Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet
netzbremse.de
netzbremse.de
DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached.
I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)
The ones not on HN probably just notice that their internet is getting slow after 5 p.m
Trust me, I know how much they suck and I still had to enter a 2-year contract just to get fiber optics in my house.
The more I read about DTAG the happier I feel like using our cable connection which, upstream excluded, works quite well.
We're about to buy our apartment in Berlin and that changes things. I hope we have soonpre choice on the fiber operator.
Insane pings, excellent peering, giving a totally different internet experience from the mainstream ones.
Currently I use Telekom's 5G for my home internet connection in Hungary as Telekom is the only company who has a cable in my street, but they refused to sell me wired internet due to the hole they use to take their underground cable up to the houses being already over capacity (it turns out this "hole" serves like the entire street with cables being run across everyone's attic...).
I previously used yettel/telenor's 4G (basically as fast as Telekom's 5G because their 5G is a scam, although Yettel's 5G is even more scammy, it is slower than their 4G) but they broke their routers, I had comical packet loss and they refused to fix it (technically, when you pay for a cellular connection, the required uptime in the contract is zero). They also started CGNAT-ing in order to supposedly "improve security" (wtf..) just before I switched (this now means that their "internet-focused" plans have just CGNAT-ed IPv4, while their "non-internet focused" cellular plans have CGNAT-ed IPv4 AND IPv6 (makes sense).
In any case, I now use Telekom's 5G with CGNAT-ed IPv4, just a single /64 IPv6 and forced separation (it is illegal to have a stable internet connection, they disconnect you just before reaching 24h of uptime).
DTAG is not just a run-of-the-mill consumer ISP. They are a global Tier-1 carrier.
Which of course makes their behavior all that much worse.
Never thought I'd see this play out in practice, especially with a consumer ISP. Normally this comes up with server hosting, not consumer ISPs.
The best part about ISPs, is that usually who have very few choices, sometimes only one! Where I grew up, we had the choice of "broadband" (via antennas between an island and mainland) with one ISP, or modem with any telephone company. Eventually, proper cables where put, and we had a choice between 6 different operators.
Where I live now, I only have 3 options for ISPs with fiber, even though I live right outside a huge metropolitan area.
But depending on local rules, you can sometimes route around the monopoly: trench your own last-mile (at least on private land), do a neighborhood co-op, connect buildings, etc. It’s sometimes expensive and you’ll hit permits/right-of-way bureaucracy, but it’s totally doable if you’ve got a few (rich) friends or a business willing to back it.
“the conduit is full” is often just BS and a super convenient excuse for incumbents to block competition indefinitely.
Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.
If digging is blocked, wireless works too. Point-to-point links, WISP stuff, even satellite. The main thing is: you don’t necessarily need your local ISP as your upstream, you just need a path out.
And it propagated to Spain thanks to the Romanian DIGI playing their strong bets for a while. I've had the access to the cheapest while also best-uptime-service option because of them on the two places I've lived in the city. They're still deploying as much as they can and meanwhile they offer VULA access where they don't have (In Spain thanks to the NEBA regulation, biggest ISPs are obligated to ease local access for any other operator) own infrastucture.
So it's available also at my parents' as well since a few months ago (Internet access still contracted with another company which honoured the low price offered back then which was subject to some conditions, and even having risen prices as much as three or four times, they've respected them for staying clients). I didn't see the need for the switch, but wouldn't had given much thought to it.
I think Australia's model works really well – the last mile is (with occasional exceptions) owned by a government-owned ISP, NBNCo. But NBNCo is purely a wholesaler, and they only provide service from the premises to the local telephone exchange. There are dozens of competing retail ISPs, and they own the connection from the local exchange onwards. So if one of them is screwing you over, you can switch to another. And if you have a fibre connection, you can even split your fibre connection over multiple retail ISPs–you can sign up for new one as a trial without cancelling the old one, and then reverting back is literally just swapping an Ethernet cable to a different port.
I'm surprised more countries haven't copied it.
https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-te...
https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt...
https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudfl...
At least they are cheap. 25€ a month for 2gbps/1gbps so I can’t complain about that
They also offer 4gbps/2gbps for 40€ but at this point I’m not even sure what to use that for (besides torrent seeding)
The DT is not doing cost neutral peeing with Cloudflare. Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX.
I pay 80 EUR for 1Gbps/300mbps and it's behind GPON or if you can get more XGS-PON. Not even real ethernet. It's a shame.
Why would they? There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex
not that far away from the former https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... , something like HQ of the former Gov-telco. While those have been torn down, or brought to other uses meanwhile, the Deutsche Telekom has still a massive presence in Karlsruhe. Still not that far away from the Dagger Complex.
Get what I mean?
Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.
Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)?
Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):
"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
They also don't enforce DMARC, nor do DKIM. It's stuck nearly four decades in the past.
