Germany to become bandwidth heaven?
You can say what you want but sometimes you get officials that are surprisingly bright - not very often but it happens. So I read today that the german government is considering bringing 50 Mbit/s broadband to every household until 2018 - including remote villages. I was about to close the page with the thought that it might be another scam by the german telekom who is already offering 50Mbit/s via VDSL - which is clearly aimed at broadcasting TV through it and makes the recievers the same couch potatoes they have always been. For me any advancement in internet speed that is not bidirectional can stay where it is. How is 50Mbit/s download going to help when the producers of podcast have to wait for 2 hours to upload their stuff through 1Mbit/s upload speed - the only persons who are capable of broadcasting are again those with money those that are the brainwashers the media elite those that the internet can not use at all if it is to strive - those that are to big to fail but are failing.
Then I clicked on an adjustant link and my eyes almost came out:
Die von der Deutschen Telekom derzeit angebotenen 50 MBit/s via VDSL seien "lächerlich", befand die Regulierungsexpertin am Donnerstag bei einer Anhörung über Next Generation Networks (NGN) im Unterausschuss Neue Medien des Bundestags.
Thats the vice president of the "Bundesnetzagentur" or German Network Agency - regulating our communication networks - saying that a 50Mbit/s VDSL network is laughable and absurd. I could not agree more and that this agency is aware of the scam that DSL and even more so VDSL is, bodes very well for the future of the german internet - now if only the companies would start offering SDSL for prices that are affordable (at the moment SDSL prices are in the range of 3x -20x as those of the high end DSL connections - starting around 60 euros a month for 1Mbit/s up/down). Oh and they finally see the light in putting in empty pipes in the ground when its dug open anyway for future networks with for example glasfibre (different story but here in my hometown they ripped out glassfibre 5 years ago after installing it after the wall came down 15 years ago because they did not want to invest in the backend infrastructure to make internet work over fibre - no joke - that is the German Telekom if you don´t know them yet). What a novel idea - too bad that everyone and their grandchildren already had this idea 15 years ago when you dug up everything anyways.
Anyway its not the worst news you can get in the morning especially since you are investigating how to transmit streaming video from a remote location in the past week.
The quote is from an article in Technology Review and is in german.