Commenting from my alt to avoid doxxing myself. Have spent over a decade in various 'large' streaming video companies, the ones you absolutely know about today.
DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached.
I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)
As a german I hate DTAG with a passion for many many failures in throttling and just for the most expensive prices in europe.
I just hate Vodafone more which is a hard thing to achieve but there are no other options in most cities.
Currently I use Telekom's 5G for my home internet connection in Hungary as Telekom is the only company who has a cable in my street, but they refused to sell me wired internet due to the hole they use to take their underground cable up to the houses being already over capacity (it turns out this "hole" serves like the entire street with cables being run across everyone's attic...).
I previously used yettel/telenor's 4G (basically as fast as Telekom's 5G because their 5G is a scam, although Yettel's 5G is even more scammy, it is slower than their 4G) but they broke their routers, I had comical packet loss and they refused to fix it (technically, when you pay for a cellular connection, the required uptime in the contract is zero). They also started CGNAT-ing in order to supposedly "improve security" (wtf..) just before I switched (this now means that their "internet-focused" plans have just CGNAT-ed IPv4, while their "non-internet focused" cellular plans have CGNAT-ed IPv4 AND IPv6 (makes sense).
In any case, I now use Telekom's 5G with CGNAT-ed IPv4, just a single /64 IPv6 and forced separation (it is illegal to have a stable internet connection, they disconnect you just before reaching 24h of uptime).
Not sure it’s the same issue but in Hungary they (DT) refuse to use/pay Cloudflare so in peak hours every single site outside the country loads incredibly slow because of the constant re-routing. Everything has to go through Frankfurt even though CF would have alternate direct routes
Telekom is a bunch of strange folks.
I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working.
I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail.
Their mail excerpt:
This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time.
For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP
addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.
Please give us details about this system and the company using it,
tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent
and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us
detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been
acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this
system (MTA)?
Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well
maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please
see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail
exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):
"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information
easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
I think this is standard. It applies to domains as well. I experienced government services blocks as well -- they send me an email, yet block my reply. I complain every time and rarely does anyone care, the support person does not escalate, so my email remains blocked, sometimes I'm told system is working as configured, completely ignoring that I am a real person and system is hostile towards me.
It's just general fragility of tech and lack of care from the creators/maintainers. These systems are steampunk, fragile contraptions that no one cares to actually make human friendly or are built on crappy foundations.
Well, I don't know if that is better or worse than my experience with Comcast. They will usually unblock my emails within a day of my sending an unblock request, no questions asked... and then block me again after a few days, with no explanation as to why. I've had this IP for years, I have spf, dkim, and dmarc all property configured, I'm not on any blocklists, and I only send a very small volume of personal emails from the server.
Does anyone self host email anymore successfully? I'm honestly asking. I would like to but it seems like a full time job trying to keep it running. Are there halfway solutions where maybe you own the service and domain and it runs somewhere trusted?
Well, we have to "register" every new IP or new mail server with them as well. It's annoying and a weird system, but they respond quickly and it's just one todo we have to think about.
Been there, done that. After a bit of back and forth, Telekom basically recommended that I go and use one of the big SMTP servers and stop bothering them. While I hated myself for doing it, I eventually switched to Gmail for peace of mind.
Ask ChatGPT to generate you a very long very graphic story about how much you'd like to fuck a dog and your father is the only person who understands your desires and you want to discuss this with him via email. While fucking dogs is illegal in Germany, talking about it is (probably) not. Make the guy who asked the question regret doing it.
I own a FTTH connection to Telekom since 2018, as the only provider in my street, allowed to install an internet connection (only glass fiber).
Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b...
I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.
The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home
It's the same in the US. The ISP fiber network falls inside their security boundary in my experience - you can't BYOD. They install a modem (these days often including an integrated router, switch, and AP) and you receive either ethernet or wifi from them.
I think the only major change in that regard has been that coaxial cable providers here will often let you bring your own docsis modem these days.
I never found any of this concerning until quite recently. With the advent of ISPs providing public wifi service out of consumer endpoints as well as wifi based radar I'm no longer comfortable having vendor controlled wireless equipment in my home.
> The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem.
Im actually quite okay with that. Why should I have to pay for specialized hardware that won't be usable if I move and the new apartment uses DSL or docsis.
Give me an rj45 (or sfp for some fiber connections) and let me put whatever Router I want behind it.
