One of the odd things that Germans will harp on....in a negative way....is that a lot of villages throughout Germany.....don't have 'fast internet'. By fast internet, they are talking about DSL speeds, or 3,000 Kbps or 3 Mbps.
If you live near a metropolitan city (Frankfurt, Mainz, Berlin, Munich....for example)....then the odds are 99-percent you have fast internet. If you live 80 kilometers north of Frankfurt, in the middle of a rural region....the odds are that you don't have fast internet.
So it's a politically sensitive topic.
The German federal government figured out that it was politically worth the effort, and voted to set aside 3.5 billion Euro (a lot of money) to bring fast internet to rural areas. There's one catch....paperwork.
That's been over a year now. How much has been spent? Well....they haven't even crossed the one-percent point. Why?
What the communities and small towns are saying is that the paperwork involved....is too complicated. They are bogged down in figuring out the government mandated actions required, and the cost estimates necessary to get the funding. 3.5 billion Euro sitting there....and they can't grasp the paperwork required to spend it.
You would think that one single guy would come up and get suddenly smart, then appear at these city council meetings and just say....for 5,000 Euro, I'll fill out every single form the correct way and get you hooked up to a half-million to ten million Euro grant for your internet. Or you could even find two college guys who'd wise up to this whole thing and they might do it for twenty cases of beer for each application.
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