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by unitboolean 3116 days ago
Meanwhile in Germany:

- you can't even send an email to tax authorities and have to print/send paper letters

- mobile internet is very slow and super expensive.

- until recently it was not even possible to share your wlan

3 comments

I don't think something working for 2 mln nation scales up for 80 mln nation. Anyways the German paper and post fetish, and active fight against any internet in wireless form is obnoxious.
I don't think something working for 2 mln nation scales up for 80 mln nation

Why? There's proportionally more manpower, and even more than money than that.

Try to drive a small car. Then try the same with a big truck and you know there can be scalability issues ;)

In case of Germany the problem might be that they do not need to change much as everything is okayish. In Estonia they knew they had kind of nothing after the 90's and there was a real need to reinvent themselves.

This! I finished my 4GB with Blau and they don’t have any option to top them up. Just be ok with a limited connection at 64kbps, was their support reply. Insane.
This sounds so backwards to me. Usually us third worlders have markedly worse infrastructure than abroad, but I use a prepaid plan for ~$9 (not adjusted for PPP) which gives me 2.5 GiB 4G per day for 30 days. Limited monthly plans seem like a thing from the past.

Is there a lack of competition in the mobile service provider market? Bad regulation?

Wow, really 2.5GiB per day? May I ask which country?

> Is there a lack of competition in the mobile service provider market? Bad regulation?

Probably too few competition. I live in Germany and have not yet looked into this much, but I think Deutsche Telekom could be still a problem creating the majority of the infrastructure and offering usage for others probably only via higher fees. Similarly why there is no real competitor to Deutsche Bahn in the train sector.

I don't really know, but check this out. You don't need to understand German to see the crazy prices Telekom is asking for capped data plans:

https://www.telekom.de/unterwegs/tarife-und-optionen/smartph...

In Thailand last january I paid 9€ for a 4G Sim that lasted me 1 month with something like 21GB allowance.

Plus LTE's speed is limited here. Thanks to the EU rules on roaming I'm now using my Italian Vodafone seem for data :(

> May I ask which country?

India. I live in Mumbai and use Airtel; apparently the plan I was using got discontinued, so I'm going to bump myself up to the 3 GiB/day for 30 days plan at ₹550 (~€7.5). This is considered expensive here, with cheaper options like Jio readily available.

It's still not perfect but most messages to the tax authorities can be send electronically via Elster. Companies are even required to do their filings electronically and can't do them on paper anymore.

Many tax authorities will communicate with you via email if you sign a form that you understand that email is not encrypted (for regular questions, proper applications need to be done via Elster).