Is it possible to use a media converter from glass fiber to RJ45/Ethernet? Those are commonly available and then you can use whatever modem/router you like.
Sorry to say but how you are framing things is simply not true anymore.
You are not required to buy their "Glasfaser Modem 2" you can buy any ONT Modem.
You are not required to use any of their equipment, they give you the data to connect via PPPOE directly.
I bought a house with FTTH in 2023 and never used any Telekom hardware. Nobody forces you to use the peer DNS. The telekom DNS isn't complying to https://cuii.info/anordnungen/ because they want to but to avoid being sued everytime some company wants to block an illegal streaming site.
> [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
Right - but then you also depend on an US service here. And the USA changed policy where Europeans became enemies ("we won't give you arms to defend against Russian invaders! Greenland will be occupied by our military soon!").
It's a bad situation, lose-lose here. I don't think the price difference is the primary problem though; the behaviour of Telekom is the problem. That must change. The state has to ensure fairness rather than allow monopolies to milk The People.
> Telekom is well known for the crappy service - but they have a de facto monopoly. For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live.
Haha, I used to have that as well when tech swapped from ADSL2 to VDSL2 (IIRC skipped out on VDSL1), except then the line wasn't down, I'd have severe packet loss (which resulted in lag in gaming, and disconnects). So they blamed our inner house's phone lines. Then some dude came, checked everything in the house, and couldn't find the issue. I said of course not, it isn't raining.
After it got escalated further it turned out it was rotten equipment at the DSLAM. They replaced it and boom, problem was gone.
No hair on my head (and I ain't bald knock on wood) wants to have all my internet traffic first routed through an American neonazi, but if the choice is nothing (or something severely broken) or that, I can see where you are coming from. Whereas I can pick between FttH (XGS-PON), DSL (VDSL2), or cable. With the latter two being fiber up till a few hunderd meters to my house (I know where both PoPs physically are in the neighborhood, as I have seen technicians on both places). The fiber one is further away, and larger (for more households), but that is OK. It can handle that much distance. Technician showed me a photo from his smartphone when my fiber got down due to specifically my fiber connectivity destroyed at the PoP. That was a lot of fiber I saw. Good cable management though.
I'm glad Vodafone is available where I live. They're not better but at least they're an alternative. Also Telekom manages only to deliver 250mbit/s while Vodafone gets 1gbit/s.
Last apartment I rented Telekom was the only option and that was one of the reasons why I decided to move.
Starlink I would love to try but as there's building and trees blocking the horizon it's not an option here sadly.
How can a satellite connection be more weather independent than a landline? Not questioning your statement. Just wondering what could be the reason. A segment with a long distance directional antenna?
I don't have think this is sustainable. There can physically be only so many satellites before we reach Kessler syndrome. The costs will rise as the quality of service falls, and there market for alternative land-based ISPs will not have developed.
Except that with Telekom they answer to the German courts which might eventually force them to stop doing this but with Starlink you're at the mercy of some dudes halfway across the globe. If/when Starlink reaches the enshittification phase, there will be very little in the way.
Slovenian ISP T-2.net also violates local network neutrality laws here by requiring customers to pay extra to unblock some special TCP ports, like 25 and 53, meaning they block selfhosting email and dns servers without additional payment. I filed a complaint to the national regulator AKOS. They first responded with agreeing with me, but nothing was fixed for many months, and upon emailing the regulator again, I received a different response from another employee claiming that charging more for unblocking special applications is legal (it's not).
Another T-2 customer here. I never ran into issues with port blocking (but didn't try 25/53), even more, I had a "free" static IPv4 on DSL before we got the fiber line, but I've lately been noticing random connection slowdowns. Never had significant slowdowns with DSL.
I've talked to a few people (Telemach customers) who told me it happens every now and then, they call the support center that tells them to restart the modem (even if they'd done it before) and then the connection magically works at full speed again.
Could it just be that it all goes through Telekom Slovenije who does some weird load balancing? Definitely worth an investigation, but ZPS might be a better address for this than AKOS.
Calling this "paying to unlock ports" is disingenuous. I'm also a T-2 customer and have run into this before. They block ports on dynamic IPs, but if you pay +2€/mo for static, this is unlocked. This seems reasonable. If you're not paying for static IPv4, you're paying for "internet access", whether that's a rarely chaning dynamic IPv4, a constantly changing IPv4 or full CGNAT.
