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back to article Germany to fork out BEELLLIONS for farmers' broadband

Under-investing cable companies in Germany are to get a €2.7bn hand-out to bring high-speed broadband to the countryside. Federal Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt told national daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the grants wil be given in an effort to give every German household speeds of at least 50Mbps by 2018. …

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  1. Tim Wolfe-Barry
    Stop

    50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

    Shows what you could do if you tried...

    I got all excited the other week when someone rang me from the ICO to talk about Rural Broadband and poor performance.

    Then they explained they were only interested in people who had nominal speeds under 2Mbits; my nominal 8 (delivering 5 on a good day and 0.5 at peak) is too fast to be considered 'Slow'!!!

    So I need to wait for BT to graciously connect the fiber trunk, which LITERALLY runs past my door and past that of the adjacent exchange (Seriously - they ran it under the pavement 20M from the house), to the local exchange and then decide what to do with my DEL connection before I can aspire to 20Meg...

    According to the local council it's coming "between July and December 2015". Not holding my breath...

    0 0 Reply
    1. GrumpenKraut
      Reply Icon

      Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

      > Shows what you could do if you tried...

      I am less than confident that the promise will be kept.

      Also, Dobrindt is in the same league of fuckmuppetry as "H." Oettinger, the German Wiki page is quite informative (the English very much not):

      https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dobrindt

      1 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

        I am less than confident that the promise will be kept.

        But if we shared that view, we British would struggle with our self-deprecation. Far better to believe Germany to be a paragon of everything organised and clever, talk ourselves down, and take comfort from our treasured national collection of war jokes.

        4 0 Reply
        1. GrumpenKraut
          Reply Icon

          Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

          8-)

          Mister Pooprint is the guy who suggested to collect car (not: lorry) tax for our Autobahns. Reason given (well, not, but that was the rationale): evil foreigners use our roads without paying (boo hoo, bad!). Totally a step towards a united Europe. This crap will only be yet another layer of bureaucracy, and _zero_ gain. Oh, and spying on all road users.

          Accordingly I correct his title to Fuckmuppetosaurus Rex.

          1 0 Reply
          1. Fortycoats
            Reply Icon

            Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

            I thought Fuckmuppetosaurus Rex was Horst Seehofer. You know, the party leader who is supposed to stand for "catholic family values", but who has fathered a child with a woman who wasn't his wife. (But that's never mentioned in the media any more)

            Pretty much par for the course for the CSU..... the car toll was just to get revenge on the Austrians, who dare to charge Bavarian motorists for using their Autobahns to get to Lake Garda or Rimini. The cheek!

            I live in Bavaria, and I can't understand how this shower of Fuckmuppets are in government in this state. And with an absolute majority, too. Michael Mittermaier was right, the east Germans should stop whinging. They got a multi party democracy 25 years ago, the likes of which Bavaria can only dream about.

            3 0 Reply
            1. GrumpenKraut
              Reply Icon

              Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

              > ...the car toll was just ...

              It was purely populistic, and I think it failed even as such. Car owners are more than a little fed up about paying through their noses.

              0 0 Reply
            2. Anonymous Coward
              Reply Icon
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

              They got a multi party democracy 25 years ago, the likes of which Bavaria can only dream about.

              You make Bavaria sound like Scotland, but with decent roads.

              0 0 Reply
              1. Anonymous Coward
                Reply Icon
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

                I think you're confusing Scotland with England.

                0 0 Reply
        2. TheOtherHobbes
          Reply Icon

          Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

          >Far better to believe Germany to be a paragon of everything organised and clever, talk ourselves down, and take comfort from our treasured national collection of war jokes.

          See also, "austerity."

          Anyone with a brain should be able to understand that fast broadband would be a Very Good Thing for UK PLC.

          But the current crop of saddos would rather build train sets and play Monopoly with real property.

          2 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

      I was expecting the obligatory 'BT whinge' after at least 4-5 posts, well done on getting in early !

      0 0 Reply
    3. AndrueC Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

      Shows what you could do if you tried...

      Indeed. Cornwall has done very well thanks to the EU and BT. Unfortunately the rest of the country had to go with a scheme cooked up by the UK government and it's been slow going.

      's a funny old world ain't it?

      1 0 Reply
    4. Christian Berger
      Reply Icon

      Re: 50 Meg Everywhere, eh?

      Well the promise is not very ambitious, however it's rather ambiguous. It doesn't take into account how you get the net, so LTE probably counts even though it's currently far from being able to provide 50 Megs to more than a demo device on an otherwise empty cell.

      What can be done is shown regularly by the CCC. At the last camp they provided 10 Gigabit to over 4500 people. The peak utilisation was about 7 Gigabit so the line was already a bit overbooked. You did get a nice 1 Gigabit line to your tent and some people even got 40 Gigabit into the local network.

      The whole thing was done on a budget much smaller than what you'd usually spend for broadband access. You can cut a lot of corners when you don't have to do billing.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Richard Altmann
    FAIL

    Alexander Dobrindt

    ain´t nuthin´ but a numbnut with a profile neurosis. His first project was trying to implement a roadtax for "foreign trucks". He failed miserably. Now he is cocking about broadband to make it even into ElReg (shame on you). Well, his cock is a bit too small. German infrastructure needs a boost about 10 billion €. This 3 billion € are pissed in the wind.

    2 0 Reply
  3. Richard Altmann

    @ Fortycoats

    yeah, i´m going to swap Munich for Africa again. People are the same: Tribalistic, selfish, ruthless and corrupt. Only, the weather is better down there.

    0 2 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Green with envy

    Out here, town council shovels money at a consultant every year for a feasibility study with the same predictable result: consultant says, I can do it for a few milliona; and council says, we can't afford that. (Meanwhile, my ISP struggles along with a few dozen RF modems sitting on smoke-stacks and towers and no money to upgrade beyond the current 0.2. He would be quite happy with the amount paid for the study.)

    0 0 Reply
  5. Nifty Silver badge

    Hybrid internet

    There was a review on German TV the other night of all the usual suspects - ADSL, Calble, Satellite, LTE.

    But the solution for one family was a hybrid router. Uses a mix of slowish ADSL and a boost from LTE when demand for data can't be met temporally. A bit like having a hybrid car ending with battery for boost.

    Price quoted was 37 Euros/month.

    0 0 Reply

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