Deutsche Telekom kills fixed line IP flatrates | Hacker News Reader

Deutsche Telekom kills fixed line IP flatrates

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91 pointsrmoriz70 comments

Their objective is clear: Promote their own cloud-services and make deals with cloud-service providers, since those services are not metered. They already have a deal with Spotify in place for their mobile network ( bandwidth throttling, after a certain volume is already common practice for all providers ). So effectively their are killing net neutrality.

I hope that plan strikes back and they loose money and customers over this.

The only problem is that they OWN most of the cables and most other providers need to rent at least the "last mile" or maybe even other parts of their infrastructure (i.e. 1&1 uses Telekom DNS services) so there is a big chance, that others will follow :/

They'll HAVE to follow because Deutsche Telekom will hand on the limitations to their resellers.

To be picky ... Most other providers aren't resellers of Telekom plans. They own their own infrastructure and only have to rent the cables going from the distribution box to the customer's house. And this line is not charged by the traffic or bandwith. And Telekom can not change the way how they charge this line. There are federal regulations for that.

And to be specific, as customer of 1&1 I seem to be having a VDSL connection (50M) like any other T-Online customer. My host is some *.t-ipconnect.de and Youtube is as throttled as it is for a direct contract. If they now add bandwidth caps on top of that, they can go screw themselves.

So that's why YouTube is still so flaky even on my 50Mbit connection. That's ridiculous. With a 200GB data cap, what's the point in paying for that? I use 500GB/month without even trying.

I think O2 is also just a simple reseller of Telekom's VDSL. So apparently we have a competitive market for standard DSL up to 16Mbit (if you're very lucky, but often well under 10Mbit in practice), but not for the current generation of highspeed internet.

But they only rent the last mile from the Telekom. Starting at the DSLAM they usually bring their own infrastructure. (Except reseller contracts).

In the last years there also have been many small, local ISPs popping up, often partly owned by the city (Stadtwerke). Some start rolling FTTH connections and finally bring germany to the internet-first-world.

Cable providers, at least Kabel Deutschland (which is the only option here where I live), are sadly no alternative, while they offer high bandwidths without volume based throttling, the traffic shaping they do at peak times and for torrent traffic is ridiculous and makes their service almost unusable.

I am lucky enough to live in Cologne we have fibre in almost every household (NetCologne) so I don't really worry .. But still most people have to rely on Telekom offerings cause there are no other options.

Well, we're not so lucky in Backnang. It's the year 2013 and still, my connection keeps randomly dropping as if it's making a tribute to the dial-up days (tried many adsl providers; no luck. I haven't tried Kabel BW though.) I guess the situation is similar in many other small German cities?

In Berlin the situation is quite bad. There are these moronic DSL providers, which deliver the connection when they feel like it. It's quite expensive, slow and there are interruptions quite often.

The alternative is Kabel Deutchland. Their connection quality is pretty ok, but the throttling every evening when I get home from work is annoying as hell.

What I really miss from Helsinki is that when you order e.g. a cable connection, they'll deliver it the same day when you made the contract. It's fast and reliable. No throttling, no limits.

Although I understand why the situation is what it is. And still I'm not complaining, this connection is good enough for the most of the time.

Worst part is that they are excluding their own services from that traffic. So you can watch Telekom IP TV without buying a traffic extension, but for movies from the iTunes store you have to pay iTunes for media and Telekom for traffic. Nice one!

This is why we need net neutrality regulation in Germany.

This is why we need the state to take back the phone network it paid for in the first place, manage it and rent it out to the Telekom like any other ISP ...

Having the state own that infrastructure introduces its own concerns though, especially re: privacy and anonymity.

It hasn't been an issue in the US. The telecoms voluntarily provide sensitive customer info to the government.

Ironic then that if you had sent those same communications through the government-organized postal service that it would be much more difficult to legally divulge that info to other parts of the government.

I kind of agree. But I get the opinion that provision of basic infrastructure like water supply, electricity, roads, railroad tracks and telecommunications should be handled by a democratic government instead of a profit-oriented enterprise... And additionally, I tend to trust an elected government more than any enterprise that can basically do whatever they want

Try saying that to a conservative. You'll be branded a commie, as if being one is shameful or anything.