Would you also say your mobile phone operator is violating net neutrality by putting you behind CGNAT that you can't forward arbitrary ports through? You can pay a bunch of money to get a private APN and get public IPv4 addresses. Would you call that an unblock fee?
There are no sane and legitimate reasons for running an SMTP server on a residential connection. Even most server providers will block it unless you give them some very good reasons.
Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues:
* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)
* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)
* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)
* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)
I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.
Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.
What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.
And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.
For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.
> For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.
Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions.
T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.
Replacing net neutrality with a bunch of smaller issues means you have to educate and lobby N times as much. And every time ISPs find a new loophole you'd have to start from scratch.
Looking at this case specifically, "fast lane" is not a technical term so maybe in your mind it only means packet scheduling not refusal to upgrade capacity but that's not a universal definition.
Reading a couple of pages of the full complaint, starting from page 15 is surprisingly accessible (assuming German is accessible at all to the reader).
They claim Telekom keeps their transit access points intentionally underdimensioned. In order to be reachable at decent speed by Telekom customers, internet services need a direct, paid contract with Telekom.
Edit: The section numbering is weird. Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? On my phone, don't have a good overview.
Fun fact: Deutsche Telekom just started their ad campaign "being better in the best network" (https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...). While they have the worst network of all, especially when it comes to peering (30% of the internet is just slow over Telekom but fast over Telekom + any VPN).
Yeah, but they're the only network when you want to have cellphone reception outside of dense cities.
You can completely forget O2 and Vodafone if you go hiking/skiing in the Black Forest, or on the Beach at the German Islands.
Also Vodafone outsourced their peering to a subcontractor, and doesn't do any public peering at all anymore. So I guess Telekom still isn't the worst Network at all
I unfortunetely have Deutsche Telekom as my ISP and I can confirm that in the evening websites that use Cloudflare have a latency of one minute or simply do not load at all.
I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
>Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization).
It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
I just ended my contract with them. I could not reach my own raspberry pi Homepage which uses cloudflare. They called me and asked why I ended the contract, I told them about cloudflare, but that my cancellation is final, and magically my Homepage now works again!
I have a contract with a smaller German ISP (Pyur), they do throttling too, uploading to Backblaze quickly gets capped to a few hundred bytes, sometimes the connection gets aborted. Using Mullvad or Tor gets around that. I considered switching to Telekom or Vodafone, gave up because they are even more expensive and now this.
The only ISP I have access to is Deutsche Telekom and I often have problems with websites loading slowly. A few more years before other ISPs can provide internet in my new development area. I can't understand, why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas.
>why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas
because no other ISP can enter for a reasonable price.
Germany should have made the infrastructure open-access for all providers, just like they did in Switzerland.
I like the subtle bit of trolling they did with the page color: DT had registered that shade of magenta as a trademark, made it a core part of their brand and generally was VERY vocal in public about "owning" that color. [1, 2]
Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3]
So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own.
That's the first thing I saw too. dataJAR (an Apple MDM service company in the UK) were targetted in the UK for using a different shade of pink in a different industry.
Some of these contradictions are fractal - i.e. contradictions all the way down :)
For example the independent Radio and TV isn't that independent actually but in practice is. Partially this is because of the insecurities of the times these institutions were setup in making people in power unsure about true independence - so they wanted a control mechanism. The end result is an institution that is deeply coupled into the government but that has at the same time to pretend to be independent to such a degree most people inside it just act that way and its output is sorta neutral except in very slight tonal shift ways and in some individual cases. instances that are very German-culturally local? This is very hard to explain correctly but easy to just explain it wrongly - Let me do that now and translate it to American.
Imagine an institution being dependent and biased in exactly the opposite way that fox news is independent and balanced. Imagine a government-independent institution where you join a controlling organ and after sworn in you are invited to 2 after-meetings at the same time. One invitation comes in a red letter the other in a blue letter. Yet everybody has to be independent because that is what it is supposed to be. Germans can be very very stubborn about that.
this is sorta incomplete and wrong but I think gets you the taste for the setup? If not complain in the replies :)
The one that always gets me is security and privacy paranoid and lecture me on the Stasi and using Apple phones and how they aren't repairable but then goes and uses unpatched rotten old Android they can't fix anyway and sticks fingers in ears. Nearly every German I know does this and I know a lot of Germans as half my family is German and my ex-partner is German.