Maybe "strictly worse than 40 years ago"?
I did end up later moving to Proton primarily out of laziness. I thought these issues would be a thing of the past until I applied to work at a company that administered their own Exchange server that also black holed my messages from Proton's servers. Their reasoning? "We geo-block Switzerland for security reasons." Needless to say I turned them down.
Every month or so I had this issue and I had to contact them through a form somewhere and I would get emails back from someone in india who reset my 'reputation'. They have some stupid made-up reputation system which means they need to see significant volume from you that is not marked as spam for them to accept your mailserver.
And yeah proton has similar issues. A lot of companies blackhole even confirmation emails there. So you can't confirm accounts with a proton email and they give zero indication as to why. Tinder and the internet archive (archive.org) come to mind.
It's just general fragility of tech and lack of care from the creators/maintainers. These systems are steampunk, fragile contraptions that no one cares to actually make human friendly or are built on crappy foundations.
To send emails we need to pay for a mail service. Or get ads of course Gmail is part of the ring.
Like most things it start with good intentions, to fight spam. As if it even worked, I guess we would get far more without they will say.
If you haven't received any mail from a mail system before (or in a long time) and then it sends you one message, it probably isn't spam, because spammers are typically going to send you a large number of messages. You also typically want to let the first few messages through so the recipient can see them and then classify it as spam or not, so that you get some data on how to treat future messages from that sender.
This is the same thing a centralized system should be doing with individual users. You impose some reputation on accounts (e.g. by sender/registration IP address) and then if that address starts spamming people it gets blocked, and otherwise it doesn't.
It's sort of like email, but based on the XML stack (SOAP / WSDL / XML Crypto / XML Sig), with proper citizen authentication and cryptographically-signed proof of sending and delivery.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/DI... [2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/DI...
Ask ChatGPT to generate you a very long very graphic story about how much you'd like to fuck a dog and your father is the only person who understands your desires and you want to discuss this with him via email. While fucking dogs is illegal in Germany, talking about it is (probably) not. Make the guy who asked the question regret doing it.
Hell, I can even say, likely, nobody will ever read it, regardless of how you answer.
Those companies only respond to lawyers.
Aka, when you are a customer of them you get a @t-online.de address and login data for their smtp server.
You can just login into that server and set the From: Header to anything, they don't check.
Not sure though what the magic ingredient is. I've had the IP address for 7 years before I decided to use it for mail, after one quick mail to Cisco's Talos stuff everything was fine. Software is Mailcow. Hosted at Hetzner in Germany.
And still, I cannot deliver to T-Online, so there's that.
My IP has not changed since 2010 and I have perfect dkim/dmarc/rdns and whatever duct taped bullshit de jure is currently being practiced.
Everything generally works.
I have switched servers regularly, mostly between OVH/online.net/Hetzner since they are the three big cheap European hosts. I have also used various server software, now happily running OpenSMTPd.
I have had a few problems with Microsoft in the past but contacting them (what made me care enough was marrying someone with an @hotmail email address) eventually fixed delivery for good. No notable delivery problems otherwise. I also run my company's mail server, it works fine too (with a much larger volume and different usage patterns), also running out of OVH servers.
What I recommend for people who don't want to do sysadmin is buying a domain at OVH to use the free email service offered with it. It's cheap and works, and it's easy to switch to another registrar or provider if needed.
The basic setup has more or less stayed the same, but there's some more extra components around it you have to know now (spam filtering and SPF/DKIM/DMARC come readily to mind).
To quote Michael Lucas: "everything complicated about emails revolves around spam and not getting it". I highly recommend his book, "Run Your Own Mail Server".[1]
In short, hosting your own email is not that bad at all. I strongly suspect, like many other skills, since it has atrophied with the advent of the cloud and people readily giving up to the large carriers, it has gotten the reputation of being hard, or as you said, a full time job. I don't think either of those things are true.
My setup: I have a root server with DNS attached to it. On there is a postfix, with a minimal config that forwards all emails to my real address on posteo.eu. And posteo has not given me any trouble with any of my emails at all.
I use this setup, so I can easily give new email-addresses to individual web services, and it gives me the option to selectively block these addresses.
Last year I brought the big abo from proton, which includes throwaway mailadresses, and I am thinking about migrating my mail setup there.
Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b...
I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.
The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home
Also the authentication might rely on weak secrets. I know my ISP provided FTTH router has a six letter password and a guessable username (derived from my last name), and I can't change either.
Though the research is quite old now. Couldn't find anything recent specifically for DT.
FTTH here in Australia is the same, you’re stuck using the network providers device, which just provides an Ethernet port, and a POTS port if you’re in to that sort of thing, with your LAN device connected behind it.
There was fierce lobbying back in the day (shout out to Simon Hackett / Internode) for our national broadband network to be simple dark fibre and that ISPs could build on top of that to provide innovation and differentiation.
