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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the Greeks care more about enjoying the life, the nature, the sun, the beach, the sea, their small villages, their food, in person interactions with other human beings than being always connected and worrying which Netflix series should they consume next. Maybe they enjoying the real life too much than the virtual one.

That's the impression I've got when I traveled to Greece and I've seen far less Greeks with their noses stuck in their mobile phones than tourists.

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We do enjoy the simple pleasures of life more than other countries - sometimes too much perhaps. :-)

The problem with the internet in Greece is fundamentally a combo of bad infrastructure (due to belated investment), high taxes (on internet services) and terrible market dynamics (an oligopolistic industry after intense consolidation).

If you are a tourist or a Greek on holiday, perhaps it's great to disconnect. But if your work depends on it, that's a very different story.

"Those grapes look really sour, don't they?"

Ask all the younger Greeks that had to leave their country and come over to Germany what they think about their Internet.

Ask how many of them have a home-based job in the UK, Denmark or Germany, but feel they can not go back simply because they don't have a minimally decent internet infrastructure to be doing fully remote work.

Ask a small hotel owner in one of the islands about their plan of turning their property into a "hacker house" in the off-season.

Of course, it's not the only thing that is lacking in Greece. But I can guarantee you that is one of the things that is holding it back.

The situation in Greece is really dire if they think Germany's internet connectivity is much better than there.

Uh, perhaps I was too long away, perhaps I'm too old, but what's wrong with Internet connectivity in Germany?

I got here (town of less then 25k souls) 100Mbps (the least I could realistically chose) last year, RTT to nearest google server is 22ms (116ms to Amazon though). There's some commotion in town to get us each 1Gbps (which is IMHO absurd). Took a while to install it (partly due to history of the premise), but I don't think it has been down since I got it.

Honestly, if it is any worse than Internet in the S.F. Bay area, I haven't noticed it yet.

it's not much better, but it's good enough to the point that is not a blocker.

100%. I get better internet here in a small town in the third world at the bottom of Africa than I did in Salamis (very short boat ride from Athens for non-Greek readers).

Of course, my experience has a 10+ year gap now, things have definitely grown in Greece as OP has highlighted in the post, but I remember still having 100+ ping while connecting to European servers. Nowadays from Cape Town I "only" hit 150.

> Ask a small hotel owner in one of the islands about their plan of turning their property into a "hacker house" in the off-season.

Maybe instead they should look into making their hotels into "doctor house", or "teacher house" or generally "something affordable by public workers" so that people who move to the island to do their job can have a reasonable life without competing with north EU nomads for living space.

You can not rent your property to a doctor or a teacher only in the off-season.

I’m not Greek, but I hear/read this kind of argument made about Italians as well. No, Southern Europeans are not noble savages, they want and, arguably, need good infrastructures, which include phone and internet connections, exactly like the Northerner.

Putting aside for a second whether there's some truth to the stereotype or not, we truly live in strange times when description of a culture that values family life, the outdoors, good food and leisure over working at your phone at 2 am is automatically taken as an insult or provokes comparison to noble savages.

Please elaborate on how "maybe they don't need good infrastructure" can be taken positively. It is, at best, deeply patronizing.

The insult is in thinking that they somehow don't "need" material things just because they have so many other good things going in their life.

The person that doesn’t need modern infrastructure because they are at peace with nature is literally the noble savage

Enjoying nature doesn't mean you don't need a good internet connection.

It's 2024, internet is not used only for Netflix, but is a must have in our daily lives

Nice sentiments, but the problem with the Internet in Greece is a runaway oligopoly of three telco carriers and a "business-friendly"(one set of sarcasm quotes doesn't feel enough in this case) government that won't bring down the hammer of regulation on it. No lofty ideals here.

Greeks are avid mobile phone and social media users, evidently higher than many of the tourists

Also , please don't confuse what the tourist guides tell you about greece with reality. Greeks are normal people with normal anxieties and ambitions as everywhere. The Lazy lifestyle trope is somethign that s good for tourism ads, but not a way of life.

Greece is nice for tourists, but living here is quite different. Western living cost with Balkan salaries.

It has the highest number of work hours per week in any EU country. Many worker are only part time employees, but expected to work full time...

No: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/greece-popula...

Nope, we want better internet connections but we can't get them. My parents' house still has DSL (around 10 Mbps), it makes it hard to work whenever I go there.

They are enjoying life a good deal while their lifestyle is being subsidized by the rest of Europe. Not sure if their young are as much because they had to leave the country to find employment elsewhere.

May I suggest you read the book "adults in the room". The author has his faults but the notion that any bank bailout and debt repackagings mean that the rest of the EU (cough, Germany) is subsidising Greece is deeply misguided. As I see it Greece is massively subsidising by taking the brunt of migrant crises, camps and humanitarian conundrums...

No problems enjoying the simple things in life - as long as it is not leant from the future generations who will not have the same benefits extended.

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