Why Germans put up with snail-speed internet | International

During the last UEFA European Football Championship, it wasn’t just the trains that were always running late or the fact that many stores only accepted cash that made Germany look bad. Criticism of the country’s terrible wi-fi connections was also shared with the rest of the world. Germans seem resigned to their spotty coverage, and the country has been trying to deal with the issue for years. At this point, some residents take the problem in stride. “Of course, it’s normal that there’s no signal here, there are a lot of us in the same place,” said a German journalist after leaving a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, upon hearing the complaints of her foreign peers about the lack of reception. Some of the writers from other countries jokingly pointed out that they had better wi-fi in any remote town on the island of Mallorca than they did right there. in the center of Berlin.

Germany has a serious mobile and internet coverage problem, not just in isolated areas, but also in big cities like Berlin and Munich. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken about the issue, and what it means for businesses, on various occasions, and has mentioned Spain as an example of a country that has done well in the area of digitalization and high-speed internet.

Some Germans did note that the subject of artificial intelligence appeared to be absent from the last German elections. “How are we going to debate about AI if we don’t even have internet in downtown Munich?,” two young people seated in front of their laptops at a café in the capital complained, only half jokingly.

The problem goes a long way back. In 2018, the Greens commissioned a study from the German Parliament which revealed that in Germany, citizens surf mobile networks at speeds slower than those in Albania. However, the government at the time saw no reason to take action, and the Minister of Research, Anja Karliczek, went so far as to say that not all households needed 5G mobile telephone coverage. In February 2023, the government announced the Gigabit Strategy, which had a goal of getting modern fiber optic connections installed throughout the country, and the latest standards for mobile phones “everywhere that people live, work and travel.” A provisional goal was set to get 50% of homes and businesses hooked up to fiber optic by 2025. When it comes to mobile phones, officials are aiming to get uninterrupted data and voice communication throughout the country by 2026.

At the bottom of the list

However, Germany continues to lag behind the rest of the world. In the current Speedtest Global Index — a well-known website for testing internet speed — Germany ranks 56th out of 152 countries in terms of broadband internet speeds, well behind other European countries. Spain, for example, is ninth on the list. In terms of mobile internet, Germany barely reaches 68.91 Mbps and is once again in the 56th spot. A Deloitte survey revealed similar results a year ago, stating that the proportion of high-speed internet connections above 250 Mbps is 2.5 times higher in Spain than in Germany. 31% of the 2,000 respondents in Germany said they had frequently had connection problems during the past year.

Internet providers are working to change all this, but there are still many areas with poor digital coverage that need investment. That’s despite the fact that since the end of 2021, there has been what is known as the “right to high-speed internet,” which was revised in December to a guarantee of a minimum 15 Mbps for downloads and 5 Mbps for uploads. Consumer advocates consider these current standards too lax. “The minimum bandwidth should have been increased a long time ago,” says Ramona Pop, chairwoman of the Federation of German Consumer Organizations. She adds that there are cases in which the Network Federal Agency has detected insufficient supply “and yet, nothing happens.” It remains to wait and see if the future coalition government takes steps so that the country is not left without coverage.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition