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Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time
- bell-cot 10mo agoNot to say that Mr. Musk seems popular in Germany, nor that orbital dynamics are friendly to high user densities, but ...
- noAnswer 10mo agohttps://inter.link https://inter.link "Trusted By: SpaceX"
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoSpaceX used to pay AS33891 Core-Backbone GmbH to reach AS3320 now they pay 1299 (German (landed) Starlink users) for that Interlink is to get to France Telecom/ Orange from German Starlink users And to get Italian/Bulgarian landed traffic to AS3320 From what I see most of the traffic that flows via inter.link from SpaceX is point to point traffic. Not regular IP transit like what they get from 1299 or GTT SpaceX is settlement free in Germany, customer elsewhere.
- fuzzy2 10mo agoIt's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever? I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
- sadeshmukh 10mo agoThey mention it extensively in the article.
- lxgr 10mo agoThe big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.
- cachius 10mo agoStill Telekom has a big market share there.
- archi42 10mo agoThey're entrenched. They have Telekom-branded stores (resellers) in every other town. They operate the network and hence have the best ability for trouble shooting. Non-technical users don't know what peering means, they just pay for Internet like they pay for water or power. So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-) Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.
- wil421 10mo agoI worked with Vodafone years ago to do an integration with ticketing systems. It seems like no one actually worked for Vodafone it was all contractors or contractors of contractors of contractors. Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
- lifestyleguru 10mo agoI used service of Vodafone Germany once. In paperwork fever I only scanned the contract and saw somewhere 6000 but signed off and moved along with remaining paperwork. I thought "it has to be at least 60Mbit/s, right?". Nope. 6Mbit/s DSL, two years contract, cancellation by letter. Fuck you, Vodafone.
- egeozcan 10mo agoAt such organizations, you can usually communicate with any contractor, but you must go through a project manager. These managers, who are often contractors themselves, act as a support center for the other contractors.
- benced 10mo agoRare comparative W for American ISPs?
- aidenn0 10mo agoI think Comcast charges for peering as well (but not through an intermediary).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- stego-tech 10mo agoNot really, as US ISPs have been repeatedly trying to game the system into becoming landlords for decades. The difference is, ironically, their own self-imposed monopolies: Comcast may be a T1 ISP, but they’re largely a monopoly in the markets they serve. Same goes for Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, TDS, etc. The end result is a sort of “forced cooperation” with each other, though occasionally one will try to extort the others for cash (I seem to recall L3 and Cogent both engaging in this bullshit around the time streaming video got big). Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
- rsingel 10mo agoCalifornia's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs
- stego-tech 10mo agoExactly. Regulations without suitable punishments and investigatory powers are essentially only barriers to new entrants, not deterrents of bad behavior.
- Liftyee 10mo agoNew selling point for all the VPN sponsored segments... "if you're on Vodafone Germany, make your connection speeds faster with YetAnotherVPN!"
- timvisee 10mo agoA VPN won't make your route shorter
- toast0 10mo agoIf the shortest route is congested, a longer route can be advantageous if it avoids congested hops.
- immibis 10mo agoIt actually can, depending on where it is. Paperclip optimizers don't optimize for route length - they optimize for paperclips received. When Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom gets your packet, they try to send it to one of their customers, because their customers pay them to receive traffic, even when it's a longer route. If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route. In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
- inemesitaffia 10mo ago
- Lio 10mo agoIs there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts? If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on Vodafone's part? I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
- lukan 10mo ago"If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection" That's why you are paying for a "up to" 1Gbps connection. (I think it was already a struggle that they had to put the "up to" in the big advertisement)
- Telaneo 10mo agoSurely there's a reasonable expectation that Netflix would work at decent speeds, especially given that Netflix's infrastructure, nor the network load as a whole are to blame, but rather the specific ISP bureaucracy? Getting 1/1000 the listed speed does not strike me as something even a 75 year old computer neophyte of a judge would take kindly too, unless it were for very good reasons.