Instead what we got was a bunch of ISPs that resell the National Broadband Network’s expensive wholesale plans with little in the way of either differentiation or innovation.
Edit to add: what the sibling comments said too.
If they are using certs youd have to extract it. The vast majority of ISPs don't bother or care.
Now customers can choose. Nearly every ISP chooses the easy way and has the customer connect through Swisscom's XGS-PON but Init7 in particular has instead built out their own routers in POPs around Switzerland so that customers can have a physical fibre directly to their network. It's just plain ethernet with DHCP so you can use whatever equipment you want. It's also allowed Init7 to do something none of the other providers can do: offer 25Gbps symmetric service at no extra cost (beyond a one-off installation cost for the more expensive SFP modules).
Confused? Maybe but probably not. It depends on how they track things. An ISP I had in the past tagged subscriber accounts on the OLT side.
Earlier, in the dial-up era, my dad didn't feel like paying for internet at home and work, so after school I would call his office and ask his secretary if he had left for his evening meetings yet. If so, she'd disconnect his dial-up connection and I'd get a couple hours to myself after school.
We didn't have two phone lines at home so I'm not sure what happened if he needed it unexpectedly. I think he also had a by-the-minute service as a backup or maybe his partner in the office had a separate plan? This was all done under agreed rules I only vaguely remember so must not have been a frequent problem.
Always funny to think back to that era when internet wasn't assumed to be a 24/7 thing and losing internet for a day wasn't the end of the world...
There are some ISPs issuing and verifying certs for GPON, which are more annoying to extract. I'm not aware of anyone (even those same ISPs) doing it for XGS-PON. It seems they all decided maintainimg their own CA infrastructure for millions of customers was not worth it ;)
There's also a EU law which says that users should be able to bring their own modems / routers, so AFAIK providers say that this particular terminal device is still "on their side of the network".
I've seen such devices come in two varieties.
One is a separate device which plugs on the optical network, does the encryption and stuff, and then exposes an ethernet port which is connected to the actual router which does wifi, etc. With SFR and Bouygues, it was trivial [0] to replace the ISP-provided router with one of your choosing. You get the normal external IPs and you do your thing. The ISP router sleeps in its box in storage. This was my setup up until a few years ago, with both these providers. Now SFR has moved to CGNAT, but the setup is the same, so I expect users to still be able to switch routers (but I haven't tested, since I'm not a client anymore).
Then there's Free, who provides a single device that connects to the fiber, does routing, wifi, etc. In this case, it's possible to flip a switch in its settings for it to act as a bridge (don't know how wifi behaves in this case, if it stays on). It then only accepts a single downstream client, which gets the external IP. SFR had a similar setup for DOCSIS.
I'm not familiar with how Orange, the biggest operator, functions. But I understand they have a general tendency to be a PITA so YMMV with them.
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[0] For Bouygues, this device only talked on a tagged VLAN100 for some reason. On the SFR, the network expected you to send a client id in the DHCP request.
This is the physical boundary of a network, in telecommunications. This is the junction where the service provider can point and say "that's our equipment on this side". So it helps to narrow down the troubleshooting.
Often, if you have a telephone landline, you will see your demarc take the form of a gray RJ11 box with a small self-plug in it. It would be common practice to plug a phone into that box directly, then you've eliminated the "inside wiring" in the house.
In the case where the terminating equipment is a small box that exposes ethernet, with no routing or otherwise interfering the function of my own router, I think it's good enough. An argument could be made for the all-in-one devices, like saving some power.
I get the geek factor, and it's one of the reasons why I run my own router, but for this specific bit, which needs to be fairly well integrated with the ISP's network, combined with their usual abysmal support, I think it's a better bet to just leave it alone.
Sure, due to the shared medium nature they do not promise to always have even particularly close to a full gigabit available for me, but that's documented according to the 3 residential internet SLA thresholds the BNetzA (Germany's FCC; except they also regulate power and gas grid) defines and that a provider has to cough up numbers in an info sheet at the time of sale.
The issue is that if they are physically incapable of delivering the up-to they sell and it's not due to the unpredictable nature of e.g. radio reception strength or POTS wiring quality (ADSL), this very quickly very strongly reeks of fraud. Even just a little bit is fraud, just as systematically under-delivering e.g. gasoline would be. Think if you bought that in cans and they say they're e.g. 5 gallon (or 20 liter) each, and at nominal temperature, none of the cans you can actually find for sale end up having the full quantity, always being at least an ounce (~30ml) short.
I can only attest how they work here in Spain: They're not the best in terms of the 'openness' of their hardware: (in Spanish, feel free to us a translator) https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/router-pone-orange-jazztel-s...
My connection has been very reliable since ditching the SFR box. My own router plugs into the separate ONT.
SFR also offers good IPv6 support.
