Content

Page 1 — Lame German internet

Page 2 — Proportion of fiber optic connections

Page 3 — no government subsidies

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Websites that are idle due to timeout, jerky videos and Skype calls that are disconnected due to a bad connection – Germany's patic supply of fast broadband Internet access is threatening to become a national embarrassment. While less than one in ten German broadband connections reaches "holy grail" of net speed of 100 megabits per second, in countries like Latvia and Sweden it is almost half and in Romania even nearly 60 percent.

Japan at front

Percentage of fiber optic Internet access

Source: OECD Broadband Statistics © time graph: Doreen Borsutzki

Even more alarming: up to past year, more than a quarter of households in Germany had only painfully slow data connections of less than ten Mbits/second. In United Kingdom, only seven percent of broadband connections were so slow, and in Nerlands re were three percent.

The great coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD had discussed problem for four years – and de facto postponed it. It could not help to raise large sums of public money for digital infrastructure. Without m, however, re will be no real progress, says Marco Junk, managing director of Federal Association for Digital Economics.

The partners of a possible Jamaica coalition also recognized need. But by letting ir negotiations fail, y lengned unsatisfactory status quo by months, if not years. Meanwhile, calls are becoming increasingly urgent, Germany's digital infrastructure finally to balance into 21st century.

The lack of willingness to invest taxpayers ' money in infrastructure is one of two main reasons for slow Internet in Germany. The second is copper cables, which were moved everywhere thirty to fifty years ago, when former state German federal post joined flats in country to telephone network. The majority of population is still on internet via se cables.

This article dates back to time No. 49/2017. Here you can read entire output.

The providers of Internet connections, especially Deutsche Telekom, have so far advocated a process called "vectoring" to speed up connections via existing infrastructure. This technique is intended to eliminate interference from or Internet users in line in order to approach possible maximum transmission speed of copper cables. The financial outlay is very manageable, but an optimized copper cable is not enough as an infrastructure for a digitised economy.

Date Of Update: 02 December 2017, 12:04