Has Mr Doctorow ever visited the DACH region?
For reference I have 400/20 Cable, for 44Eur/m. No caps. Provider Pyur. Overall medium terrible experience.
Of course they 'could', but that would mean for corruption to have gone down and political competence to have gone up in those 40 years but unfortunately it hasn't, quite the opposite.
In Germany, high level corruption and political incompetence has only increased in that time (see BER airport, VW emissions scandal, and the handling of COVID).
Basically if you're well connected and rich, you're untouchable in Germany and your corruption mishaps will be swept under the rug as casual political 'whoopsies' right after you retire to a gold plated pension.
So it's not that you're completely untouchable. Even with friends in high places.
It was written in some comments before, but Germany could have had the most modern fiber infrastructure in the world when the plans of former chancellor Helmut Schmitt wouldn't have been stopped by the Helmut Kohl government who was good friends with Leo Kirch, who was a big player in the German TV market and would rather benefit from copper wiring than fiber.
One has no option but ADSL which reaches 8Mbps on a good day, the other is luckier and has Cable but only 100Mbps.
What use would you have for throughput in excess of 100Mbps?
I very rarely have use for capacity beyond 40Mbps, or perhaps even 25. 4K streaming is as demanding as it gets. If 40Mbps is appreciably cheaper than 100, I'll take 40.
If your Internet connection can't handle video chat and streaming, then you're right to say you don't have a decent modern Internet connection, and it's holding back what you can do. Capacity beyond 40Mbps, though, is rarely of any real consequence.
(I mean this in the particular context of home broadband, of course.)
But the thing is that thanks to fiber there's hardly any difference price wise. So why not use it, when it's on offer?
Before that I had 100Mb up and down and was pretty happy with it. Large games could be a bit of a drag. Especially when GTA5 became available and I wanted to play it right now!
Once the JSON parses, that is ;-P
If you want to run several 4K streams at once, you'll need more than 40Mbps. I don't think many households have this requirement though.
If you're regularly dealing with huge video files, then sure, you may be in the small minority that really does benefit from an extremely fast connection.
And yes I regularly have PDFs and PPTs of that size (thank you web agencies that keep on sending 20 pages product kit with 8K background pictures).
I do agree it's overkill and we all could do without if we prepared better but that's how it is.
And like 1/10 houses are actually networked well enough to even use a 300 mbit connect.
The only practical difference I’ve seen is upload. Cable internet is usually slow enough to impact actual use.
I've had 1Gbps before, and it was fantastic.
Checking out repositories is a rare event. It's even rarer to check out repositories weighing tens of gigabytes, such that throughput in excess of 100Mbps is noticeable.
As I said in my reply to CaptainZapp, it's generally fine if a background process like a backup takes several hours, and that's just for the few people who need to backup tens of gigabytes of data to the Internet every day. For everyone else, 100Mbps is far more than enough.
For most home users in particular, capacity beyond 40Mbps rarely brings any benefit.
That's not too bad, is it? Sweden has had world-leading broadband for a decade, and your upload could be higher, but "downright embarrassing" is people stuck on a 24Mbit ADSL connection.
(I have 300/30 Mbit/s cable for 340DKK = 45€. I could upgrade to 1000/500 Mbit/s fibre for ... actually only 320DKK, but I haven't bothered.)
Salt offers 10Gb symmetrical for 50 CHF.
Home broadband have issues that the operator can't solve quickly (once working from home at a friend's place we got the house apartment internet cut off for a couple of days), Telekom sucks, their customer support sucks, sending a technician can take a month or more sometimes.
It feels so damn backwards, even more for the largest economy in the EU, not investing in digitalisation (both infrastructure and public services) is gonna bite Germany's ass for the next decade. Can't believe most bureaucracy is still done through paper-based mail, or faxes.
Ex Telekom worker here.
But more than half their revenue is now from the US Market, which they didn't enter in such a privileged position.
Anyway, 100% of Germany to be covered with FTTH by 2030 :)
https://www.telekom.com/resource/blob/619512/394bebe64a0f87d...
I work in the communication industry and we call this "A problem that can be solved by money" - while on wireless we have "Problems based on the law of physics".
I recommend to start a business if YOU know how to keep the investment down.
Barring regulatory failure, providers don't even need to "open a street" precisely because of the other installations that already exist where wires can be run alongside.
It would be a major destination, so one would expect fast cables to be laid out there (and be available in the close area). That's the case with important areas where I live at least.
I would say Germany was hurt a lot though the de-facto monopoly of the Telekom and DSL, relying on copper wires. Telekom had even after privatisation a monopoly on the last mile and 0 motivation to invest. It is only when the internet over TV Cable became popular, they started to panic. They are still offering 250/50 DSL in some areas, but only if there is no TV Cable vendor. Otherwise they have no chance it is a lost battle for them. In my are DSL is only 16/2,4 because why bother to upgrade? They are not competitive.
Other problem in Germany is that the landlord decides which providers he lets in his house - it is usually one and only one TV Cable vendor, if multiple vendors are operating in the area.
The whole city of Zurich is fibered (mostly built by the public power utility) and you're free to chose between a variety of suppliers.
Swisscom had a really sweet deal a few years ago (when only parts of the city had fiber), where they paid for the home installation as long as you signed up for 12 month or longer.
Bin there ever since (not always with that speed, initially it was something like 100 up and down. GB fiber was still pretty expensive) and never regretted it.