I think it's less about needing 'net neutrality' regulation and more about separation of priorities. Basically ISPs shouldn't offer media delivery services.

Please s/ISPs/Common Carriers/

An NSP should be permitted to deliver vertical content, please don't stifle the free market. The monopoly on access should not be permitted to impose a tariff on competition.

What about stiffling a free market? What's hard about forming two separate companies?

IIRC, phone companies are common carriers, but your Internet service provider is not. That's part of the reason for the Safe Harbour provisions in the DMCA.

Basically, the person providing you with access to the Internet, should not also be trying to provide you with other services that compete with 'the Internet.' It provides incentive for them to violate net neutrality to boost their bottom line (e.g. What if we charge people more for access to YouTube, while our service is free? What if we change to a metered bandwidth model, but put in an exception for our service?).

The Pirate Party, Social Democrats and the Greens already want net neutrality. Nice of the Telekom to play the bad boy who will cause a net neutrality law.

This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands.

Net neutrality wasn't particularly high up on the political agenda until the country's largest telco arrogantly announced their traffic filtering plans and started a public shitstorm.

Politicians may not give a flying fuck about net neutrality, but they have a good nose for popular measures that don't cost them anything. Pissing all over the already hated telco's party is an easy way to score points.

Well two of them won't make it into any decision making position after the next election and we know what happens to the Social Democrats in a big coalition...

"Wer hat uns verraten..."

No, we don't know. This is HN, not forum.discussgermanpoliticsinenglish.com. Care to elaborate?

Here's another idea, let's not even go there...

German politics is just as stale a topic as anywhere really..

"Wer hat uns verraten... Sozialdemokraten" is a rhyme and means "Who betrayed us? Sozialdemocrates!" originally used by communist because the Sozialdemocrates never where revolutionary or anti-capitalist.

The slogan is used right now to say the SPD is very weak on all their positions and a fan of half hearted compromises.

>The slogan is used right now to say the SPD is very weak on all their positions and a fan of half hearted compromises.

Funny how pervasive the "progressive* party leadership has the will but doesn't know the way" trope is across progressives of all stripes and nations (e.g., Mr Obama's perceived capitulation on the so-called Public Option for healthcare). One could probably write a doctoral thesis analyzing the reasons for the ubiquity of the sentiment!

*Word chosen over 'leftist' or 'democratic' to avoid differences in meaning from country to country

The greens got their way on nuclear power

That might not be an issue actually.

I don't see the CDU necessarily opposed to net neutrality. They are not known for being net-friendly so this it seems obvious that they might be but I don't see net neutrality being in conflict with their ideology or provoking any other problems for them, at least not in a big way. There is no downside for security or copyright stuff to be aware of here, if the don't cooperate with the FDP after the next coalition the business side will also not be a problem. Supporting net neutrality could be a good and fairly painless way to make the more moderate parts of the party and voter base happy, which is something that becomes more and more important after recent dramas.

This translation leaves a lot to be desired. Some people in the comments look like they could benefit from a better job of it, so here you go:

After the information was initially leaked, Deutsche Telekom has officially confirmed that they plan to introduce volume restrictions (throttling?) for all landline broadband connections from here on out. Starting May 2nd, the performance specs for all new contracts will include a fixed bandwidth restriction dependent on total upload/download volume. For the time being, the new restrictions won't affect existing customers.

Till now, Deutsche Telekom had only ever introduced such stipulations on VDSL ("very-high-bit-rate DSL") - and fiber-optic connections with download speeds between 25 and 200 Mbps. After reaching a monthly download limit of 400Gb for customers with 200 Mbps connections and 75Gb for customers with up to 16 Mbps, the throttled data rate drops down to a uniform 0.384 Mbps - regardless of previous connection speed. (50 Mbps and 100 Mbps connections, if you're curious, are restricted to 200 and 300 Gb per month, respectively, before throttling.)

For now, however, connection throttling, while practical, is not expected to be implemented yet - Deutsche Telekom is merely securing for itself the right to do so.

When exactly the implementation will be introduced depends on how "traffic on the internet grows and develops." "As of yet, it's been our expectation that we won't introduce the limitation in a technical manner until 2016," said Michael Hagspihl, Director of Marketing at Deutsche Telekom.

