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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

They've been lying and ripping off customers while obstructing the German internet infrastructure for profit since they've been privatized.

It's a very popular business model here, see DB.

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Their lobbying and squeezing every single cent they could get out of legacy copper infrastructure which was too be replaced in the early eighties until today held back Germany's internet infrastructure and competition for decades.

DTAG and the Kohl government set our country's infrastructure back decades.

Internet infrastructure is pretty dysfunctional in Germany. I lived in Germany for five years and the only alternative for Telekom’s mediocre VDSL infrastructure was UnityMedia’s almost equally bad connectivity. UnityMedia rarely delivered the promised bandwidth and would regularly have connectivity issues for hours. (And don’t get me started in DS-Lite.)

I was recently discussing the mediocre German internet infrastructure with a colleague and suggested that they’d probably be better off with 5G, only to find out that ‘unlimited’ 5G in Germany has insane prices (3-4 times that of neighboring countries)

This is true. I am from Germany, you are spot on in your observations. I live in the Netherlands now and the difference is mind-boggling. I have 1Gbit/s fiber (that actually delivers 1Gbit/s) and truly unlimited 5G (that is actually available in every corner of the country) for a combined 50 bucks or so.

Similar here in France, for around 50€/month i get 2Gbps down/~1Gbps up fiber, and 200GB of 5G (after that it downgrades to 4G which is unlimited). Plus TV and cheaper Netflix, one year of Disney+ free.

Don't forget the multi-month lead times to even get connected to the internet. I lived without the internet for 3 months when I first moved to Germany. I read over 30 books that year.

3 months certainly happens, and there are horror stories of it taking much longer, but the last two times I moved it was closer to one month. And by now some providers give you a free 4G connection to your WIFI router until you get connected, so at least they realized it's an issue worth competing over.

Just to have a dissenting voice, I’ve been with Kabel Deutschland, Vodafone nowadays, for years, and while I don’t have 1GBit/s, I get my 200 MBit/s without issues, and rarely have connectivity issues (maybe 1-2 hours every few months).

Both the new connection and when I last moved (2 years ago) did not take months, but 1-2 weeks instead.

Oh, and I’m not behind CGNAT, though I don’t have IPv6 either.

> I get my 200 MBit/s without issues, and rarely have connectivity issues (maybe 1-2 hours every few months).

This is not good for US standards, never mind European ones. It's been quite a few years since I had an hour long outage.

Being heavily into online gaming in the mid-2000's, I recall being baffled at how consistently bad connections almost all German players had. Their ping wouldn't be too bad, 30ish ms most of the time, but it almost invariably felt like they had 300+ ms ping.

> It's a very popular business model here, see DB.

DB is a bad example, fake-privatized and controlled by the government. It gets you the worst of both worlds.

Don't forget the DTAG peering controversy.

I once worked for them, imagine my face when i had to call the internal IT to reset a password and ended up in a Callcenter in Bulgaria.

DB isn't a private company

GP did say that it got privatized, not that its a private company. Privatization has a range of meanings, which also include things that do not end up in a privately-owned company.

It is run as a private company despite being state owned. Some EU regulations require that all European train networks compete like commercial entities which ads limitations to financing the DB and creates a lot of bad incentives. Like letting infrastructure rot, because complete renewals and replacements are paid by the government while upkeep isn't.

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