Penguins.mooh.org

DSL woes

In response to Yun's question about what the bandwidth is like here - It's pretty good. I'm currently sitting on an academic research backbone around Germany, and apart from the loss of a significant part of the internet this morning (due to something dying around Frankfurt), it's all pretty snappy. If you're after some bandwidth you can use at home however - that's a completely different story. I once thought that Australians were alone in being shafted by a once government run monopoly, and in getting very poor value broadband options. The Germans didn't want to be beaten it seems, and got themselves their own little home-grown monopoly.

To actually get broadband access here, you've got one of two options (pretty much): Cable and DSL. Much like cable in Australia, if you're living in an apartment block (like me), you have no chance of actually getting the cable running from the street to you. The DSL requires you to have a phone line ( €15ish / month ) from the local monopoly. On top of that, you then have to pay €16ish / month for the privilege of having a DSL connection enabled on it. Once you have these two established, you can then go about thinking about actually having internet access on the line. There are a number of providers you can choose from - 1 and 1, Freenet, T-Online (part of the monopoly), and Arcor (which do DSL over ISDN, so the price structure is a bit different). All of these guys charge about €6-9 / month for the internet access at a flat rate, with speeds ranging from 1Mbit to 6 Mbit. So really, the prices paid by Australians for broadband access doesn't seem to exorbitant, and if anything, the plans produced are better since they cater for varying levels of usage - not just low usage or insane usage.

3 comments

Anonymous *

There is no "low usage". If the line ain't saturated you ain't getting your money's worth!! :)

butercup *

You still haven't convinced me I should get broadband. Especially not from the monopoly.

Anonymous *

Holy shit are you still on dialup Diane?

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