Why Germans put up with snail-speed internet
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-04-06/why-germans-put-up-with-snail-speed-internet.html
by Gjrts
Why Germans put up with snail-speed internet
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-04-06/why-germans-put-up-with-snail-speed-internet.html
by Gjrts
34 comments
Not only it’s bad, it’s also expensive!
After around 100Mb/s Download speeds I am more concerned over packet losses than speed. As I am not installing massive steam games every day, it really doesn’t matter that much to me whether something takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes to download if I don’t have to do it every day. Besides that, I can’t really think of any uses for, say, 1Gb/s connection that would change much.
But what a fiber connection does give that a half a century old copper wire doesn’t is proper signal integrity, and random lag spikes that kill me in video games or pages refusing to load unless I refresh will frustrate me much more than 100Mb/s speeds do.
Dogshit article conflating WiFi with cellular data…
It should be clear what kind of internet is being talked about as for mobile internet in Germany it is rather okay big cities but in the villages it’s quite bad this can be discovered when traveling in Germany on local trains.
As far as the cable internet in Germany it is improving unfortunately optic fiber coverage is not as large as in some other countries but the direction is good
As for the prices some people call them high but when you rely them to the average salary they are not high at all
I can confirm: although I pay for Vodafone’s gigabit, it’s very unstable and there are no other providers in my area. The mobile connection could be pretty bad as well even in Berlin
And here I am in a forgotten village in rural Romania with gigabit fiber internet for like 8 eur per month.
Center of Athens,Greece…18/0.7 Mbps ADSL…48€ a month.
Cry about something else.
I live in Munich south and only got high speed fibre optic cable about a year ago. When I lived in a small town in the Netherlands, I got fibre optic cable back in 2000…. So it took 25 years for the third largest German city to catch up
This is one area where I, as a Croatian, really can’t complain. Every mobile network (not that there are large number of them—only 3 and 2 MVNO) has excellent coverage which excels many countries in Europe. Everywhere you go, there’s pretty much always at least 2G or 3G signal. One mobile network operator (Telemach) offers nationwide 5G while HT and A1 offer it only in bigger cities. All three operators also have plans with unlimited data (thanks Tele2).
Sure, services aren’t THAT cheap, and the operators will try to fuck you every single time, but their service really is on the level you’d expect.
If you’re in a big city, you can get pretty damn fast cable internet, had 1Gb/s for like 5yrs now. But leaving the cities boundaries it gets very bad fast, no pun intended.
Mobile data is usually what’s crap here, fake ass 5G here with only ever 2 bars showing… 😒
And the adaption of 5G in general here has been like 10 years behind most countries.
Problem is not the speed its the pricing. German fibre is extremely expensive because many years ago a fat politician gave the job to telekom who fucked us all.
My cellular data internet was faster than the hotel wifi in Germany, when I was visiting it last summer 🫣
I knew it was bad but not that bad
We have to. Thanks to corruption. Our erstwhile communication ministers brother-in-law had a company producing copper cables. So, copper cable it was!
And several corruption cases later a good portion of the portion still thinks the CDU is good for the country, somehow.
My house is able to get fiber in the next 3 years but it is supposed to cost me 70 Euros for 1000mbits and thats just not doable for me. So I won’t get fiber and after the first period of having fiber installed for free (like it is now), they expect me to not only pay for the installment but also internet for 70 euros. As a private person not a business that pretty much means my house won’t ever get it, I personally won’t see a difference between 250 or 1000 (or surely not enough), which in conclusion means one person less is taking part in renewing the infrastructure. And I don’t see how it will be any different for many others living here. As long as providers think we are the cashcow of Europe fiber won’t land.
We are fast on the AUTOBAHN, we can’t be fast on everything.
Because it follows the famous Deutsch Bahn model of delays and cancellations.
It goes far back than the last few years.
Germany already had the chance to built fibre optics in late 80’s and 90’s. Fitting out Western Germany, even rural regions, with fibre optics would cost around 3 Billion DM per year (roughly 6 Billion today’s money) back then. But Channcelor Kohl decided to save money by two thirds using coppre wire.
With only one main provider for years (Deutsche Post/Telekom), a pressure to modernize germany never existed. Without competion, a provider doesn’t have to modernize it’s infrastructure.
Today’s time is different, but providers focus more on big/huge cities, ignoring rural regions.
Here in Costa Rica the government knew they needed to invest in order to elevate the country. So the government had the national electric company roll out the fiber. At first it was expensive as hell, $300 USD equivalent for 500mb per month. But they also had to allow private companies to use the fiber backbone. Now we have competition and you can get 500mb for about $50 and gigabit for about $80. Still a little pricey, but they have 250mb plans around $20 which is enough for most people and those plans include TV as well.
