[mindjiver]

As recent transplant to Germany from Sweden (moved here about 2 years ago) I observe these things daily. Cable connection being 'state-of-art' for Internet access and bad phone reception more or less everywhere. Not being able to count on good speed LTE walking around in the second biggest city in the country, is weird.

I would say large parts of this is cultural. Germans are not so quick to hop onto new things and are suspicious what problems new technology brings, especially with regards to privacy and 'Datenschutz' / data protection. Swedes on the other hand love new things and with a national number given out by birth privacy is not that big of a deal.

German companies also have a large accessible market of German speakers (~100 million) so the need to go global is not as acute as for companies from smaller economies.

[adrianN]

I'm not sure how the speed of home internet connections relates to being innovative. Are 50Mbit/s not enough to learn how to code or deploy your stuff to the cloud?

[Gibheer]

The problem isn't that 50Mbit/s might be enough. The problem is, that 50Mbit/s isn't everywhere. Germany is a country which spoutes aloud, that it wants to be one of the leading countries in IT, but in reality, Germany is a developing country in that regard. Most of the time, only city centers have access to higher bandwidth, the outskirts, smaller cities and most of the country side have very low or no bandwidth at all. The last decades Telekom hat the monopoly with providing connectivity to homes and everyone else was a reseller. But Telekom didn't see the need to modernize their old DSL infrastructure and were happy to let you pay 50 euros per month to provide you 16Mbit/s. The TV companies could provide higher bandwidth with their newer infrastructure with up to 100Mbit/s, but the country is split between them. So when you were in a bad area, you might have Primacom as a provider and they did stop at 25Mbit/s for a long time. Now the situation is, that Telekom with all their money is asking the Government to pay for the renovation and they got away with it until the beginning of the year, when they finally said, that DSL will not be supported anymore. Only the fiber will now be supported. But this comes years after some villages got couple 100k Euro together to get at least 50Mbit/s and they still pay a monthly fee of 50Euros.

And the Telekom is not alone with wanting support money from everyone. The southern Rheinland saw multiple providers wanting to connect villages for huge prices, which leads to the weird situation, that southern Rhineland now gets support from a Swiss company. That company doesn't need any money and is still laying fiber through the woods to long forgotten villages.

Compare that with most other European countries, where you can get a fiber connection for the same money with synchronous 100Mbit/s or more. The northern countries with their hard rock grounds did get it working in a much better way than Germany.

And don't rely on LTE, as the LTE tarif were bound to lower GB/month traffic limits and huge costs, as the LTE frequencies were auctioned of between the providers. And the winners couldn't build where they wanted, they had to provide LTE at first where there was no mobile internet available at all, which means on the acres.

Germany is in a sad state in regards to connectivity. And this has nothing to do with people being afraid. If you let the monopolist do whatever it wants and not enforce the modernization, then this is what you can expect.

[expertentipp]

> Are 50Mbit/s not enough to learn how to code or deploy your stuff to the cloud?

Oh! Found a Deutsche Telekom representative!

[vk23]

He has a point though. I guess you are even more productive if your connection does not allow you to stream netflix all day ;)

[thunfischbrot]

To me it's about latency more than bandwidth. Unfortunately providers do not advertise in milliseconds. They used to for a short while to have "gamers" pay extra around 2000 I believe.

[vk23]

I agree. Especially cheaper german providers like UnityMedia have huge issues with latency because they overload their network in order to reduce cost.

[expertentipp]

Netflix is an evil invention of privacy-violating Americans (an probably operating in copyright grayzone). There, am I doing it correctly?

[foxX]

It's directly linked to:

- ability, willingness, etc to tweak and upgrade your infrastructure

- how competition-friendly and pro-consumer your market is - the type of grants, contracts and industry ties your environment has (think special, prototype, maybe even government subsidized hardware, for example)

- reflects the amount of mastery over geography or nature itself - this is what successful countries pull

- is the economy market-driven or just a pocket bubble?

There might be others, but this is already quite damning imo. Also I need gigabit because that determines the size of my erection and i'd go to lengths such as paying FAIR prices for it.

[mindjiver]

Sure, that should be enough for home user. But even in my part of the woods (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) which is quite rural with smaller villages lacking even these type of connections. There was a story in the local newspaper of a stonemasonry in a smaller village which was having problems perform work for clients in Berlin and Hamburg since the upload speed to the companies machines was to slow. So it's not only "innovate" companies suffering from the lack of infrastructure.

[MrBuddyCasino]

My thoughts exactly. As if 1GBit everywhere would suddenly produces more "digital natives".

[avh02]

no, but I was on a uni network for a year (basically gbit with good IX connectivity in the UK) and being able to fling around data to the cloud like it's your local network really cuts down on things you think/worry about - making it easier to work and try new things.

Is it wasteful? sure, but who cares if it allows you to try random stuff you would hesitate about otherwise?

[MrBuddyCasino]

I'm not saying its not nice - I'd like 1Gb! But the US has terrible connectivity as well, see HN discussions about how evil Comcast is. Hasn't prevented them from starting successful companies.

Its like "we need more car companies, lets build more roads". True to an extend, but there are so many other factors.

[Arnt]

Where in Germany do you get 50Mbit/s upstream?

How about, say, 20-30Mbit/s upstream and long-lasting IP addresses? A couple of people on WebRTC conferences can easily use >10Mbit/s and the conferences work best if noone's IP address changes in the middle.

[tobltobs]

Most users are dreaming of 50Mbit/s. In small villages 2Mbit/s are the norm. For me the bad internet in rural areas is one reason that I wouldn't move my business back to Germany.

[adrianN]

How are the Internet speeds in the rural US?