Most kinds of PON sticks are still in the $150-300 range though for XGS-PON
(I use an XGS-PON stick with AT&T instead of their modem)
It's the same in the US. The ISP fiber network falls inside their security boundary in my experience - you can't BYOD. They install a modem (these days often including an integrated router, switch, and AP) and you receive either ethernet or wifi from them.
I think the only major change in that regard has been that coaxial cable providers here will often let you bring your own docsis modem these days.
I never found any of this concerning until quite recently. With the advent of ISPs providing public wifi service out of consumer endpoints as well as wifi based radar I'm no longer comfortable having vendor controlled wireless equipment in my home.
Telekom Speedports also have a modem only mode (the ones for non-fiber, dunno about the ones for fiber, but it looked like those are only modems and not a router as well). I don't make use of it since I manage the wifi for my family, but I do know it exists.
They had to start offering routers that integrate the ONT because the common consumer gear is 1G or 2.5G ethernet but they sell up to 10G service here.
Im actually quite okay with that. Why should I have to pay for specialized hardware that won't be usable if I move and the new apartment uses DSL or docsis. Give me an rj45 (or sfp for some fiber connections) and let me put whatever Router I want behind it.
This needs crazy accurate timing for the upstream. The head end needs to know the exact delay to your particular box to give it a "grant" to transmit at exactly the right time so transmit bandwidth is not wasted by idle time or multiple boxes transmitting at the same time and corrupting each other.
You don't want brand X modems with dodgy configurations in this. Of course as a consumer you'd want "as little modem as possible" i.e. just give me an ethernet port running DHCP or PPPOE and let me do the rest.
1. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/fiber-gpon/products/uf-i...
2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/fiber-gpon/products/wave...
They do however have the right to mandate certain configuration parameters just how they are allowed to mandate you connect something that isn't a noise generator to e.g. a cable TV outlet. Well, being able to limit you to connect devices that conform to some spec.
https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/fiber-gpon/products/u...
Not that I had the need or anything, but it's similarly priced to the example in 2. Seems to me like maybe they're phasing it out soon?
The common rationale behind this I'm aware of is that an ONT device is technically a computer with persistence, hosting arbitrary code and data that you cannot (or at least not supposed to) audit or alter, despite being on your premises, operated on your cost (electricity, cooling, storage), and specifically deployed for your use. These properties hold for SFP modules too in general, not just SFP ONTs (they're all computers with persistence).
The catch is that this is further true for all of these kinds of modems.
The counter-catch is that despite that, for DSL specifically, you could absolutely bring your own modem, hw and sw both.
The counter-counter-catch is that with DSL, you were not connecting to a shared media, but point-to-point. This is unlike DOCSIS and GPON, where a misconfigured endpoint can disrupt service for other people, and possibly damage their or the provider's devices and lines.
That's all the lore I'm aware of at least.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bidi+sfp looking like this:
https://www.fs.com/de/products/39196.html fitting to this interface specification from the ISP:
https://www.wilhelm-tel.de/schnittstellenbeschreibung which is AON also known as 1000BASEBX20-U.
Just have to watch out for the right wavelengths/colors for TX/RX(transmit/recieve/upstream/downstream)
This is not true for everwhere. You can totally use your own ONT or fiber modem with DTAG.
You are not required to buy their "Glasfaser Modem 2" you can buy any ONT Modem.
You are not required to use any of their equipment, they give you the data to connect via PPPOE directly.
I bought a house with FTTH in 2023 and never used any Telekom hardware. Nobody forces you to use the peer DNS. The telekom DNS isn't complying to https://cuii.info/anordnungen/ because they want to but to avoid being sued everytime some company wants to block an illegal streaming site.
For practical purposes there's the problem (at least a few years ago?) though that Akamai in particular uses DNS to steer you to the correct portion of its CDN and the default IPs returned by independent DNS resolvers tended to have relatively abysmal peering with the Telekom network that was getting completely overloaded at peak times.
Unfortunately "use <insert favourite DNS provider here> everywhere except for Akamai CDN, for which use the Telekom DNS" isn't something that consumer routers support, so you'd have to start running your own custom DNS resolver to work around that problem…
Why is PiHole necessary to dodge DNS limitations: can't you just put Quad9 as the DNS in your router/FritzBox?
Now I switched from PiHole to running unbound on a... Pi! I did that years ago: do it, you won't be disappointed.
I don't have the shiny PiHole UI anymore but I don't care: unbound supports wildcards to blacklist domains and that's what I care the most about.
So a Pi with unbound then dnsmasq on my Linux desktop: this makes for very speedy lookups (as most queries are hitting the cache).
Solution: I got my Starlink. 3x speed. No crappy service. Weather independent. And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) .
[ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
Sounds like an access line issue with DSL (lol)
DSL is so old you can't even order it in Sweden anymore.
Also, the post above would be a core issue not access.
