I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month.
The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
i've wondered for a long time why this isn't a more common solution to these services that are almost inevitably monopolous. power, water, and internet kind of things.
Somewhat similar over here in Chattanooga (aka "Gig City"): our city's Electric Power Board has offered synchronous gig fiber for $75/month, a 300mbps "slower option" for $58/month — it's plenty fast — or 25gbps for $300/month... to all electric customers [0].
Of course our lobbied state congress critters passed a law to restrict this, so EPB can only offer internet to a limited geographic area (under the auspices of network monitoring of power delivery) — wouldn't want their Comcast-bros to have any competition! Certain apartment complexes are exempted, which prevents you from using EPB.
Wish more jurisdictions were even allowed to do this; wish politicians weren't such whores.
While this is great when it works it does raise some interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money, should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a utility but not on the same level as water or sewage.
I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive.
On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue.
I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
Notably, Chris Sacca (now a famous VC), when working at Google in the early 2000s, got in trouble for mentioning that telecoms were preventing Internet from being Net Neutral, and instead of being fired, he got promoted by Larry Page and given a huge budget to work on it. I can't find a reference but I'm almost certain this is correct.
> IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in
Could this be due to the rise of services like Equinix Fabric and Inter.link? Google doesn't need to peer directly with most anymore because there is always a middleman somewhere who can handle it, and for many businesses the convenience of a point and click web gui outways whatever it costs?
Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to peer with any other domestic backbone providers.
The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto.
It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
> also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
This gives me even less confidence after BCE took over ZiplyFiber, US PNW provider. There's a long running joke about IPv6 just one more lab test away from deployment.
It's annoying how they're the only big ISP offering fiber everywhere when they're also the ones that don't support ipv6 and have the shitty peering policy. I've heard you can use another isp though (teksavvy maybe?) that uses Bell's fibre and supports ipv6
The solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already have very generous business models with widespread monopolies on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies, and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily - all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the need for additional extraction of capital from other parties. Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common man and thus can’t count on them to support the Open Internet as we’d like to see it.
That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention.
You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.
The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act.
South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make their own competing ISP.
Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.
For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.
[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.
Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants.
Deutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000€ per month per gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still at their sole discretion.
> our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar
The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect each household.
No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status quo.)
Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts?
If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part?
I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
You can file a complaint with the "Federal ministry for digital transformation" (formed this year). It does actually work, but it's a lengthy process.
I did force my cell phone carrier to grant me proper 4G speeds last year, after spending many hours with their help line and ultimately complaining to the (then) ministry of transportation and digital infrastructure.
That's why you are paying for a "up to" 1Gbps connection. (I think it was already a struggle that they had to put the "up to" in the big advertisement)
There's definitely not anything in the contract that promises performance to a 3rd party, especially not in a residential contract. The legal options are switch to a different ISP and/or start a new one. Not always easy or practical, but there you go.
Who is to say where the performance problem is? Certainly not your contract.
Maybe if the last mile is cronically congested, or between the local aggregation switch and their regional exchange points, you might have a legal case. But if the issue is insufficient connectivity between their network and other networks, I would be very surprised if the contract terms covered that at all.
There's a bunch of networks throughout the world where their policies mean you can get more economically acheive better connectivity to their customers by hosting outside the geographic boundaries of the network rather than inside it. Doesn't make sense from a theoretical point of view, but when German ISPs won't interconnect within Germany, serve their customers from Poland or France and the connectivity picture may change significantly. Worst case, serve them from the US (but the latency may be too high)
The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.
I'm surprised to read an obviously AI written article ("This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction") from a tech/news site. Does anyone else find this weird? It make me question the editors note about how much background research was actually done.
Also, am I going crazy or do the "comment" and "share" buttons under the header just tick up but don't allow you to actually do anything? This feels like a vibe-coded website but it could be Firefox being weird.
Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it.
I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away.
So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well.
To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.
> Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much data they send to Vodafone customers.
As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
> There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.
When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
> When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is abandoning.
The disclaimer at the top of the article is really mind blowing:
> We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
it sounded to me like an AI generated article covering it's ass, or at least written by someone who did naught but AI generated research as their own 'research'.
The Telekom story mentioned in this article is 100% as bad as they make it out to be, most of the users we support with issues reaching our services are with Telekom Germany. Or in an authoritarian nation that blocks access to western services.
Is doing business with Inter.link really structurally different from getting connectivity to an exchange like DE-CIX and doing business there? I know that in theory, you get settlement-free peering at exchanges, but only for those networks that participate.
And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.
Yeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for his $1T payment.