Once the throttle is actually implemented, customers should still be able to purchase unlimited monthly transfer volume as an "add-on" option. But that possibility is not set in stone. The use of IPTV (internet protocol television), Telekom's VOIP communications, and the sharing of connections via "WLAN To Go" will not count against the monthly traffic limit. Reason being, according to Deutsche Telekom, that customers pay separately for these services. Civil liberties activists and consumer advocates alike criticize such practices as violations of net neutrality.

Deutsche Telekom justifies their move with the ever-growing volume of traffic, which requires continuous development/expansion of their network. A nationwide fiber-optic infrastructure for all of Germany would cost €80 Billion, Deutsche Telekom says. And that's just for residential connections. But bottlenecks develop on the backbone of the network, irrespective of whether DSL or fiber is used on the "last mile." Internet connections with higher data rates would only squeeze those bottlenecks even tighter.

This is the introduction of the end of net neutrality. It's only a matter of time that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon have to pay directly to Deutsche Telekom to exclude DT customer's traffic from the volume limits.

It's like a medieval toll road…

... On the consumer internet.

The Enterprise will exist without Net Neutrality just as it exists without the unreasonable tariffs we suffer as consumers. Google wil lhave to pay money to get around CONSUMER traffic and volume limits, but I don't think you'll see volume limits on business circuits in the foreseeable future.

I paid for a business line from Comcast even though I am residential for this very reason.

How much does that run you? Has the monthly changed much over time? For residential at least, Comcast is known to give you a sweetheart deal for the first 12 or 24 months, then balloon your monthly.

I pay for the very basic speed, 16mbps down 3mbps up. I get pretty close to that most days. It costs me a bit over $70/mo after taxes for just Internet access. Comcast does offer phone and TV bundles that include limited-time deals, but I didn't go for that and this price hasn't changed on me in 3 years. There's no monthly data cap and the connection speed is more reliable, which is why I'm happy.

I did have to pay a significant amount of money to get it set up. I don't remember exactly what the price was, but I believe it was in the neighborhood of $200 setup fee.

Now that's a ripoff that countries with monopolized market have to live with.

Where it isn't you can get 30/15 for $18/mo.

It might be a ripoff, but it's the best I can get. You learn to live with what you have. Would I like cheaper, faster Internet? Hell yes. Can I get it? Nope :(

Indeed. Especially since they already leaked that certain VOIP offerings, certain IP TV channels, and in general certain streaming providers would exempt from volume restrictions. That means they'll monitor our traffic and whenever we're connecting to a partner company, everything will be fine. The bandwidth cap is only intended for, you know, the actual free internet.

They already do that in their mobile offerings. In certain plans, Spotify traffic is excluded from the monthly traffic limit

Or they can just cut germany from their services. Three days without google and facebook - the german citizens will be busy flaying alive DT officials.

Flaying alive top corporate executives and beer makes the perfect octoberfest - lots of fun for everyone and not a single human being will be harmed.

I am not sure everyone will perceive it like that.

Imagine a random, un-nerdy German, entering "www.facebook.com" into his browser, and getting a themed page, written bij Facebook, about how DT is effectively blackmailing them. Note: Facebook controls what this person sees, not DT (theoretically of course they could modify the page but I doubt they're that evil, even if they were fast enough).

If Facebook does some effort to write up a decent piece of text there, then I bet most people would root for Facebook, not DT, in this case. Especially so if the mainstream media does not explicitly appear to disagree. In fact, papers like Bild will love a healthy scandal and will likely choose Facebook's side just to blow things up. (idem for Google, of course)

Ironically (or not, and I missed your reference) random, un-nerdy Germans already fight with Youtube videos being blocked and are faced with a similar message very often [1].

I see at least two problems: the leverage that the other party actually has (GEMA, DT) and the willingness of the citizens to do something about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_YouTube_videos_in_G...

Google is in the content distribution business. Remember their goal is "to organize all the world's information." For all intents and purposes you can simply replace information with content and their business philosophy still holds. If the ISPs get to control the pipes, then they get to decide what content is provided and how it's organized. That sets them up as a competitor with Google. I fully expect Google to not be happy about this. They may or may not strike a deal, but if they do, it will be reluctantly. Nobody wants internet providers to simply be a utility more than Google.