I remember having to walk to a buddies home just to check the tutorial:
Last apartment I rented Telekom was the only option and that was one of the reasons why I decided to move.
Starlink I would love to try but as there's building and trees blocking the horizon it's not an option here sadly.
That's nothing compared to what German authorities can do to me. Germany is a country where you get police searching your home for torrenting movies or making stupid jokes on Facebook. So yeah.
Also about enshittification - one could argue that our local ISPs never left that phase to begin with.
> [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
Right - but then you also depend on an US service here. And the USA changed policy where Europeans became enemies ("we won't give you arms to defend against Russian invaders! Greenland will be occupied by our military soon!").
It's a bad situation, lose-lose here. I don't think the price difference is the primary problem though; the behaviour of Telekom is the problem. That must change. The state has to ensure fairness rather than allow monopolies to milk The People.
don't they do local downlinks? at least for countries they have an agreement with or where the infrastructure is available?
Musk is a subject of the US president. Like all American CEO’s he has to pay his tribute and jump when the president’s law enforcement says to.
Obviously the satellites were never modernized. But it does work, for a few thousand terminals for all of Europe with 2x to 10x the ping Starlink provides.
It's like a lot of things in the EU: on the one hand the EU absolutely requires this infrastructure, or they become dependent on foreign nations for critical infrastructure. But they won't pay. It's not even that expensive. Starlink was built with budgets that would be double-digit millions per year per EU country. But the main problem always repeats: they can't agree who gets the money/business.
If you calculate the lifespan and cost of a Starlink satellite you will come to the obvious conclusion: it will be very hard for Starlink to break even. Of course, the same can be said for most of Musk's businesses (perhaps all. I'm not actually aware of any exceptions)
We don't have up to date revenue numbers but let's look at spending $5B a year on sattelite launches. That's probably around half their current revenue, and they're gaining customers quickly. They're doing about 100 launches a year, and each launch is about 30 $1M satellites and $15M of rocket. That fits into the budget.
And for just maintaining the constellation they could cut the number of launches in half.
They're online but unfortunately it seems they don't sell directly to consumers? So you have to find a local reseller. Sounds needlessly complicated.
Apparently Amazon's constellation should be available for consumers within the next 6 months as well. Qianfan not until next year (I didn't realize they had hit delays). So there should be direct-to-consumer Starlink alternatives SOON™.
2022 Russia controversy
In March 2022, media reported that OneWeb was scheduled to launch a batch of 36 satellites from Baikonur cosmodrome days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There were calls for the UK to cancel the launch. Russia said the launch had already been paid for and would not be refunded, and would be cancelled from the Russian side unless OneWeb provided additional assurance that the satellites would never be used for military purposes and the British Government disposed of its shares in the company. The British government refused this demand and the launch was cancelled, along with other Russian launches. OneWeb tried through negotiations to get the stack of 36 satellites back, stranded in Kazakhstan due to political reasons. However, these negotiations never progressed. As OneWeb was on the verge of completing its 1st generation satellite network, they gave up hope in March 2023 on further attempts to get their satellites back, potentially scrapping the batch. The satellites were insured for $50 million, and OneWeb received the insurance money for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb#:~:text=2022%2...
The state is the monopoly here.
Telekom is still partially state-owned (~27%), since they were, back in the 90s, privatized from the former total monopoly "Deutsche Bundespost" and the related ministry "Bundespostministerium". Nowadays, the parts of the ministry that were back then regulating EM spectrum, allowable phones (basically phone police, you had to rent from Bundespost or go to jail) and generally being corrupt (relations of the former ministry to copper manufacturers is why they botched the first fibre rollouts in '95 and then ignored the topic for 20 years). Nowadays, the "Regulierungsbehoerde", staffed with the same people, is supposed to regulate their former colleagues at Telekom. Telekom got all the networks and was never split up, so it still has a (~85%?) monopoly on everything copper basically, as well as on customers, using this monopoly to bully other ISPs as well as it's own customers and extending this monopoly into future tech. And the state has a financial interest in this regulation being as lax as possible. So you can imagine how this goes...
Then you call their customer support, tech comes out, it's not raining anymore and everything works, and the problem doesn't get fixed.
As for the starlink: I noticed that clouds or weather ( rain snow ) does not have a true effect. Must be the frequency is not absorbed by the water in the air or similar effects. Only hard blocking with construction or big canopies of trees is struggling.
But after living in 3 different apartments there, I never had a luxury to be able to connect the internet from a small provider. Their coverage is very, very limited. So it always was Telekom/Vodafone/o2.
Haha, I used to have that as well when tech swapped from ADSL2 to VDSL2 (IIRC skipped out on VDSL1), except then the line wasn't down, I'd have severe packet loss (which resulted in lag in gaming, and disconnects). So they blamed our inner house's phone lines. Then some dude came, checked everything in the house, and couldn't find the issue. I said of course not, it isn't raining.
