It’s not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It’s mind-blowing.
Wow, I wish you could get a reliable 50mbps connection in Australia for that cheap. The government is still installing new Fibre to the node (DSL) there which can max out as low as 12mbps.
Not mind-blowing. Comparing to Romania, where internet is "cheaper" and faster, the salaries in Germany are much higher, so the cable guy costs more. Many times more. So in the end Internet is just faster in Romania, not cheaper, because compared to the salaries it is quite expensive.
In a suburban area outside of Tacoma ~300mbps was about $50, and now just outside of Seattle I pay $75 for 1 gbps. The non-gigabit plans were south of $50.
I Googled a bit and most websites said Americans generally pay somewhere between $50-$60.
I'm upstate ny and pay $80 for internet. This gets me 100Mbit down and a paltry 10Mbit up. I don't consider this "broadband" as the upload speed is so slow. It's also highway robbery... there's no choice here.
Could you get slower for less? Because that's the standout characteristic of the German market, something like 16/1 is almost universally available at about 30€ or less, but going and faster, if available, comes at a steep premium.
I did a quick login online to search for current "offers", and they're only offering higher tier speeds. Now, it might be possible, but that takes calling them up and I'm not in the mood.
Also, the way they hide "offers" per customer/location is maddening. For my location, a new internet installation at my current speeds is $45 for 2 years. Meanwhile, look at me paying $80 per month -.- Thank you my senators and reps.
Locally, unlimited gigabit with taxes and all is ~$100 USD through ATT. The unlimited portion adds $30, but any TV package also makes the connection unlimited so that's what I did.
40 for 50 is not so bad. Some regional ISPs installing FTTB/FTTH offer 100mbps + voice for ~40€, which is a pretty good deal.
Due to heavy oversubscribing cable is an inferior product in Germany (on weekends actual speeds drop to a fraction of the advertised line speed), and the biggest cable provider by far (Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone) has serious user support and service quality issues, not to mention they only offer ipv6 dual-stack lite connectivity.
Interesting. Not sure if it's location dependent, but I've had a considerably better/faster/stabler experience with cable. With DSL the connection keeps breaking all the time. And yes, Vodafone definitely has support/quality issues.
The amount of regulator-enforced competition varies a lot between technology generations. The basic idea is that Telekom cannot deny renting out to resellers what they inherited from their government monopolist predecessor, but more recent infrastructure has no such strings attached (the details are slightly more complicated I think).
This was meant as an incentive for investment ("if you build new stuff it's all yours"), but it has cemented the usual premiums for higher bandwidth as a permanent fixture, instead of something that only hits early adopters before trickling down to entry levels. So now you have a situation where quite a few people would be able to upgrade to something like 50 mbps down, sticking to the 16 mbps contract that does the job as well (when you're not hooked to cloud services yet, something Germans might tend to be wary of anyways, given the data protection mindset). In a market where VDSL is widely rejected (because it would almost double the bill), who would invest in even faster infrastructure?
Th exact prices you see seem to vary depending on where it thinks you are, and it requires a street address and unit number to quote you exactly what I get quoted. I’m not going to give you my address to verify my prices, because I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.
But if you google around you’ll see their pretty typical (eg. googling “telus internet 750 review” will give you a result that links to Telus’ page with Google adding that there’s a price range of $95-$140)
Do you think maybe that’s why I said “compared to elsewhere in Canada” and not “compared to every single other place in Canada”?
I have no clue how you convinced yourself I was unaware of this obvious fact. Two different links in my post clearly spell out every community it’s available in.
So! that's competitive for a 35Mbs (inc phone service) in the Uk - consumer broadband doesn't need more than 35-50Mbs any how.
At least "Duecherbuderpest" is not still fixated on making you all use ISDN. "Duecherbuderpest" is what other Telco's use to refer to the German PTT as.
Does the ISP equipment even have a 10Gbps port? I know someone here (Ireland) who had an early consumer 1Gbps FTTP connection. The ISP provided equipment had 100Mbps ports and 802.11n...
Usually it's best to "cancel" the contract immediately after signing, then when the cancellation comes in effect a year later it's easy to get the new customer rate again.
Or if you don't mind the hassle and have another provider available at your location, switch to it via some broker like check24 and get it even cheaper. I'm currently on 30/6 mbits for 11€ for two years, before that I had 120/10 mbits for 17€ over two years. They would turn into 25€ and 35€ after two years.
It is kind of ridiculous how they actually punish loyal customers by making them pay more after two years if you don't do anything. Sure, enough people are lazy enough to make this model feasible, but just imagine the butcher you've been getting your meat at for years suddenly goes like "hey you come here all the time so I'm gonna charge you 30% more"