Monday, December 9, 2024

A Little Internet Story

 I had dinner with a German couple last night, and the topic of cable/internet came up.

So they live deep in the Pfalz (the state).  Around 20 years ago, the Telekom folks came and gave marginally-high cable to each house in their village.  The speed is high enough to handle email but NOT streaming video.  There is a lag-time....so trying to do hotel reservations or airline arrangements....is  not practical.

I didn't say a lot.  My village....on the outskirts of Wiesbaden....had a Telekom crew come back in the late 1990s....to bring DSL-level speed.  The village even got the faster speed....over vast sections of Wiesbaden itself.  Things corrected themselves over the next decade locally.

So in the past 2 months....here's another crew in the village (Vodafone folks)....bringing even a faster level of fiber-optic cable to the whole village.  

Yet this couple sits and waits....for the day when they might deliver DSL-level speed.

This is brought up on TV news a good bit.  There are vast regions of Germany like this...still waiting.  There is some profitability angle to this....people willing to pay more for services.  


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