After it got escalated further it turned out it was rotten equipment at the DSLAM. They replaced it and boom, problem was gone.
No hair on my head (and I ain't bald knock on wood) wants to have all my internet traffic first routed through an American neonazi, but if the choice is nothing (or something severely broken) or that, I can see where you are coming from. Whereas I can pick between FttH (XGS-PON), DSL (VDSL2), or cable. With the latter two being fiber up till a few hunderd meters to my house (I know where both PoPs physically are in the neighborhood, as I have seen technicians on both places). The fiber one is further away, and larger (for more households), but that is OK. It can handle that much distance. Technician showed me a photo from his smartphone when my fiber got down due to specifically my fiber connectivity destroyed at the PoP. That was a lot of fiber I saw. Good cable management though.
While I chuckled at "American neonazi", the company SpaceX is doing great things.
There are no sane and legitimate reasons for running an SMTP server on a residential connection. Even most server providers will block it unless you give them some very good reasons.
Blocking 53 is just weird though.
Although the GP wrote "53/tcp" that is a weird situation, because most (not all) DNS is over UDP.
One day I suddenly found my DNS resolver logs were very active with veritable gibberish. And it seems that my router had been pwned and joined some sort of nefarious botnet.
I only found this out because I was using NextDNS at the time, and my router's own resolver was pointed there, and NextDNS was keeping meticulous, detailed logs of every query.
So I nipped it in the bud, by determining which device it was, by ruling out other devices, and by replacing the infected demon router with a safe one.
But yeah, if your 53/udp or 25/tcp is open, you can pretty much expect to join a botnet of the DNS or SMTP-spam varieties.
Restricting ports also doesn't mitigate it, as a port scanner can easily find out I'm running this or that vulnerable server software on a non-standard port.
It's none of the ISP's business to restrict the ports I should be using.
There is no such thing. A connection to the internet should be equal to any other connection to the internet, modulo BGP peering. Noone has a right to dictate what services I run or don't run, what protocols I speak or don't speak, what traffic I accept or deny, but *me*. That's the whole point of being on the internet rather than Prodigy or Compuserve or something.
The physical location of that connection is irrelevant. Maybe I feel my servers are safer in a datacenter. Maybe I feel they're safer in my basement. In my case, it is very much the latter, and again, you don't get to make that call. I do.
It's not your connection. It's your ISPs. They are also their IPs.
> Noone has a right to dictate what services I run or don't run, what protocols I speak or don't speak, what traffic I accept or deny, but me. That's the whole point of being on the internet rather than Prodigy or Compuserve or something.
Then become your own ISP. Get an ASN (easy), acquire your own IPv4 and IPv6 space (also easy, but v4 is expensive), get a commercial connection that'll allow for BGP, and go ahead, do whatever you want with your IP addresses.
> The physical location of that connection is irrelevant.
It's not about the physical location, it's about who's IP addresses are you using. If they are not yours, the service provider has every right to restrict what you do with them.
Would you also say your mobile phone operator is violating net neutrality by putting you behind CGNAT that you can't forward arbitrary ports through? You can pay a bunch of money to get a private APN and get public IPv4 addresses. Would you call that an unblock fee?
In France, CG-NAT is getting widespread even for fixed, FTTH links. I'm typing this connected to SFR, which provides a static IPv6 /56, but IPv4 is behind CG-NAT. I can't host anything on IPv4. I think there's an option to get a fixed, internet routable address, but not on the "discount" plan I'm on. I hear you maybe can ask support to get you out of CG-NAT, but that doesn't seem very reliable.
Free (local ISP), by default, doesn't give a static IP for fiber, but you can ask for one for free through your online account page (you just need to tick a box).
Why does that seem reasonable to you? Why should dynamic IPs not be able to receive incoming connections? It costs them nothing to let those packets through.
> disingenuous
Bad.
> Would you also say your mobile phone operator is violating net neutrality by putting you behind CGNAT that you can't forward arbitrary ports through?
CGNAT is pretty awful, but at least there's a reason for connections to fail.
But sure, if I had control I would mandate that CGNAT lets you forward ports. Maybe you don't always control the external port, but there shouldn't be any other compromises.
> You can pay a bunch of money to get a private APN and get public IPv4 addresses. Would you call that an unblock fee?
That's a workaround to get a different connection, not an unblock, so no.
If you get static, you keep that IP for a while. You suffer the consequences of your bad setup, you have to deal with FW vendors and after you leave, the IP will be offline for long enough that it will probably "cool off".
And secondly, while I don't like it, we need to keep in mind net neutrality was not written for selfhosters. It was written so an ISP can't zero-rate their own streaming service, or block their competitors. It was about internet access, not internet participation. The ownerwhelmimg majority of people are not and don't care to be "on" the internet, they want to "access" things that are on the internet. That's why NAT is still everywhere.
