[eqvinox]

> You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone.

I do.

I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.

Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.

Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D

[JoshTriplett]

> Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.

> Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains

The mobile networks don't have enough dB and the trains have too much DB?

[hnbad]

The boneheaded decision to "privatize" rail by creating a state-owned corporation competing with itself, a network of regional corporations with extremely inconsistent funding and separate corporations for various services like literally maintaining infrastructure definitely has resulted in "too much DB". Although I sincerely doubt attempting to actually open up those "markets" by introducing foreign corporations like National Express really does anything other than cannibalize rail services even further.

I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").

We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.

[lifestyleguru]

Sir, with this comment you signed up to auto-renewable two years contract.

[fransje26]

For the bargain of 45€ a month. Noncancelable.

[lifestyleguru]

Direct debit required, service not guaranteed.

[microtonal]

I feel you. We have stellar coverage pretty much everywhere in NL. Heck, I was recently in a work video meeting in the car, not a single drop. The route included part of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk

Yet, when we visit family in Germany, five minutes after crossing the border we are in a cellular dead zone.

[kmm]

Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.

Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.

[Cthulhu_]

+1 on the train, mobile internet in the train is really bad. I kinda get it because you're in a faraday cage, moving between cells quickly, and frequently far outside of inhabited areas but still.

I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.

[janandonly]

But in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?

[hnbad]

Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.

The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).

[lifestyleguru]

Moving to Germany from countries where mobile networks function is traumatic. My welcome experience was USB stick with faulty drivers, balance zeroed immediately because of not activated packet, then sipping expensive 1GB data packets over choppy connections. Of course that was all my fault. The only reliable thing was monthly billing and enforcement of contract length by the telecom. When I heard before arrival "there is no internet in the apartment but you can simply buy USB stick" I had subconsciously felt there will be problems. Fuck, I hate these memories so much. Fuck everything about it and everyone involved.

[eru]

> Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.

GDP per capita (or GDP per square metre) would be a more useful indication here. Otherwise, you could throw a bunch of poor countries together--just for purposes of statistics, and expect a better mobile network?

[wongarsu]

GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.

However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network

1: https://ssz.fr/gdp/

[eru]

> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.

Well, it would be the best metric, if your country was homogeneously populated.

If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.

> However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network

Yes, France, Germany and UK are all equal enough in these measures (well within an order of magnitude) that the much bigger difference in mobile networks is most likely due to some other factors.

[mr_toad]

> If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.

Sometimes the reception is good but the data rate is poor because of too few towers per person, or because the cellphone companies connections to the wider internet are saturated.

[wongarsu]

Luckily Germany is pretty homogeneously populated. Far more so than the UK (England is pretty even, but Scotland is far emptier) or France (1/5th live in the Paris metro area).

[swiftcoder]

> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric

GDP per square metre only really works for countries with uniform population density. For example, by European standards, Spain is huge, and basically entirely empty outside of a handful of cities...

[dmurray]

There are some economics of scale that work best at the country level.

Even with the EU single market, mobile phone operations almost always follow country borders. You'll get a different set of providers in Germany than you'll get one km away on the other side of the Rhine in France. Even though some of them may have the same name or the same ultimate owner or both, and even though you can roam on the other side of the border, you'll have a contract with a different entity, and different people will build and maintain the networking equipment.

Conversely, in the US, the major carriers all have nationwide coverage.

[eqvinox]

Thing is, mobile networks are national affairs. A bunch of small countries has a lot of small telcos. Germany has 3 (2? not sure with the mergers) large telcos.

[samplatt]

I also do, I'm Australian. I regularly experience both congestion caused by tower over-subscription as well as traveling waaaay out into the country where there's no reception, even on the Telstra network that boasts better coverage than everyone else by a mile.

[Panzer04]

I rarely encounter outright congestion in Australia tbh, but then again I avoid watching videos on the train.. so that's probably indicative of something :D

Coverage is decent on Telstra, but if you're out of town reception is rarely any good, presumably because there's little to no incentive to improve it when there's no on around to need it.

[_carbyau_]

Better coverage may be claimed. But as you know, Australia is a big place.

The few farmers I know have a rough idea of the on-the-ground cell coverage. They say things like "this side of the hill/town" usually. I've seen them deliberately walk to the other side of a silo to make a call.

I assume that the coverage maps are assumed cell-tower-coverage-if-shit-is-not-in-the-way. No surprise radios are common.

[bitwize]

A Diné (Navajo) slang word for "cellphone" is "bił nijoobałí" which means "the thing you spin around with". Coverage on rez is not great you see, and in some places is so marginal that whether you get a usable signal depends not just on position but orientation...

[robot-wrangler]

> Coverage on rez is not great you see

Tangent but this is a pretty interesting topic. I've heard people speculate that local politics deliberately prevents such infrastructure, waiting for some kind of kickbacks to make it worth their while. Others suggest that it happens because federal telecom subsidies aimed at improving rural connectivity don't apply, as a kind of retaliation for tribal sovereignty. Way off-grid, ok, maybe it's simply not worth it to corporate telecom, but whatever the cause coverage even in fairly populated areas around Kayenta/Monument Valley is also quite bad in a way that would be infrequent in comparable communities in say, nowhere Appalachia.

Many a suburban parent of smart-phone addicted children would romanticize the whole thing and actually be kind of jealous of a situation like that. Years back and on the other side of the world, tourists were very scandalized about more roads and towers around Annapurna in Nepal.. but of course the locals usually do not actually like to be cut off from the world.

More telecom is probably good despite the evils, but fuck commercial billboards in particular. Those are still creeping closer to the Grand Canyons and Yosemites, and they suck whether it's for multinationals like McDonalds, or for locally owned gas stations or hotels that put cash into tribal communities. Ban them all like Hawaii, and everyone will be astonished to learn that the world keeps turning..

[rendall]

Cool: https://endangeredlanguages.com/resource/navajo-word-day-cel...