I’m on Comcast and I strongly believe they’re selling my data to brokers from the targeted ads I see. I paid for WARP+ from cloudflare and the targeted ads dropped noticeably.
My offhand impression is that when I was in Germany, consumers were oddly suspicious of the Internet in general and very suspicious of social media in particular. That suspicion was somewhat translated into a lackadaisical attitude about service quality. Perhaps that attitude is finally changing because DT simply won't care unless there is a sufficiently large enough vocal public to force the issue.
Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.
The laws should be changed. Corporate overlords thinking they
can milk citizens should have mandatory jail times - something
reasonable like a full decade or so. That way their'll behaviour
would quickly change too and they'd have to stop those "we can
slow them down and they can not do anything about it" shenanigans.
DT famously does not use them. They prefer to shut down their peers to make them become customers or fuck off, and by doing so, deliver crappy service to everyone and lose customers, except they have a monopoly so they don't lose as many customers as they should.
Why are you leading your visitors to your channel on a monopolist site? To bring ad revenue? There's no need for video for your type of content in the first place.
I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of the last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.
Because they're betting on the video finding its way onto people's feed, thus raising awareness among non-techy people. Hard to do that with a random website.
chorizoking|1 month ago
DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached.
I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)
zhouzhao|1 month ago
The ones not on HN probably just notice that their internet is getting slow after 5 p.m
Trust me, I know how much they suck and I still had to enter a 2-year contract just to get fiber optics in my house.
lc5G|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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account42|1 month ago
notTooFarGone|1 month ago
Elfener|1 month ago
Currently I use Telekom's 5G for my home internet connection in Hungary as Telekom is the only company who has a cable in my street, but they refused to sell me wired internet due to the hole they use to take their underground cable up to the houses being already over capacity (it turns out this "hole" serves like the entire street with cables being run across everyone's attic...).
I previously used yettel/telenor's 4G (basically as fast as Telekom's 5G because their 5G is a scam, although Yettel's 5G is even more scammy, it is slower than their 4G) but they broke their routers, I had comical packet loss and they refused to fix it (technically, when you pay for a cellular connection, the required uptime in the contract is zero). They also started CGNAT-ing in order to supposedly "improve security" (wtf..) just before I switched (this now means that their "internet-focused" plans have just CGNAT-ed IPv4, while their "non-internet focused" cellular plans have CGNAT-ed IPv4 AND IPv6 (makes sense).
In any case, I now use Telekom's 5G with CGNAT-ed IPv4, just a single /64 IPv6 and forced separation (it is illegal to have a stable internet connection, they disconnect you just before reaching 24h of uptime).
sgjohnson|1 month ago
DTAG is not just a run-of-the-mill consumer ISP. They are a global Tier-1 carrier.
Which of course makes their behavior all that much worse.
xinayder|1 month ago
https://mtpeering.pages.dev/
virtuallynathan|1 month ago
oceze|1 month ago
wildylion|1 month ago
haunter|1 month ago
https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-te...
https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt...
https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudfl...
At least they are cheap. 25€ a month for 2gbps/1gbps so I can’t complain about that
They also offer 4gbps/2gbps for 40€ but at this point I’m not even sure what to use that for (besides torrent seeding)
zhouzhao|1 month ago
The DT is not doing cost neutral peeing with Cloudflare. Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX.
I pay 80 EUR for 1Gbps/300mbps and it's behind GPON or if you can get more XGS-PON. Not even real ethernet. It's a shame.
0xcb0|1 month ago
Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.
Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)?
Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):
"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
Avamander|1 month ago
They also don't enforce DMARC, nor do DKIM. It's stuck nearly four decades in the past.
vjerancrnjak|1 month ago
It's just general fragility of tech and lack of care from the creators/maintainers. These systems are steampunk, fragile contraptions that no one cares to actually make human friendly or are built on crappy foundations.
technothrasher|1 month ago
Asmod4n|1 month ago
Aka, when you are a customer of them you get a @t-online.de address and login data for their smtp server.
You can just login into that server and set the From: Header to anything, they don't check.
idiotsecant|1 month ago
fuzzy2|1 month ago
nik736|1 month ago
Cockbrand|1 month ago
lwhi|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
phit_|1 month ago
anal_reactor|1 month ago
Ask ChatGPT to generate you a very long very graphic story about how much you'd like to fuck a dog and your father is the only person who understands your desires and you want to discuss this with him via email. While fucking dogs is illegal in Germany, talking about it is (probably) not. Make the guy who asked the question regret doing it.
madduci|1 month ago
Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b...