Why should bandwidth be charged for on anything other than a per-gigabyte basis, perhaps with congestion rates for peak hours?

Because almost all of the cost of the network does not depend on usage?

So what? There is certainly a capital cost to building and maintaining the network, which scales with the provisioned capacity. That fixed cost can be apportioned on a per-GB basis.

It's not different than the electric grid. Power plants are pretty much binary creatures--they're either on or off. Each incremental kWh doesn't really cost any more once the plant is up and operating at design capacity, except to the extent that sufficient extra kWh might necessitate more capacity and thus more fixed costs.

Those extra kilowatts can be sold to other areas. That is exactly what is happening in most instances.

You can't sell the left over bandwidth of an infrastructure you provide to a consumer.

That depends on the power plant type. Gas fired power plants are very much variable. Nuclear not so much.

what metric would you use instead?

Statistical multiplexation of the service rate (bandwidth) is the inflection for cost to the consumer. On most SP networks, if aggregate user constant load utilization increases past 10-15% committed rates, the cost model must bear service load into account.

There are several possible business models: Charge every customer the same amount, charge per Mbps, charge per GB, etc. I don't think there's one "obviously correct" business model.

it's not to say that there is one obviously correct model, but to say there are clearly very incorrect models.

While portions of the public want to buy 'unlimited' service, the only way that 'unlimited' service can exist at rates not deemed unrealistic is if most users of the 'unlimited' services do not create heavy usage. It's a tanstafl issue; once everyone is a heavy user, the subsidy created by uneven usage no longer exists.

Traffic in bulk is cheap as fuck. The new tariffs don't reflect the real market prices but are just another way of ripping off existing customers with a functionally defective product.

1. Even wholesale access is getting pretty cheap on guaranteed capacity. (Under $1/mbps). So it'd be nice to see that trickle down. No reason I shouldn't be able to pay $x for a guaranteed up/down.

2. I'd love to buy such a transfer based service, assuming I'd get top speed and pay for transfer. The problem is that carriers want to sell "unlimited" for marketing reasons, then tack on huge "overage" fees (Rogers in Canada was in the dollar range I think). Congestion rates at peak times make it extra confusing.

3. The issue of excluding their own services from the limits is what people are annoyed about, as it destroys net neutrality. I'm fine with an access provider doing that, but not if they have an effective monopoly on access.

It's not so much the metric used, though GB transferred is pretty disconnected from actual costs, you can do some hand waiving and say it is generally related most of the time.

It is the price per gig that is typically charged that is the real crime.

I couldn't tell what the fee is to exceed the transfer caps, but either:

1) there is no way to pay to exceed the cap

2) the charge to exceed the cap will be excessive, like it is almost everywhere else on the planet

In either case, the motive is to steer consumers to other DT services or partners (read: paid peers) that are not capped.

I'd love to see this unfold differently.

I’m ok with that, but if that happens I want it to be fair.

E.g. do it like ISPs buy traffic from each other: Each month you pay for the average bandwidth you used, excluding spikes. That would be great.

What we have now is not paying per GB. For once, you do not get to use unused GBs in the next month. They are just lost forever.

I want the network to treat the 100Kb I use during a VoIP call much differently than 100Kb of a file I'm downloading.

The real plan of the DTAG is something no one has thought of yet. Because this will only affect new customers, the new customer-base will drop, if not vanish entirely.

Now, the DTAG can complain at the BNetzA (regulatory body) that they don't get new customers and that they can't maintain the infrastructure because of missing money, and so can increase the amount they charge of resellers.

At the same time, though, they will lower their own pricing, so that they have a massive competitive advantage again.

If you look at their current conditions, for Call & Surf VDSL and fiber contracts there is already a cap in place [1]. It is not enforced, though, but certainly will be in the future. Entertain contracts on the other hand do not mention this for VDSL, only fiber [2].

From my basic understanding they cannot change that, so I switched to Entertain for the next two years. I currently costs the same as my old contracts for 24 month.

[1] http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40569.pdf [2] http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40926.pdf

IMHO throttling to 6Mbit/s is a lot different than throttling to 384kbit/s

Agreed, but it still hurts. Also, the upload goes down from 10mbit to 0,5, which is quite severe.

