Germany is downgrading
grobmeier.de
grobmeier.de
For example in the US at the moment it costs me ~$80 for a reasonable cable connection from comcast 20Mb/s. I can expect my connection to go down for a few seconds/minutes about once a day and once or twice a month it'll be out for longer. I have had this and similar issues up and down the east coast in 5 different locations.
Maybe the experiences with Telekom in Frankfurt and with Kabel BW have been above the norm, but for I never/rarely had connectivity issues and it has always been much cheaper.
Now I'm back in Germany and have fabulous 16mbit for nearly 50 Euros. (Fastest internet I can get here.)
Also it's ridiculous that my internet access in Poland was set up within 2 days and here I had to wait 6 weeks for everything to work properly.
BUT the activation time of your connection is something unacceptable in Germany. Four weeks seems to be the normal case for a landline connection to be up and running. FOUR WEEKS, are you kidding me?
And the same problem is ahead of you if you're moving to another flat.
As I did. I moved one month ago. And I didn't know the new address until 1 week before the end of month. As soon as I knew about it I went to the ISP & asked them to make the switch to the new address.
I had to pay extra (which was ok) and WAIT ANOTHER FOUR WEEKS (which was not ok at all).
So in effect I was without internet for 3 weeks while paying the connection to my old address at the same time.
Someone was saying that here the bottleneck is on Telekom's end. And maybe so? The guy who eventually came after 4 weeks was from Telekom - he basically came around for max 10 minutes (probably 5) and made some magic tricks and voilà - internet working.
EDIT: Wild guess #1: the problem is just too few people at Telekom.
Wild guess #2: If Telekom would offer a service that you pay 100EUR extra to get the connection in two days, they 1) could do it, 2) have loads of customers wanting that service and 3) give jobs to more people and 4) have more money in the pocket
Next month, I'll switch to a 16MBit/s DSL connection including a phone flatrate (who needs tv, anyway?), which will be about 25 € / month.
I live in Darmstadt (which is about 50km from Frankfurt).
15 bucks for 100 MBit/s sounds rather nice though!
I pay $45 for 30Mb/s from Charter but if I lived in the next city to the south, I'd have Comcast.
Not only that, you can only purchase a new block of 5 GB after your current one has already been used up. Before then they simply don't take your money - unless you set up autopay. And you can't purchase time online, because the URL forwards to nowhere - see above lack of any support facility. You can't even report this breakage.
So you have to do it by phone. But there are two systems; first you have to load money onto your account, then you can use the money on your account to pay for a new 5GB block - but these are two different systems with two different numbers and they each require you to punch in your phone number and a PIN code. Different PIN codes, if I recall. And again, no human support at all.
But then let me tell you about our T-Mobile cell phones here in Budapest. My phone started sending me "premium" SMS messages at 1500 ft a pop (about $7.50 per premium message) until the entire balance was used up. As service messages so they don't show in the Inbox. T-Mobile was able to block that, but my wife's phone started mysteriously "accessing the Internet" (it's not a smart phone), again at something like 500 ft per access, invisibly, until her balance was used up. The only recourse is to go to a T-Mobile store and stand in line for half an hour, because they do kind of have phone support here in Hungary, but the only thing they can tell you is to go to the store and wait in line.
The store has no permission to escalate to technicians. The people in the store "disabled" Internet on my wife's phone three separate times; the theft continued each time. Sometimes they'd refund some money and apologize and swear up and down that everything was disabled.
Finally, it seems to have stopped on its own. Maybe it was a system misconfiguration, maybe not. It's impossible to know, because clearly T-Mobile itself has no idea.
Their Internet stick (in Hungary) works great, though. So I continue to use them - it's just that if there's ever a problem they are entirely unable to fix it. The entire company is so Balkanized and so incredibly poorly managed that they can only barely function if nothing goes wrong.
Judging the 'United States' based on Puerto Rico?
It's just nothing like you would have in say Florida, Texas, or another state.
Going to a store should be your last resort. Use My T-Mobile/My T-Home (on their website). If you have a really special problem, call them. Also, never buy anything in a store or on the phone, unless you're very, very good at negotiating, you get 10% off of your orders automatically on the website. Customer service agents use the very same interface (with more privileges of course) but you can do pretty much anything you would want on My T-Mobile. E.g. I know for a fact (I'm also a customer) that you can disable receiving premium texts and having an Internet connection altogether. It's worth checking out every service if they're enabled or disabled at least once, so you can avoid unexpected charges and activate things that you know you might need some day. Btw, your options are very clearly described, much better than how an agent would explain them to you.
