The online funeral live stream just broke. The 4G* connection at the place is awful, which is probably the reason for it...
*If it even has 4G now, it definitely didn't a few years ago

Germany keeps jerking itself off how amazing our economy and science is. We're a country of engineers and all that.
Yet our digital infrastructure is a fucking joke.

Rural area? Well better hope you'll get any reception, let alone 4G.
Oh and cable connections? I've seen areas that will give you a 6 Mbit/s DSL connection.

Some time ago there was even a fatal road accident; they couldn't immediately call the ambulance because there was no reception.

It's a fucking joke. I'm not in Germany but cable internet is garbage tier here as well. We switched to a 4G based modem a few years back and basically got double the bandwidth and higher stability for a slightly lower price. Now due to the increased demand in the pandemic they'll increase the prices by a few bucks and in return almost triple the bandwidth. Meanwhile the cable provider just had a nationwide outage.

Some people had to use dial-in modems (reminder: Max. 56 kbps) after ISDN (64 kbps / channel)was shutoff because of modernisation and nobody installed something more modern.
Of course this only affect a handful of people, but nonetheless happens.

@sbiewald it's ridiculous
I feel like the right to a “decent” internet connection, or whatever the main means of communication is in the current time, should be embedded into our Constitution

@LotsOfCaffeine The government (or even EU) has plans for such a right. Unfortunately, instead of requiring connection speed, application profiles are planned (like "the connection must allow emailing and online shopping"), which is very unprecise.

@LotsOfCaffeine impossible.

Feudalism prevents this. And the common deregulation approach.

The network isn't owned by the government ;)

@IntrusionCM of course it is, even if they claim it's private companies, they regulate the hell out of them and they probably don't own a bit portion of the company shares

@sbiewald a law like that must be a bit vague, as the way we use the internet (or whatever communication medium) changes the demands change as well.
I could imagine the law stating that certain things must be useable, and higher courts define actual values ever few years

@LotsOfCaffeine Sure, though laws should ideally help now, not only after someone fought to the highest court.

Ideally, it would contain a minimal speed in numbers for now, and such vague statement to allow "growing.

@LotsOfCaffeine nope. It's more complicated.

Leaving the whole infrastructure / regulation discussion aside, there is a whole lot of communal rejection...

From "the signal towers are a health issue" to "our lovely rural view gets destroyed by this blasphemy" to ... anything is possible.

Just as one example.

Germany is kind of a "denial of reality" country.

You cannot have a common guaranteed broadband speed if you don't find a common ground - and common ground would require that the decision making doesn't become a children birthday party where everyone wants but no one is willing to give.

But every (feudal) country wants to uphold their individual character, their power and their might, and every government politician who poked into this hornets nest ended their career.

The lobbyism and nepotism only adds fuel to this problem.

Private company supports private interests.

Public company supports public interests.

Ape together strong.

@LotsOfCaffeine If you need an extreme example of what @IntrusionCM is meaning:
In Germany we don't want nuclear power and coal plants. Also not wind turbines (noise, looks).
What we have, is an excess of energy from off short wind parks. But new power lines also cannot be built, as people do not want to see them, and the slight heat of ground lines is also apparently to much as well.

---

@InstrusionCM Luckily fibre is without cell towers...

@sbiewald yeah.

Except that trenching is another senseless childish fight.

I'm really curious how it will end.

Most of the time, the local power / energy provider fights with another ISP who does the trenching and why.

Ripping up streets 3-5 times to get the job done - local provider once, then the ISPs and maybe then the local provider again xD

It's insane.

💩

@sbiewald energy's a bit of a different issue, one that I'm not gonna get into

But having network coverage is a basic necessity in my opinion, and there shouldn't be areas left in the stone age pike this

@sbiewald Lol, technically online shopping is possible via email in some rare cases, so this is basically about as good as the water suppliers giving you a bucket to fetch water from a well that they haven't dug yet.

I thought that there is no fibre because ultimately there is no competition between internet providers. It is all deutche telecom. What they want - everyone gets.

@str-write not really.

It's a highly regional debate of who get's what and why.

Telelemon eh Telekom is FTTC, not FTTH.

And Telekom is still being hellbent on copper as far as I know and won't switch from FTTC.

"True" FTTH is regional and fragmented.

FTTC / Fibre to the curb | street | node is a problem on it's own... I dislike copper /DSL - especially because Telelemon did a great job at claiming (false) superiority regarding costs.

Copper is dead. Let it finally rest instead of trying to fight it's death with more complexity....

The main infrastructure problem in Germany is because people just love to live spread out with single family homes and big gardens, ideally out in the country where land is cheap.

Yeah it's cheap because infrastructure is fucking lacking, and the low population density of single family home areas doesn't make better infrastructure likely.

These people then wine that the taxpayer should subsidise their fucking cheap land infrastructure. Yeah sure - but only AFTER we slap really massive taxes on your cheap land so that you can pay that shit yourselves because I fucking won't!

Meanwhile, I'm fine with 100 Mbit down and 40 MBit up over copper, and the second miracle is that it's with O2 and it still fucking works.

@Fast-Nop "cheap" my ass

Oh and using bankcards is a fucking joke