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Comment by schmidp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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