Bundeskartellamt imposes fine against Fritz brand products manufacturer AVM | Hacker News Reader

Bundeskartellamt imposes fine against Fritz brand products manufacturer AVM

bundeskartellamt.de

Unrelated to Fritz, related to company raids: Some time ago I worked for Kaufland (sister company of Lidl - Schwarz group, #3-#4 retailer company worldwide) and on all offices & hallways there were signs saying something like:

"In case of raids, cooperate with the police, do not throw away documents or break any device", which always seemed funny to me, as there was probably an incident that happened that lead to them putting this so often in the office.

See also in German News:

- https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bundeskarte...

- https://www.golem.de/news/fritzbox-preisbindung-bundeskartel...

- https://www.heise.de/news/Fritzboxen-Co-AVM-bezahlt-Millione...

Fritzboxes made me hate internet when i lived in luxembourg

I learnt to like them after my current ISP moved from Fritz to a (I think) crappy rebranded ZTE. I got all sorts of stability problems that disappeared once I threw it in a drawer (can't throw it on the trash as I'm still paying for it) and got a used 7590 on ebay.

Does this mean then that they will be forced to lower their prices, or not to increase them, or... what does this mean for consumers in the end?

It means retailers will be able to set their own prices and not have them (unlawfully) dictated by AVM. The resulting competition will probably lead to (at least occasionally) lower prices for consumers.

Way to go germany. Seems like they truly try to weaken all homegrown companies that have any relevance in electronic products whatsoever.

Germany & it's economy is just a mere shell of what it was. Their right extremists & nazis gain more acceptance & influence everyday. While the economy seems to be hopeless.

Let's just hope this doesn't end up like last time.

Oh boi, your comment is nothing but uninformed propaganda.

AVM is way past "home-grown" with sales of over 620 millions and a profit of 60-80 millions. The owners have been preparing to selling AVM for a year now, to a private equity investor, which should be closed in the very near future.

And above all, AVM broke the law. But from your comment it sounds like law is a concept you do not approve much, do you?

The founders bought back their shares to regain control only in 2006. Now they want to retire and seem to evaluate options [1]. Guess it is far to early to judge what they will do. They seem to care about the company. Recently AVM settled their wifi patent dispute with Huawei [2], so maybe the sale becomes more likely? But I try to be optimistic that we will not have another Software AG like disaster (on a smaller scale) [3] .

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/AVM-Fritzbox-Hersteller-steht-ange...

[2] https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/huawei-and-avm-settle-wifi...

[3] https://technologymagazine.com/articles/ibm-closes-software-...

Should we just let companies do whatever they want instead??

If Fritz Boxes would actually be a good product...frequent internet drops, which a simple restart fixes, is that normal for routers from other brands? As a German, I don't know, because I've been forced to use these shitty Fritz Boxes my entire life.

As a German who lived a prolonged time abroad, I might have a perspective. I wasn't actually aware that I would be forced to use Fritz products here, but they certainly seem omnipresent. My 7530AX performs actually flawless, no complaints there. I wished it would offer more functionality, e.g. NFS, ability to force some clients to use either 2.4 or 5GHz (to circumvent a current bug in the Nokia G20) or make it easier to upload Linux on them, but I wouldn't call it a bad product. I'd rather give it 4 out of 5 stars. I liked my Linksys WRT54GL, but that was very dated (too slow to exploit the 50Mbps connection to the Internet and no 5GHz) when I finally left it behind during the last move. The Dlink product (713p?) I used (much) earlier was poor, with buggy firmware not supported or maintained by the manufacturer after sale.

Dropping Internet connections which are fixed by a restart sounds to me like a marginal connection (the restart forces a re-learn of DSL parameters). The Fritz box should be able to diagnose that.

Working absolutely flawless here, months of uptime.

And no, you're not forced to use them, "Routerzwang" hasn't been a thing in almost a decade, ISPs are required to allow you to use any router you like.

