coal. It seems like "humanity should not meddle with the power of the gods", but they're usually explicitly anti-religious.

Nuclear power was first shut down under Schröder with a coalition of SPD and Green. The shut down was then cancelled by Merkel just to shut it down again shortly after the Fukushima disaster.

Interesting. So I guess Merkel had the right intentions (keeping nuclear seeing it was the greenest / lesser-evil option), but also the expected characteristics of a politician.

> I would take a German nuclear power plant any day over coal.

I'd prefer ditching both. Germany lost more jobs in the solar and wind industry than there are left in coal ffs, we would stand way better in the Energiewende if it were not for Conservatives in government. When China started dumping solar the German government did nothing, and wind was famously sabotaged by Conservatives ("10H Regel").

Besides, just that a nuclear plant is operated in Germany does not mean at all it is safe. The list of accidents is long (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_meldepflichtiger_Ereigni...), way too long.

Nuclear fission cannot be operated safely and in contrast to the US we don't have ample lots of empty space away from civilization where we can chuck the waste into - we are not even close to finding a permanent disposal site.

> On the one hand, Merkel gets constant praise for being a scientist, on the other hand she's a conservative (questionable by any standards) that is technophobic.

Merkel herself is a scientist, but her cabinets? They are a whole different lot, and not in a good way. "Internetausdrucker" is a good way to describe most of Merkel's cabinets.

> Additionally, Merkel never ruled alone, it's been either a coalition with the SPD or the FDP, neither are conservatives.

Yeah, but the responsible ministry has always been in the hands of the CSU (1982-1991, 2009-now) and the CDU (1991-1998). As you know the Chancellor and the Ministers they appoint set the political direction.

I'm too young for the first generation of Conservatives under Kohl, but I can fairly well judge especially Dobrindt and Scheuer to be utterly incompetent, with Merkel doing nothing to keep them in check (and to be fair, neither did Seehofer and Söder, to whose party they belong).

> Please don't spread misinformation and if you actually believe "Conservatives are a plague", go see a mental health professional, because you're dangerously radicalized.

yawn

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