because the old Kanzler Kohl, decades ago, chose copper instead of fiber optic. I believe his family member was in the copper business..
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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It wasn't a family member of his, but a family member of his post minister, a Mr Schwarz-Schilling, who was in the copper cable business. Kohl and his entire government are synonymous with incredible levels of corruption and nepotism. Kohl made corruption a kind of national sport for German politicians. Our upcoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz is of his ilk.
This is how West Germany chose copper, when even the by then almost bankrupt (and ruled by even more senile backwards looking geezers) GDR was already starting to lay down fiber optic.
I think the spread of cable television also played a big role in this. It seems that the public broadcasters were too left-wing for Kohl. It was hoped that the private channels would provide more sympathetic coverage or at least a better distraction.
This is how West Germany chose copper, when even the by then almost bankrupt (and ruled by even more senile backwards looking geezers) GDR was already starting to lay down fiber optic.
In fairness, fiber optics were cheaper and easier to lay and worked better. So of course the socialists would adopt it first. They just wouldn't monetize it properly such that they had the incentive to keep expanding it at an accelerated pace, until everyone in the country was paying $100/mo for $2/mo worth of internet.
For a real expansionist system, you either need people who are as greedy as they are ruthless (capitalism) or as ideological as they are hyper-competitive (dengism).
What are you talking about? The whole of Europe was doing ADSL by then in 2000-2010. Fiber didn't start being a common thing until 2015 at the earliest.
are you crazy? I had fiber in Slovenia in 2008.
no no, sure most people had adsl in the early 00's using the pre existing phone network, but on the building new infrastructure front it was in the early 00s fiber really began picking up its stride in most places. If you started building out internet infrastructure in the early 00's using copper you were way behind the curve.
In terms of mobile internet, Germany barely reaches 68.91 Mbps
The snails in Germany must be somewhat faster than the ones around here.
Blitzed off amphetamines, them snails are.
The problem really boils down to a combination of NIMBYism and even more importantly lobbying. Telecom lobbied the German government to allow them to not upgrade to copper cables and upgrade those with better backend infrastructure as well. However that is always going to be worse then proper fiber.
For mobile in most countries the government issues licenses with built in fines, if certain coverage quality is not reached. Germany did not do this and the conservative government even repeated that mistake with 5G. The issue is that there are only three network providers and obviously upgrades cost money, which means less profits.
Nobody is "putting up with snail-speed internet" here. The problem is that there really is nothing for me to do to get fiber or higher mobile speeds. I can even see a mobile tower from here and it still is slow.
I just talked to a colleague of mine today who declined to have fiber internet installed at no extra cost. Because his DSL is fast enough.
So yes, some (a lot) people do put up with it.
I had so many discussions with neighbors about this. For most of them the argument that their DSL cable will stay where it is and the fact that the mandatory 2 year contract with our local ISP is cheaper than what it would cost to have it installed later made them see the light.
Germany has a cultural problem of deeply ingrained technophobia when it comes to all things computers. Any technology that's not absolutely dumbed down to the point a trained monkey could operate it, is seen as too complicated. And the political and managerial caste running this real life absurd comedy show are used to dictating E-Mails to their secretary rather than dealing with the "complicated technology" of writing it themselves...
You can't expect from people like that to possibly grasp the complexity of the difference between a slow connection and a slow device.
Article does not cover the why question, only partly how it came to that situation: A government stuck in the past. I'd like to add that laying cable/fiber costs money, so the providers like to milk that invest as long as possible. So while we have ftc here, there's still multiple dslams on that curb distributing the net though copper to the homes. Some even still set up with adsl line cards (15 mbps instead of 250), although newly built. Some efforts are being made to provide fth, but these are hard to distribute in 1950 era buildings. These costs are mainly not recoverable by rent, need a heavy planning effort and all tenants in that building would be bound to one provider for one or two years, which most of mine do strictly not want. Not only the government is stuck in the past here. When I asked my provider if I could have fiber and dsl as fallback and for testing those few who understood the question just laughed.
so the providers like to milk that invest as long as possible.
Might want to add that the providers, especially the Telekom, largely got that investment for free, because it was paid for by the tax payer before the postal service, which was in charge of telecommunications, was privatised and split up into multiple companies.
The privatisations starting from the 1990s were a wholesale theft of public property.
Because Germans are allergic to change and are conditioned to believe that suffering is a lifestyle. Source: moved to Germany 7 years ago.
"accept and continue" or "subscribe and decline" lol
Never seen such a blatant violation of gdpr, as if it was read as a guidebook instead of laws on what you can't do
It's very common for German news sites as well, but then not for the Swedish ones. I think news sites in some countries have an exemption?
Perhaps, all I know is the button "reject all" should be available and it took many years and fines before some of them actually complied and even then most tried to hide it
I work in the telco industry (specifically mobile networks) in Germany, there are heaps of reasons for heaps of issues⦠cbf to start listing them now but feel free to ask I guess
Are you waiting for Godot... sorry, 6G?
Sorry to disappoint ya, still waiting for 4G over here