Technically you are no longer forced to use them but the IPSs will try to make your life as difficult as they can if you want to use your own router while often discounting the rent for their AVM routers to $0 (meaning it everyone pais for them with their base subscriber fee even if you opt out of getting one).

Not my experience. With o2, the sales guy on the phone even recommended buying a fritz box when I told him I don't want to rent their "o2 homebox" (which is not made by avm and has a terrible reputation) for 2€ a month.

With Kabel Deutschland the process was also painless. I disconnected their box which they lend to you for free (also not avm), connected the fritzbox I bought on ebay and ended up on some form of captive portal where I had to enter my customer information and boom I was online. I've yet to encounter an isp which tries to force you to use a fritzbox. But then again I wouldn't mind since they are reliable and stable. :)

In the Netherlands the Fritz boxes are seen as one of the 'premium' brands. Most other ISP provided routers are completely shit random value brands so that might explain the difference. I'm on my third Fritzbox now and only the second one really went bad after 8 years (dropped the VDSL connection multiple times per day) so was promptly replace by the ISP. Current one is a 7583 that's been running really stable for a few years now. Of course it's a network product: it might also be a spotty hardware part on the other side of your connection. I'd suggest calling your ISP...

I don't know what you are talking about. Every time I got an ISP contract and used their default router I got nothing but problems until I decided to upgrade to their Fritz Box offering and then all the problems disappear. LAN and WiFi just work.

I’m on my 5th fritzbox and have no problems at all.

I've been using Fritzboxes my entire life, I am on a Fritzbox right now, I never had frequent internet drops, with none of the Fritzboxes I had.

from the evidence here, there is no way to know the reason for these restarts.. the next reply says "no problems for thousands of hours"

I used to have connection issues every few weeks. I got a digital timer plug and reboot my router every night at 3am, that fixed almost all of my connection drops. I was thinking about this XKCD comic after digging through logs to try and trouble shoot the issue https://xkcd.com/1495/ and just went with the timer solution.

Right. Real not-Nazis would have let their domestic companies continue breaking laws and engaging in illegal schemes to fix/inflate prices for consumers. We live in terrifying times indeed.

So illegal price fixing shouldn't be punished for economic reasons?

I don't see any "right extremists & nazis" in charge of the current or past governments. Why would they have any impact on the German economy and decisions by Kartellamt?

I agree though, without cheap energy from Russia, the German industry is headed for dark times. But that's the fault of the current government. They're not pressing the issue on who actually destroyed the pipelines and they're not using the one that's still operational and instead buy Russian gas via resellers at a premium.

The right wing extremists and neo-nazis live in East Germany because the soviets thought they were immune to fascism simply because they equate anti-fascism and communism. They thought their job was done by doing nothing. West Germany took significantly more cautions to prevent a rise in right wing extremism than East Germany.

If you would actually inform yourself a bit before spouting such nonsense you would know that East Germany was actually a lot more serious about denazification than West Germany after WW2 (not quite as serious as the official propaganda would want you to believe of course - for instance the early "inofficial" East German army made use of Wehrmacht officers until they were kicked out around 1956 when the NVA was officially founded, but still more serious (and effective) than West Germany which mostly turned a blind eye towards higher ranking nazi officials in the government, secret service and army).

Also the leading neo nazis who built up their East German networks in the 90's were mostly "Alte Kameraden" coming in from West Germany (and that's still the case, guess where Bjoern Hoecke grew up, hint: not in the GDR), and this was made easy not because the East Germans were "preconditioned", but instead disillusioned and frustrated with how the reunification was going in the 90s. The poor, disillusioned and frustrated tend to turn towards extremism, that's the problem in a nutshell, and that problem is not unique to East Germany.

Fritzbox is a shit show. Their router is not yours (no access to the OS). Their router only works with their DECT telephone (ask me how i found out). Fritz is the Microsoft of internet access in Germany.

> Their router only works with their DECT telephone [...]

I've had no issues pairing a DECT phone from a different vendor with a FRITZ!Box, so that's not true.

The DECT limitation is not true. I have it paired with a Gigaset.

Pairing works. No Contacts or phone log though.

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