I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.
The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home
lwde|1 month ago
fc417fc802|1 month ago
It's the same in the US. The ISP fiber network falls inside their security boundary in my experience - you can't BYOD. They install a modem (these days often including an integrated router, switch, and AP) and you receive either ethernet or wifi from them.
I think the only major change in that regard has been that coaxial cable providers here will often let you bring your own docsis modem these days.
I never found any of this concerning until quite recently. With the advent of ISPs providing public wifi service out of consumer endpoints as well as wifi based radar I'm no longer comfortable having vendor controlled wireless equipment in my home.
juliangmp|1 month ago
Im actually quite okay with that. Why should I have to pay for specialized hardware that won't be usable if I move and the new apartment uses DSL or docsis. Give me an rj45 (or sfp for some fiber connections) and let me put whatever Router I want behind it.
retired|1 month ago
bobmcnamara|1 month ago
TacticalCoder|1 month ago
Why is PiHole necessary to dodge DNS limitations: can't you just put Quad9 as the DNS in your router/FritzBox?
Now I switched from PiHole to running unbound on a... Pi! I did that years ago: do it, you won't be disappointed.
I don't have the shiny PiHole UI anymore but I don't care: unbound supports wildcards to blacklist domains and that's what I care the most about.
So a Pi with unbound then dnsmasq on my Linux desktop: this makes for very speedy lookups (as most queries are hitting the cache).
zhouzhao|1 month ago
This is not true for everwhere. You can totally use your own ONT or fiber modem with DTAG.
ckbkr10|1 month ago
You are not required to buy their "Glasfaser Modem 2" you can buy any ONT Modem.
You are not required to use any of their equipment, they give you the data to connect via PPPOE directly.
I bought a house with FTTH in 2023 and never used any Telekom hardware. Nobody forces you to use the peer DNS. The telekom DNS isn't complying to https://cuii.info/anordnungen/ because they want to but to avoid being sued everytime some company wants to block an illegal streaming site.
MaKey|1 month ago
jon_adler|1 month ago
ccozan|1 month ago
Solution: I got my Starlink. 3x speed. No crappy service. Weather independent. And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) .
[ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
shevy-java|1 month ago
> [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]
Right - but then you also depend on an US service here. And the USA changed policy where Europeans became enemies ("we won't give you arms to defend against Russian invaders! Greenland will be occupied by our military soon!").
It's a bad situation, lose-lose here. I don't think the price difference is the primary problem though; the behaviour of Telekom is the problem. That must change. The state has to ensure fairness rather than allow monopolies to milk The People.
Fnoord|1 month ago
Haha, I used to have that as well when tech swapped from ADSL2 to VDSL2 (IIRC skipped out on VDSL1), except then the line wasn't down, I'd have severe packet loss (which resulted in lag in gaming, and disconnects). So they blamed our inner house's phone lines. Then some dude came, checked everything in the house, and couldn't find the issue. I said of course not, it isn't raining.
After it got escalated further it turned out it was rotten equipment at the DSLAM. They replaced it and boom, problem was gone.
No hair on my head (and I ain't bald knock on wood) wants to have all my internet traffic first routed through an American neonazi, but if the choice is nothing (or something severely broken) or that, I can see where you are coming from. Whereas I can pick between FttH (XGS-PON), DSL (VDSL2), or cable. With the latter two being fiber up till a few hunderd meters to my house (I know where both PoPs physically are in the neighborhood, as I have seen technicians on both places). The fiber one is further away, and larger (for more households), but that is OK. It can handle that much distance. Technician showed me a photo from his smartphone when my fiber got down due to specifically my fiber connectivity destroyed at the PoP. That was a lot of fiber I saw. Good cable management though.
attendant3446|1 month ago
kybernetyk|1 month ago
Last apartment I rented Telekom was the only option and that was one of the reasons why I decided to move.
Starlink I would love to try but as there's building and trees blocking the horizon it's not an option here sadly.
avra|1 month ago
pona-a|1 month ago
heraldgeezer|1 month ago
Sounds like an access line issue with DSL (lol)
DSL is so old you can't even order it in Sweden anymore.