Not really, as US ISPs have been repeatedly trying to game the system into becoming landlords for decades. The difference is, ironically, their own self-imposed monopolies: Comcast may be a T1 ISP, but they’re largely a monopoly in the markets they serve. Same goes for Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, TDS, etc. The end result is a sort of “forced cooperation” with each other, though occasionally one will try to extort the others for cash (I seem to recall L3 and Cogent both engaging in this bullshit around the time streaming video got big).
Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
I think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.
Mesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with, it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet without some major technical breakthroughs.
Fucking around with peering is the specialty of German ISPs. Telekom (our biggest provider) is sometimes unusable for YouTube/Netflix/Cloudflare/Steam in big cities because of similar shenanigans.
I was shocked just how slow and poor the mobile networks were in Germany. When I last visited (circa 2014) I literally switched my prepaid sim from T-Mobile to Vodaphone because the experience was so bad - only to have the same bad experience. I had barely usable LTE and connections dropped to EDGE on the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Google Maps barely loaded in the cities let alone the fact I was playing Ingress at the time and it was pretty much unusable
This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
I have had sporadic problems with Vodafone Germany’s IPv4 routing for months, sent detailed analyses and refused in advance to pay for any technicians they might send because the problem could not be on my property. They sent two technicians who confirmed my view. Then they charged me 160 EUR for them without fixing the issue.
1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router.
2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router.
3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error.
4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times.
After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone.
I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
They are NATing the IPv4s, i.e. multiple customers are sharing the same IPv4, which can cause problems. I called them and told them that I absolutely need to do port forwarding and asked nicely if I could get an exclusive IPv4. The support said „Of course, let me check the box in the UI for your account, should be active by tomorrow“ and done. You have to get lucky to get someone who understands your problem and is willing to fix it, though.
Thank you for writing this article. It is a rare take on what is happening, and not everyone has the expertise to write it. It seems easy enough to share to consumers who may be affected by this. And it does have some action steps too.
Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“
No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster.
We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
I worked with Vodafone years ago to do an integration with ticketing systems. It seems like no one actually worked for Vodafone it was all contractors or contractors of contractors of contractors.
Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
At such organizations, you can usually communicate with any contractor, but you must go through a project manager. These managers, who are often contractors themselves, act as a support center for the other contractors.
I used service of Vodafone Germany once. In paperwork fever I only scanned the contract and saw somewhere 6000 but signed off and moved along with remaining paperwork. I thought "it has to be at least 60Mbit/s, right?". Nope. 6Mbit/s DSL, two years contract, cancellation by letter. Fuck you, Vodafone.
When can we start doing meshnets again? I was excited about it in '05 long before I could afford networking equipment. 20 years later and we've only regressed.
Right now. There's Freifunk in Germany. But we're all terrified of laws now. There was a time when hackers would dare to sticky-tape cables out their window and across the street. Not any more, everything's all nice and regulated and a strict order is harshly enforced. If I place a fiber anywhere outside of my apartment I expect to be deported.
Germany has had a weird approach when it comes to the Internet for several decades, but sure, it must somehow be related to recent nuclear power policies.
It doesn’t make sense to conflate a decision made by the government with that of a private company, just because they happen to be in the same country.
Companies claim mergers of competitors are good because they increase efficiency, to get permission to centralize markets to a far greater degree than any cartel could.
Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense.
The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure.
And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR.
--
It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.)
A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed.
But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater.
Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant.
Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc.
Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type.
(I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)
There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe.
And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra.
I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.
It's very simple. I host my stuff on a network with an open peering policy. If you as an ISP somehow have peering issues with that, then that's a you problem. I will not pay a ransom to some shady middleman that you decide to use because your network admins are too lazy. I will (rightfully) blame you and tell your customers to switch ISPs if they have issues.
Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.
This is a very reasonable approach until somehow your competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany network.
As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
Interesting take, but generally large, incumbent eyeball networks have refrained from open peering at IX's for decades at this point. They maintained presences, but usually just to grab a few specific peers they wanted, not to peer broadly with everyone across the exchange, and the bulk of traffic from large providers into eyeball networks comes across PNIs or on-net CDN nodes, not IX.
If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.
lwn|3 months ago
The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
thelaxiankey|3 months ago
ProllyInfamous|3 months ago
Of course our lobbied state congress critters passed a law to restrict this, so EPB can only offer internet to a limited geographic area (under the auspices of network monitoring of power delivery) — wouldn't want their Comcast-bros to have any competition! Certain apartment complexes are exempted, which prevents you from using EPB.
Wish more jurisdictions were even allowed to do this; wish politicians weren't such whores.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB
LaurensBER|3 months ago
I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
radeeyate|3 months ago
phineyes|3 months ago
On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
brynx97|3 months ago
techsupporter|3 months ago
(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?
stroebs|3 months ago
I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
mike_hearn|3 months ago
simonebrunozzi|3 months ago
9cb14c1ec0|3 months ago
Could this be due to the rise of services like Equinix Fabric and Inter.link? Google doesn't need to peer directly with most anymore because there is always a middleman somewhere who can handle it, and for many businesses the convenience of a point and click web gui outways whatever it costs?
hylaride|3 months ago
The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto.
