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by microtonal 222 days ago
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.
2 comments
kmm 222 days ago
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.

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Cthulhu_ 222 days ago
+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.

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janandonly 221 days ago
But in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?
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hnbad 222 days ago
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).

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