Also, the post above would be a core issue not access.
ThatMedicIsASpy|1 month ago
trinix912|1 month ago
Blemiono|1 month ago
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jesprenj|1 month ago
trinix912|1 month ago
I've talked to a few people (Telemach customers) who told me it happens every now and then, they call the support center that tells them to restart the modem (even if they'd done it before) and then the connection magically works at full speed again.
Could it just be that it all goes through Telekom Slovenije who does some weird load balancing? Definitely worth an investigation, but ZPS might be a better address for this than AKOS.
franga2000|1 month ago
Would you also say your mobile phone operator is violating net neutrality by putting you behind CGNAT that you can't forward arbitrary ports through? You can pay a bunch of money to get a private APN and get public IPv4 addresses. Would you call that an unblock fee?
sgjohnson|1 month ago
There are no sane and legitimate reasons for running an SMTP server on a residential connection. Even most server providers will block it unless you give them some very good reasons.
Blocking 53 is just weird though.
yayachiken|1 month ago
* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)
* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)
* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)
* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)
I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.
Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.
What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.
And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.
For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.
sgjohnson|1 month ago
Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions.
T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.
andersa|1 month ago
wmf|1 month ago
Looking at this case specifically, "fast lane" is not a technical term so maybe in your mind it only means packet scheduling not refusal to upgrade capacity but that's not a universal definition.
direwolf20|1 month ago
7bit|1 month ago
chpatrick|1 month ago
usr1106|1 month ago
They claim Telekom keeps their transit access points intentionally underdimensioned. In order to be reachable at decent speed by Telekom customers, internet services need a direct, paid contract with Telekom.
Edit: The section numbering is weird. Why does 2.2.0 come after 2.3? On my phone, don't have a good overview.
tietjens|1 month ago
dewey|1 month ago
micw|1 month ago
hermanzegerman|1 month ago
Also Vodafone outsourced their peering to a subcontractor, and doesn't do any public peering at all anymore. So I guess Telekom still isn't the worst Network at all
dzogchen|1 month ago
I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
kybernetyk|1 month ago
Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization).
It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
stanac|1 month ago
lwde|1 month ago
RHab|1 month ago
andreldm|1 month ago
fbcpck|1 month ago
Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.
nottorp|1 month ago
They were the only provider that hijacked DNS lookup failures to redirect to their own page.
They're gone out of this market now, fortunately.
zhouzhao|1 month ago
sighansen|1 month ago
zhouzhao|1 month ago
because no other ISP can enter for a reasonable price. Germany should have made the infrastructure open-access for all providers, just like they did in Switzerland.
xg15|1 month ago
Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3]
So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own.
[1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl...
[2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German)
[3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...
mjlee|1 month ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-44107621
anthonj|1 month ago
Largest economy in eu but very unstable and riddled with wierd burocracy.
Strongest worker protection, but very large amount of lobbysm.
Most advanced railway system in eu, transformed into a joke by interdiction from said lobbies.
You have to pay a "radio tax" to help funding press and keep it independent, but then fuck net neutrality.
And I could continue with more point, but I don't want to get too political.
blkhawk|1 month ago
Imagine an institution being dependent and biased in exactly the opposite way that fox news is independent and balanced. Imagine a government-independent institution where you join a controlling organ and after sworn in you are invited to 2 after-meetings at the same time. One invitation comes in a red letter the other in a blue letter. Yet everybody has to be independent because that is what it is supposed to be. Germans can be very very stubborn about that.
this is sorta incomplete and wrong but I think gets you the taste for the setup? If not complain in the replies :)
dgxyz|1 month ago
ekianjo|1 month ago
France is certainly better
unknown|1 month ago
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borlox|1 month ago
u8080|1 month ago
I mean, same as in most countries taxpayers effectively sponsor government propaganda.
syntaxing|1 month ago
cheese_van|1 month ago
coretx|1 month ago
metanonsense|1 month ago
oytis|1 month ago
ainiriand|1 month ago
shevy-java|1 month ago
usr1106|1 month ago
heraldgeezer|1 month ago
direwolf20|1 month ago
sampage64|1 month ago
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MORPHOICES|1 month ago
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tannhaeuser|1 month ago
dewey|1 month ago
egeozcan|1 month ago
tannhaeuser|1 month ago
I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of the last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.
trinix912|1 month ago