It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
jacquesm|3 months ago
1over137|3 months ago
idatum|3 months ago
This gives me even less confidence after BCE took over ZiplyFiber, US PNW provider. There's a long running joke about IPv6 just one more lab test away from deployment.
inemesitaffia|3 months ago
See Telstra(Australia), the Korean Telcos, NTT(in Asia), Globacom (Nigeria) etc
subarctic|3 months ago
stego-tech|3 months ago
That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention.
You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.
danogentili|3 months ago
South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
kmeisthax|3 months ago
Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.
For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.
[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.
pimeys|3 months ago
What a time to be alive.
immibis|3 months ago
sunaookami|3 months ago
lxgr|3 months ago
The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect each household.
No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status quo.)
mtmail|3 months ago
Lio|3 months ago
If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part?
I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
m_gloeckl|3 months ago
I did force my cell phone carrier to grant me proper 4G speeds last year, after spending many hours with their help line and ultimately complaining to the (then) ministry of transportation and digital infrastructure.
lukan|3 months ago
That's why you are paying for a "up to" 1Gbps connection. (I think it was already a struggle that they had to put the "up to" in the big advertisement)
toast0|3 months ago
Who is to say where the performance problem is? Certainly not your contract.
Maybe if the last mile is cronically congested, or between the local aggregation switch and their regional exchange points, you might have a legal case. But if the issue is insufficient connectivity between their network and other networks, I would be very surprised if the contract terms covered that at all.
There's a bunch of networks throughout the world where their policies mean you can get more economically acheive better connectivity to their customers by hosting outside the geographic boundaries of the network rather than inside it. Doesn't make sense from a theoretical point of view, but when German ISPs won't interconnect within Germany, serve their customers from Poland or France and the connectivity picture may change significantly. Worst case, serve them from the US (but the latency may be too high)
tracker1|3 months ago
fuzzy2|3 months ago
I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
sadeshmukh|3 months ago
lxgr|3 months ago
danogentili|3 months ago
South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
bbzylstra|3 months ago
bbzylstra|3 months ago
unethical_ban|3 months ago
oasisbob|3 months ago
This article is 2700 words of repetitive slop. It seems that people are adapting to this new world.
littlestymaar|3 months ago
vitorsr|3 months ago
Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it.
I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away.
So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well.
To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.
inemesitaffia|3 months ago
Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.
lxgr|3 months ago
As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
trvz|3 months ago
> There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.
When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
mystraline|3 months ago
Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media.
This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
TulliusCicero|3 months ago
noAnswer|3 months ago
https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
preya2k|3 months ago
Starlevel004|3 months ago
Tab closed
cachius|3 months ago
littlestymaar|3 months ago
> We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
alienbaby|3 months ago
meibo|3 months ago
amaccuish|3 months ago
For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/
EN https://netzbremse.de/en/
naIak|3 months ago
immibis|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
fweimer|3 months ago
And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.
inemesitaffia|3 months ago
ThinkBeat|3 months ago
Jackson__|3 months ago
benced|3 months ago
stego-tech|3 months ago
Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
aidenn0|3 months ago
weinzierl|3 months ago
20after4|3 months ago
BoredPositron|3 months ago
hylaride|3 months ago
This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
lorenzk|3 months ago
noAnswer|3 months ago
1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router.
2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router.
3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error.
4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times.
After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone.
I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
0xbs|3 months ago
tracker1|3 months ago
everfrustrated|3 months ago
inemesitaffia|3 months ago
That's giving free transit/route leaks
ElijahLynn|3 months ago
metanonsense|3 months ago
IlikeKitties|3 months ago
mft_|3 months ago
rurban|3 months ago
We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
wil421|3 months ago
Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
egeozcan|3 months ago
lifestyleguru|3 months ago
globular-toast|3 months ago
immibis|3 months ago
bell-cot|3 months ago
noAnswer|3 months ago
1a527dd5|3 months ago
lxgr|3 months ago
glitchcrab|3 months ago
Nevermark|3 months ago
Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense.
The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure.
And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR.
--
It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.)
A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed.
But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater.
Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant.
Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc.
Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type.
(I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)
ExoticPearTree|3 months ago
There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe.
And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra.
I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.
uyzstvqs|3 months ago
Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.
LaurensBER|3 months ago
As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
inemesitaffia|3 months ago
fortranfiend|3 months ago
Liftyee|3 months ago
undeveloper|3 months ago
timvisee|3 months ago
binome|3 months ago
If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.