If you absolutely must see someone in person, here are some more tips. Always go to T-Pont stores, those are the official reps of the company, never go to a store with a big T-Mobile sign, those are resellers, agents there receive poor training and all they want is to sell you stuff. Don't go to a store in the late afternoon/evening hours, they have the most customers then and you have to wait more. 30 min waiting time is actually not very common, if you go any other time you either won't have to wait or only have to wait a few minutes. Also check on My T-Mobile if you're a 'gold' or 'platinum' client. If you are, always choose that on the first screen in the in-store queue ticketing system, and you'll get to someone in a few minutes even if there are loads of people in the store, bc most people don't know about this.
Yeah, it's ridiculous that you have to know all these to get a good service, but you don't have to put up with it, e.g. Telenor's customer service is pretty good, or so I've heard.
I'll have to take another look.
- In my city (not that large, about 200k residents), i have access to 16-50Mbit DSL connections or cable connections of up to 150 MBit/s (uncapped). Its the same in many other bigger cities
- i hardly know anyone who cannot get some type of broadband. My mom lives in a VERY rural area (one neighbour and then a half a mile of NOTHING) and she still gets 3Mbits DSL, not great but ok.
- the situation in the US is even worse, still alot of people on dialup in rural areas
- traffic caps are a step backwards i agree, but its just one ISP doing this right now and there are many other countries where this is common practice as well
"Don't move your startup there"? Is the poster aware that several startups work with internet worse than that? Internet quality is one important factor, but it is not the only one. I'd even say there are more important factors.
Complains about D-Telekom but offers no alternative? (and that's why government monopolies are BS)
Disclaimer: I may be moving to Germany in a couple of weeks so I may still regret this post
Try getting something like a video streaming service running if your main consumer base has a traffic limit of several gigabytes a month.
Code is not big, other resources like images, etc, may take more space, but that's often not an issue.
More importantly, 'consumer grade DSL' may be all that's available depending on the location.
Of course, the website is not being served from there.
In fact knowing Germany I am not surprised that using a consumer line for business is not breaking some rule.
There are usually good options available and usually you're up and running quite fast. I can recommend NetCologne (local, dsl/fiber), UnityMedia (cable) and 1&1 (Vodafone reseller) as providers of very nice, very dumb pipes.
The author obviously is frustrated and annoyed. That's okay, it happens. A rant might even help. But I wonder why that ends up on this site here: The internet in Germany isn't going away and is, frankly, quite usable and widely available.
In my region are zero options, as the telekom refuses to give out lines (see article)
Widely available - i was living at various places in germany and the only place which gave me a good connection was Frankfurt. I am now living near munich, its just crap.
The internet isn't going away, nobody said so. But it's in danger to become a two-class internet full of service providers who a) pay to telekom for "managed services" or b) don't pay to telekom. I complain about not respecting "Netzneutralität".
German engineering is still of really high quality and there are lots of companies (especially in mechanical engineering) that make use of this knowledge.
But the German gouvernment has missed the information revolution and many powerful companies (Deutsche Telekom, TV companies, etc.) see anything that has to do with the internet as danger for their business models - thus they lobby a lot for laws against anything that endangers their business models and especially internet startups. See for example > http://www.uni-muenster.de/Jura.itm/hoeren/materialien/Skrip... to see how complicated the law has become there - full of legal mines.
For the same reason the idea to found a public corporation that builds a modern fiber network which internet providers can rent on equal terms (an idea that is discussed) will probably never be done.
So I should choose my preferred living place on the premise of maximizing profitability for my ISP? I don't think so.
The current government just don't care about the net, acts even hostile against it.
They could just issue a mandate in the kind of "every citizen shall have 6MBit and no less" like they did with ISDN back in the 90s, but I don't think this will ever happen with CDU/CSU/FDP.
Broadband access is defined as 380kbit/s and customer service is terrible.
By the way: T-Mobile is part of "Telekom".
But if you choose the right street in the right city, getting 100mbit for 50euros (flatrate) is not a problem.
I guess the big difference here is that monopoly regulation went rather well. Many providers appeared in the late nineties, protected by laws mandating that Portugal Telecom rented last mile loops. Nowadays, the market, while not perfect, is competitive enough.
(fiber and coaxial networks are private, these are not the public debts you are looking for ;-)