Time to evolve those mesh networks!

Wireless mesh technology can't touch the capacity and latency profile of traditional last-mile access networks even with bandwidth caps.

This is charging per byte. They're implementing an amount of traffic bundled with the base package, throttling when it's exceeded and the ability to purchase additional full speed traffic blocks.

Charging per byte is a "good thing". It encourages carriers to go after the top 1% of their bandwidth users. Otherwise, they treat them as a cost.

Even better, it places a lower bound on the value of a piece of media. Here in NZ, I'm paying US$1.20/GB. That means that 720P torrent of Game of Thrones would cost me US$1.70 to download. All of a sudden, people can compare torrenting something with getting Sky (HBO provider).

Even better, if the total value is around the cost of traffic, it encourages the provider to do a deal with the telco for cheap transit and revenue splits. That typically results in better performance for the end customer - such as Google's YouTube caches.

The problem with this is that the actual transit cost per GB never seems to come close to what the ISPs charge. $1.20 per GB could very well be 100 times what the ISP ends up paying to actually move the GB. The basic problem is that the up-front infrastructure and maintenance costs are expensive, but the transit is extremely cheap. So, unless the ISP charges a base minimum amount, a heavy user just ends up heavily subsidizing the infrastructure and maintenance costs of the light users.

Not to mention that charging by byte is a great way to stifle innovation on the web. Basically, I would disagree with your assessment.

Yes, you are correct about minimum account fees being required to avoid a subsidy in the other direction (large->small). NZ packages typically work out to about US$24 + $US1.20/GB, although the per GB price is dropping. We're getting fiber in the next couple of years, and at least one ISP is already offering TB/mo data bundles for US$144 (incl 100/50 fiber).

I don't see how it stifles innovation at all. It does stop a cross subsidy from the ISP to the company attempting to implement a new, even higher, usage service.

I appreciate the reply and further details on these NZ plans. Given the rather high cost of $1.20/GB, I naively assumed that these plans did not actually also have a minimum account fee. I would still contend that $1.20/GB is ridiculously high for home broadband, barring special circumstances (remote areas, cell network, etc).

As for stifling innovation, consider what the internet would look like if we were all still on dial-up. Greater bandwidth continues to open up new innovations; customers struggling with low bandwidth or expensive per GB pricing schemes hinder that innovation.

I can see that. I just look at the NZ market and see competition working. :)

You're right, $1.20 feels expensive and we all grumble about it. Even so, I did some math and found out it was cheaper to stream video at $1.20/GB than it was to pay for cable tv, so I cut the cable and upped my data bundle. :) It's all relative.

I'd argue that it's only when there's a single monopoly provider does pricing start to stifle innovation. The NZ ISP market is split into wholesale/retail, with an unbundled local loop and a regulated wholesale price. ISPs can purchase DSL connections from the wholesaler, or pay for access to the cabinet to install their own equipment.

Even when NZ was analog they had innovation. The biggest one was the creation of "Free" ISPs, where they lived off of the termination fees that they were able to charge the originating carrier - much the same as free conference calling and international long distance services out of Ohio. That lasted about as long too. :)

NZ has tried unmetered service several times, with really bad results. Throttling, low bandwidth, ugly. High traffic users would shift to the unmetered plan and overwhelm the provisioning ratios. You ended up with a service that only bulk users (low throughput, high volume) would want to use.

However, since unbundling (2006), we've had pretty vibrant retail ISP competition, which goes through ebbs and flows of price competition. The shift to fiber is currently causing lots of competition. :) We've got 3 mobile carriers and 7 major ISPs. The ISPs all offer fixed phone service as well, some on their own equipment, some from the wholesaler.

The carriers have learned that the market isn't going to pay extra for fiber, but it is expecting more service and bundled data. Some are currently grumbling about that, but their competitors are jumping on the treadmill so everyone has to. We're starting to see fiber accounts with 1TB for US$115, which is US$0.12c/GB, a much better price.

I look at my connection and I've got a 100/10 link, and I can pull 30-50mbps of international traffic out of it during busy hour. I can get the full 100mbps to the ISP's servers - the local Steam mirror can be wicked fast. I attribute this to the carrier perceiving me as a source of revenue to be encouraged instead of a cost to be driven out.

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