Define quickly? My modem stays attached on the same IP for months at a time.
> so if one customer get an IP onto a bunch of firewall blocklists
That can happen anyway! Most of those are based on outgoing connections!
> a bunch of other angry customers as well as beg all the firewall vendors to unblock those IPs
Does this happen today on the huge number of ISPs that let you open ports on a dynamic IP? I'm not aware of it.
> we need to keep in mind net neutrality was not written for selfhosters
Well I'm not really focused on the idea of net neutrality, just whether it's reasonable to make customers unconnectable, and I say it's not reasonable.
I've talked to a few people (Telemach customers) who told me it happens every now and then, they call the support center that tells them to restart the modem (even if they'd done it before) and then the connection magically works at full speed again.
Could it just be that it all goes through Telekom Slovenije who does some weird load balancing? Definitely worth an investigation, but ZPS might be a better address for this than AKOS.
Article 7.2 of their terms of service https://telemach.si/download/terms/splosni-pogoji-poslovanja...
> Naročnik se obvezuje, da po priključitvi na omrežje izvajalca: > ... > * ne bo postavljal strežnikov na svoji lokaciji, razen v primeru sklenitve ustreznega dogovora z izvajalcem, > ...
It states that customers are bound not to setup servers on their internet connection point without prior aproval by the ISP. It sounds against the law to forbid this, albeit ianal.
* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)
* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)
* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)
* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)
I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.
Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.
What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.
And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.
For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.
Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions.
T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.
The providers are then free to either move out of the EU market, or let their non-EU traffic flow via the (then likely larger) unrestricted pipes at DECIX and AMSIX. If they think that routing everything via EU is cheaper instead of just peering better in the other parts of the world to deliver traffic locally, then be it, that is their own economic freedom to decide so.
But they will realistically not do that. Also, SDNs will likely never go back to serving content in Europe from e.g. the US. Good connectivity is just generally the economically better option.
That being said, T1 companies like Deutsche Telekom who also serve a large consumer base via broadband and mobile and not just other large business networks are probably more vulnerable to such legislation than an exclusive transit provider.
Regulating peering how? Freedom of commerce is one of the core pillars of the EU. Forcing a company to do business with another company is insanity.
If DTAG doesn't want to peer with CloudFlare, you can't force them.
Mobile networks have been forced to allow roaming in other countries for a certain low fee, and that is actually enforced and has happened. It's clear the EU has no qualms about forcing companies to do business a certain way when it serves some greater interest.
Roam-like-at-home is also not a particularly good comparison here, because the the roaming fees were basically a price gouging scheme.
Don't like DTAG? You're free to switch to another ISP.
Because I don't believe it's about any additional cost -- it's only about additional revenue that could be extracted. That's a behavior you don't like to see from a state-owned ex-"Only Offer Allowed" monopolist that is still dominating the market while the government entities tasked with regulating the market are closing both eyes.
Legislation could focus on the following general rules, without favoring some providers over the others:
* If you participate on an IX node, there is no reasonable technical or financial reason not to peer with the other participants at that node. Of course this would also mean that participants have to be protected against price-gouging of IXs when they need to scale up their uplink for that reason.
* Alternatively, you could conditionally allow paid peering, but in that case require certain availability guarantees on your general transit connection.
* If you do not want to do business with a certain party, it should be all or nothing. Blacklist them organization-wide. No misleading to consumers that a content provider just appears slow, announce that you do not want to play with e.g. Netflix anymore and if your customers do not like it, they will switch.
* If you want to opt out of all of this regulation, you are free to run fiber yourself and just directly connect with everybody you are interested in. That is expensive? Too bad.
I don't believe that there's a single lawmaker, anywhere in the world, who understands anything about the fundamentals of IP transit. But no doubt they have ISP buddies who understand everything about it, and no doubt they'll be the ones actually writing the legislation.
And I have a feeling that as soon as that is seriously discussed, the current exploitation of market power will stop rather quickly, without any need for actual regulation.
This one I actually agree with.
They recognised where the monopoly was: the incumbent telcos with millions of customers that had to go through them to get anywhere else.
So the government insisted that such incumbents make available space in their exchanges for third parties (not for free!), and to allow their customers to use the third parties for telephone and/or internet service, rather than themselves.
A similar argument and regulation could be made today. It could only apply to ISPs with a significant number of endpoint customers. It could require that the ISP make peering available to third parties, at the third party's cost, but the resulting transit should be settlement-free. It could require that if a peer asks the ISP to upgrade, because the ISP is deliberately underprovisioning, the ISP is compelled to allow the third party to pay reasonable costs to upgrade both sides (so the ISP can't sit on its hands, can't brazen it out, and can't set an impossible price)
This already happens all the time, and especially in telecommunications. Interconnection is a core of telecommunications law everywhere.
