Internet Landscape in Germany
by Patrick
I really love the international nature of 2600.
I haven't seen any other magazine with contributions from all over the world. In particular, I like to hear about other countries' Internet and telephone infrastructure for end users. Sometimes "Telecom Informer" writes a little bit about this topic. In this article, I would like to briefly explain to you the Internet for end users in Germany. It's not a scientific paper. Please read it more like a subjective view from me living in the northwest part of Germany.
In mid-1990s, the telephone monopoly by Deutsche Telekom (previously Deutsche Post) ended and every company was able to provide telecommunication services to end users. Some of the new providers used the last mile from Deutsche Telekom and some installed their own cables. Later the cable TV companies started to provide Internet access via the TV cable. A few years ago, fiber to the home got big hype and a subsidy program was founded by the government. Now, the local authorities are in charge and it takes a long time. Some other providers, mostly serving a limited area, even started to install new fiber cables at their own cost, which usually comes with a shorter realization time.
What Internet access bandwidth is available for you highly depends on the available providers and what cables your building has installed.
With old copper lines, you can get DSL (ADSL or VDSL) with bandwidth between 1 Mbit/s and 250 Mbit/s downstream and 0.1 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s upstream. This depends on the equipment the provider has installed in the telecommunication cube down the street and how far away your home is from it. With a copper line from some provider (mostly Deutsche Telekom), you can also choose from a variety of different access providers which use the Layer 1 (cable) or Layer 2 infrastructure (bit-stream access) from the provider who owns the last mile cable.
You can order Internet access from the cable TV company that's in your building for up to 1,000 Mbit/s downstream and 50 Mbit/s upstream bandwidth (DOCSIS 3.1). With the new fiber installation, you will see AON networks with active termination in the cube down the street or GPON with passive infrastructure until the next bigger aggregation facility. The offered bandwidth on this fiber installation is up to 1,000 Mbit/s in downstream and 1,000 Mbit/s in upstream, but mostly still asymmetric like 1,000 Mbit/s in downstream and 300 Mbit/s in upstream.
For an apartment building in Cologne, I have seen an installation which uses fiber to the basement and then reuses the old copper lines with G.fast from it to the flats.
Recently, 4G/LTE access or combined 4G/LTE with fixed line became available. Wireless point-to-point or point-to-multipoint connectivity isn't a big thing for end users. Some smaller citizens' initiatives are using wireless technologies to connect areas where no provider wants to invest. But nowadays, with the subsidy for fiber installation by the government, these self-help initiatives may not be needed anymore.
All of this access comes with neutral Internet access to any services and mostly without any traffic limits. Some providers have a fair use policy in their terms of use and can terminate the contract if it's violated. Also, a hard limit from some providers is in place. This will slow down your access to the Internet after a certain limit is reached, like O2 on their DSL products. But most of the fixed line access comes without any limit on traffic or services. For the mobile networks, this is another story. They have traffic limits with slowed down speeds after the limit is reached, and also unlimited traffic to specific services like music or video streaming is available as a paid add-on.
In Germany, there is a big difference in the backbones of the providers.
After the purchase of cable TV company Kabel Deutschland by Vodafone, they had a lot of problems with slowness during high traffic hours and after a massive amount of new customers resulted in over-subscription in access nodes. I had a cable TV Internet connection during this time and it was really bad. Video streams stopped for buffering multiple times. But luckily these times are over.
Deutsche Telekom is also a little bit special because they have a restricted peering policy and are usually not available for peering in big Internet Exchanges.
They had a big fight with Google about YouTube traffic, and for quite some time you had slow access to YouTube during high load hours from Deutsche Telekom. Another story about Deutsche Telekom I heard from a small local provider recently: the small local provider had only business customers and, during the coronavirus pandemic when people began to work from home, a lot of their customers complained about slow VPN access for their employees. The customer's VPN gateway was in this local provider network and the customer's employees at home most often were connected with Deutsche Telekom to the Internet. The local provider had no direct peering with Deutsche Telekom and the reason of the slowness was unknown to me - maybe latency or bottlenecks in the network path. Anyway, to solve this issue, they had to establish direct peering with Deutsche Telekom which they had to pay for.
The price range for Internet access is from 20 euro per month for the lowest bandwidth and for 1,000 Mbit/s about 120 euro.
Most of the Internet service plans come with unlimited domestic telephone calls. The telephone services have mostly migrated to VoIP. Almost all of the providers offer a router for a monthly fee of two to eight euro or a one-time reduced price.
Popular brands are Fritz!Box from AVM and Speedport from Deutsche Telekom. But it's also possible to use any router with the ordered services. After some back-and-forth, a law was established which let you choose the router on your own and set the demarcation point of the provider to the last passive connection point in the building - see Router Freedom.
For this, each provider has to provide a technical interface description of it. An example is the Schnittstellenbeschreibung nach § 41c TKG from EWE.
Since a little more than one year, my current Internet connection is fiber with AON technology from a local provider.
In the beginning, I had a Fritz!Box 5530, which comes with a fiber SFP BiDi module, and was able to reach the provided 1,000 Mbit/s in download stream and 100 Mbit/s in upstream. I'm now on 75 Mbit/s download and 25 Mbit/s upload, which is enough for my current needs and cheaper. But I can highly recommend the fiber connection instead of DSL.
Before I had a VDSL connection, and my first hop latency dropped by around 20 ms to 3 ms after migration to a fiber connection. Everything just feels a little snappier. I replaced the Fritz!Box 5530 with an OpenWRT instance in a virtual machine on my home server and I terminate the fiber from the provider in a MikroTik five-port switch with a 1G SFP BiDi from fs.com.
With this setup, I can use OpenWRT without an additional hardware router. The only negative was that my latency increased by 1 ms. I think this is due to the virtualization, but I haven't checked this in detail. Maybe it's the MikroTik switch.
Thanks for reading, and I hope I can encourage some people around the world to write about the local Internet in their country.