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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

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fuzzy2·

It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever?

I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.

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They mention it extensively in the article.

I suppose OP is hinting at the fact that Germans are probably already used to having one of the shittiest internet services in the Western world.

They certainly do; however, we all know the game: Headlines only. Reading TFA? Meh

The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.

Still Telekom has a big market share there.

They're entrenched. They have Telekom-branded stores (resellers) in every other town. They operate the network and hence have the best ability for trouble shooting. Non-technical users don't know what peering means, they just pay for Internet like they pay for water or power.

So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-)

Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.

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