Just nearly everybody except Telekom is doing this on a liberal and informal not-even-handshake basis. On ISP scale, you either invest in infrastructure, or pay rent for network ports or cross-links, and you generally want your traffic usage to be smooth without spikes, and also go to the destination without going through your expensive ports more than once. So general connectivity is more important than any kind of traffic metering.
This also describes transit and describes getting internet service at home. I wouldn't say my cellphone peers with my provider. My cellphone is very much subordinate to my provider, not a peer.
DT thinks it's important enough that it can extort everyone.
A good policy for ISPs is to peer as many places and networks as possible, and carry traffic between your peers and customers, and customers and customers, and transit and customers, but not between peers and peers, or peers and transit. This way one end is paying for all traffic you carry. If you are a bully, you can try to make both ends pay.
Well no. Transit means that you use another AS (usually by a larger ISP) to get connectivity to a certain AS. And as for your internet service at home, unless you announce an AS, you are not peering with anyone.
On ISP level, routing tables are built via BGP. BGP needs Autonomous Systems (AS) as organization unit to work. If you are not an AS you are never a peer as you are not on equal footing.
As a rule of thumb, if your edge router has a default route set, we are very likely talking about different scales.
Looking at this case specifically, "fast lane" is not a technical term so maybe in your mind it only means packet scheduling not refusal to upgrade capacity but that's not a universal definition.
They claim Telekom keeps their transit access points intentionally underdimensioned. In order to be reachable at decent speed by Telekom customers, internet services need a direct, paid contract with Telekom.
Edit: The section numbering is weird. Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? On my phone, don't have a good overview.
Ask the paper how many 'r's in strawberry
Also Vodafone outsourced their peering to a subcontractor, and doesn't do any public peering at all anymore. So I guess Telekom still isn't the worst Network at all
Just checkout DTAG's 5G network coverage on Breitbandatlas.
Also Switzerland being included is at least for me a nice perk that O2/Vodafone don't offer. But compared to other European Countries offerings it's obviously shit.
Also Fraenk is even cheaper than Congstar
https://www.teltarif.de/telekom-aktionstarif-prepaid/news/10...
I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization).
It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
Their service is good on a technical level but they have the most aggressive and obnoxious sales reps. They scammed me twice with open lies on the phone (probably abusing also the fact that german is not my mother tongue) and had to fight for ages with their customer service later to get the issue resolved.
If you wanna go with them, buy on their website and hang up if anyone from 1und1 ever calls. They are official 1und1 reps and they will prove it you yet behave like scammers.
DT called me on phone over and over again, so much that I had to block them on my FritzBox. Several times they even knocked at my door.
Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.
They were the only provider that hijacked DNS lookup failures to redirect to their own page.
They're gone out of this market now, fortunately.
because no other ISP can enter for a reasonable price. Germany should have made the infrastructure open-access for all providers, just like they did in Switzerland.
Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3]
So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own.
[1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl...
[2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German)
[3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...
Largest economy in eu but very unstable and riddled with wierd burocracy.
Strongest worker protection, but very large amount of lobbysm.
Most advanced railway system in eu, transformed into a joke by interdiction from said lobbies.
You have to pay a "radio tax" to help funding press and keep it independent, but then fuck net neutrality.
And I could continue with more point, but I don't want to get too political.
But it's possible it's just my personal bias.
Also, what I'm not sure, I'm trying to find out, if there was a change in the last 1 or 2 decades, or was always like that. Like now, except for things like you here a siren and cars open like Moises opened the water, in many other things, seems to be not more organized that any other country. Hell, sometimes compared with Bangladesh seems to be lagging behind (point example: birth certificates)
* Old Androids are not repairable because they're shit, not because a megacorp works hard to make repair impossible
* Old Androids may be hacked by a pegasus-like software (just like most new smartphones anyway), but at least the operating system does not lock you into its own closed ecosystem.
You may disagree, and correctly, because it's in part irrational, but many Europeans just dislike Apple and consider Android a more open/free ecosystem.
If you run like that it doesn't matter what phone you use and your privacy and openness arguments are moot.
Based.
Fsk Apple. Soy aah
France is certainly better
However, I remember the anecdote of how France has two different companies for the trains and trainstations. The first ordered trains which were a little bit to wide for the trainstations, due to a miss communication.
When I read about this, I thought „this could have been Germany too.“
Imagine an institution being dependent and biased in exactly the opposite way that fox news is independent and balanced. Imagine a government-independent institution where you join a controlling organ and after sworn in you are invited to 2 after-meetings at the same time. One invitation comes in a red letter the other in a blue letter. Yet everybody has to be independent because that is what it is supposed to be. Germans can be very very stubborn about that.
this is sorta incomplete and wrong but I think gets you the taste for the setup? If not complain in the replies :)
I mean, same as in most countries taxpayers effectively sponsor government propaganda.
I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of the last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.