[ThePhysicist]

Fiber has been laid out in many areas already, it won't be long until most households are upgraded. But to be honest it's not as much of an issue as people make it out, in most areas you can get 250 Mbit downstream and 50 Mbit upstream through DSL, that is plenty for most home use cases, there's just not enough demand for higher speeds. Don't tell me people are regularly maxing out their 1 Gbps lines. In most rural places the fiber linkup stalls not because there's no will to do it but because not enough households vote to get it, providers typically need a quorum of 10-20 % and they don't get it because most people just don't need or want faster Internet (or let's say they are not willing to pay 50-100 € per month for it). Telekom and other companies have fiber running in most of the smaller cities already (otherwise they couldn't offer 250 Mbit DSL) it was just the last mile that was missing and that is mostly being fixed now, but again most households don't even see the need to upgrade. That might change once services requiring super high bandwidth become popular (but what might those be), even 4k streaming is possible on 25 Mbit already and with 100 Mbit you can stream 8k content...

And yeah, Romania might have better Internet in some places with high population density but certainly not in the more rural areas, there was a big EU project (RO-NET) to help them get that up and running in more places in the last 5 years. In Germany you can get fiber connection in most cities as well.

Don't get me wrong I love faster Internet myself but don't pretend like that is a chief reason why Germany can't have IT startups, we have some of the best connectivity and peering in Europe with DE-CIX and the hub in Frankfurt.

[theiebrjfb]

For some people internet is like electricity (or even more important, I can go 10 hours without electricity with UPS). It is a baseline for consideration to even start.

How long it takes to upload 500GB video, dataset or docker images on 250/50mbps DSL line? 24 hours in theory! Like two days in reality!

On 1gbps it is 1.3 hours in theory, about 2 hours in practice!

I understand that most people do not need such connectivity, but for many people it is question of staying productive and profitable. I work in remote team, and we do share such data quite often.

DSL line is good as a backup, but it is useless. Perhaps I could deal with limited speed. But latency and throughput goes to hell when under load. I would have to pause all other traffic while making calls!

In Romania I have 4 plans in single flat. Fiber, ADSL, and two unlimited (like no speed throttle) 5G SIMs. About 90 euro monthly.

[fransje26]

> But to be honest it's not as much of an issue as people make it out, in most areas you can get 250 Mbit downstream and 50 Mbit upstream through DSL, that is plenty for most home use cases, there's just not enough demand for higher speeds.

Ha ha ha! No.

The option we have in my neck of the woods is 4.5 Mbps/s, via DSL. Take it or leave it. And were are talking about BW, in a place where the average 100 m2 house is being sold for 500'000 €.

> (or let's say they are not willing to pay 50-100 € per month for it)

Good that the criminal prices of telecom providers are being mentioned. "We are cheap!" Vodafone was advertising lately on the radio. Yeah, for 50 € per month for a DSL connection with a 2 year contract. No, that's not cheap, that's extortion. And your advert is called gaslighting.

Fun story. In the previous village were I was working, the only way to get semi-fast internet was via Vodafone LTE (for a nominal fee, of course..). Then the region awarded a grant/bonus for the first company to bring glass fiber to the area. All at once, 3 different companies were scrambling and pulling glass fiber to try to be the first ones to provide coverage. They now have 3 different glass fiber providers there.