Finland also lagged behind probably because Nokia and next to free mobile plans for over decade. Now we seem to have fiber boom here, got fiber last summer from new ISP, now old ISP reacted and is building their fiber connection for free so soon I’ll have two fibers. There is also two more ISPs looking for fiber clients.
But in same time many neighbours tell that mobile hotspot is more than enough for them and some ISP study showed that less than 50% households having fiber connection actually has internet subscription for fiber.
i didn’t read the article but the easy answer is a corrupt postal-minister in the 1980s scrapped the plan to build a complete fiber network in West Germany until 2015 and build a copper-TV-cable system instead.
One word: coorrUPTIONNN
I’m honestly shocked how well Austria is doing.
But sometimes I travel to the west of Austria, through Germany (small with train, through Munich if car) and.. it’s so shocking, it’s like going back in time.
Internet just immediately drops, speeds ar horrible, reception, never heard of her.
Meanwhile in Austria the whole Autobahn and train the only places were you understandably don’t have perfect reception are tunnels and a few known spotty places due to geography or whatever.
A few vacations to the north of Germany are the same.
And it’s the worst of both worlds, because in Austria rural areas are shit for cables but they spent a lot of effort to make wireless viable, so even in shit hole, mountaintop Vorarlberg, you will have pristine 5g connectivity. So while our cable renewal is going really slow, wireless is doing a bunch of heavy lifting and is cheaper due to not having to go to each home/splitter.
In Germany I don’t even have good reception in parts of Munich, and cables don’t make up for that.
I had 1gbit for a year because it was a good deal. Now I have 200 or 250mbit again and I don’t notice the difference. It’s still fast enough that updating something doesn’t take the entire evening like 20 years ago.
I wouldn’t upgrade to 1gbit even if it’s just €5 a month, but that might be bevause im Dutch
The article is a bit vague. Are they talking specifically about cell network coverage and speeds or also about landline internet? Seems like it’s mostly the former, in which case it’s weird since it seems like a relatively easy fix.
> Some Germans did note that the subject of artificial intelligence appeared to be absent from the last German elections
To be fair, literally every subject except for immigration was absent from the last election.
Meanwhile in a romanian town of 30k ppl we had ADSL until around 2006 and then jumped straight to fiber and now i have 1Gbps for <10€. I think decommissioning old copper connections and replacing them with fiber is too expensive to justify the cost. I read a report a few years back about the US and one of the big players on the market (can’t remember which one) said that the costs of doing that across the country, even considering a big bump in subscription prices for the users, would be evened out in like 20 years before turning profit. I guess this is one perk of ‘being 20 years behind western civilisation’ as we romanians tend to say.
Read the whole article and it doesn’t answer the question in the title and says nothing more than that Germany doesn’t have the best internet coverage. Not worth the read.
I don’t understand, we have DSL that is 250 down 50 up and it works great. I mean I guess if we had 4 8k TVs we would need more. I have a. Bunch of cameras and TVs streaming at 1080 or 4k and don’t run into issues.
It ain’t snail, it just isn’t as cool as your fire hose for a drinking fountain.
As a German, I can tell you the simple answer: Because all of our politicians are genuinely braindead. They don’t understand simple econ concepts, they only follow their stupid ideologies and then they are completely dumbfounded when people vote for someone else in the next election.
Right now, the second biggest party (in terms of the last election result) is a party full of Neonazis. And the “old” parties still haggle about how much they can force upon the poor to save Germany from crumbling infrastructure instead of simply taking the billions from the ultra rich who don’t use them / need them and instead of making life easier for the 80% of people who would actually vote for them the next time.
I am saying it here now: Next election, the AfD will win (by a small margin, not yet at the 50% margin), and all the lobotomised politicians of the old guard will be super surprised and wonder how this could have happened.
There is one good thing about it, and I say this to myself, you learn a lot of patience in the process. It started with an incredible 64 kilobytes per second and has now at least doubled. And because the downloads take so long, you have to suffer through every bad purchase on Steam with a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.
And because the internet isn’t exactly cheap, it always balances out with the Steam sales.
My ISP wants 20 Euro more for fiberglass, at the same speed.
Corruption and monopoly are stopping us from advancing. The usual…
To be fair it’s only just changing in semi-rural/rural UK too, a number of private companies have finally realised that people outside of major population centres actually like fast internet too
German here.
I have never seen a population be so unanimously anti-innovation as Germans. I hop over to the Netherlands and everything changes. It’s appaling. Our schools have overhead projectors, our bureaucracy is run by fax machines and card payment isn’t universally available too (even in large cities). Heck, I was able to do that at a Turkish flea market ffs!
And all I hear is the same phrase.
🇩🇪”Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht.”
🏴”We’ve always done it that way.”
Fuck off! 🖕
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