I once lived in the area where one of the Freifunk core contributors lives (Mannheim / Heidelberg / Karlsruhe / Rhein-Neckar Region). For years we also talked to the municipalities and the mayors of towns around the area, especially the smaller ones that had troubles getting their internet connections and bandwidths beyond 768kBit/s because they were ignored by ISPs and are kind of the best case for mesh networks.

But, as the saying goes, with the incompetent conservatives (CDU) there's no limit on how they waste tax money. If there is a friend of them doing something for more expensive, it's getting bought; because cheaper means always worse, right? Right?

For example, in a small town with around 20k citizens, they spend more than 50k EUR per year for two Wi-Fi spots near the local library, and those are "maintained" by an energy company. They also had to buy those access points for an initial sum of 20k EUR per access point, because they were very special and integrated in the street lights (not kidding you).

Network speeds are less than 10Mbit/s. For that amount of money per year, you could've easily gotten a fibre connection to the library building (which also has less than 10Mbit/s internet connection, so they are kinda fucked once more than 5 people use the internet there).

The moral of the story is somewhat that it's so ridiculous how incompetent politicians are when it comes to tech.

I'm kind of glad that this is an EU-driven project that's delegated top-down, because that means those incompetent politicians have no excuse to buy overly expensive tech stuff from their golf buddies anymore.