- fluoridation 10mo agoI don't think there really is much that can be done. Even under ideal conditions, an ISP could only possibly guarantee the advertised link speed between you and their routers, not between you and any particular node on the Internet. Is it possible an ISP might be doing things that harm the QoS? Yeah, sure. But the angle to approach that problem is not by complaining about instances of limited bandwidth.
- Telaneo 10mo agoBut the true link speed's not even what's being asked for. 4K Netflix never goes above 20 Mbps as far as I know, so getting just 1/50 the advertised speed to one of the most well-known internet services in existence, hardly seems like a big ask, especially when the only reason that it can't reach that speed or higher is because of the ISP, given that swapping to one that aren't being knobheads about it fixes the problem. It should be the responsibility of the ISP to keep links to other parts of the internet as open as possible. If real-world constraints prevent the speed from being all that high, because it's a shitty server in Australia, then that's understandable. This however, isn't that. All I'm getting from this is that it's a good idea to label ISPs utilities and bring the hammer down if they're being knobheads about it.
- mystraline 10mo agoThe play by major content providers is "not to pay" and "block inter.link" Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to every major media. This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
- TulliusCicero 10mo agoBlocking seems overkill. Just put up a banner explaining why the service is slow, warning customers about their ISPs.
- Spivak 10mo agoBecause a banner is ignorable. A block will actually spur action.
- TulliusCicero 10mo agoA banner by itself is very ignorable, but in this case the website is going to be annoyingly slow, and people are gonna notice that and be thinking a little about why. In that scenario, they're much more likely to notice and pay attention to something like a banner.
- preya2k 10mo agoDoesn’t seem to work in regards to Deutsche Telekom so far.
- noAnswer 10mo ago"The play by major content providers" like Google? Where in order to become a "Verified Peering Provider" you are not permitted to use a IX?! https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provider https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoThe restriction is only to Google. 1299, a Google gold partner is at IXes
- BoredPositron 10mo agoFucking around with peering is the specialty of German ISPs. Telekom (our biggest provider) is sometimes unusable for YouTube/Netflix/Cloudflare/Steam in big cities because of similar shenanigans.
- hylaride 10mo agoI was shocked just how slow and poor the mobile networks were in Germany. When I last visited (circa 2014) I literally switched my prepaid sim from T-Mobile to Vodaphone because the experience was so bad - only to have the same bad experience. I had barely usable LTE and connections dropped to EDGE on the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Google Maps barely loaded in the cities let alone the fact I was playing Ingress at the time and it was pretty much unusable This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
- tracker1 10mo agoI hate this line of thinking.. Netflix isn't just sending data to random users, it's data Vodafone users request and want to receive.
- phineyes 10mo agoThis isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive. On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
- techsupporter 10mo ago> low quality network participants are joining (Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoMalware, flapping, bogons, remote peers, etc
- stroebs 10mo agoI thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue. I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.
- MichaelZuo 10mo agoWhy did your company expect Google to readily accept peering? If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.
- hylaride 10mo agoBell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to peer with any other domestic backbone providers. The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto. It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThat's insane given that Front St. 151 is probably the best spot on North America when it comes to connectivity.
- 1over137 10mo agoit’s also insane because probably no Canadian wants their traffic going through the US unnecessarily, since all the 51st state takeover crap.
- hylaride 10mo agoFWIW, this has being going on for decades. Bell literally doesn't care if there's a chance they can suck up some peering fees. There have been periodic times where it became an acute problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams became saturated and there were few alternative paths.
- subarctic 10mo agoMaybe that's a way to give them bad PR and convince then to change policies? Unfortunately most people probably don't understand this well enough and they have a pretty well oiled PR machine with all their control over tv and radio stations, etc
- danogentili 10mo agoSeems pretty much a private equivalent of "fair share" govt regulation currently being pushed by ISPs in Europe through lobbying with the Digital Networks Act (https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-future-regulatory-framework-for-electronic-communications-in-europe/ https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-fut..., https://stopdna.eu/ https://stopdna.eu/). South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
- stego-tech 10mo agoThe solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already have very generous business models with widespread monopolies on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies, and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily - all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the need for additional extraction of capital from other parties. Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common man and thus can’t count on them to support the Open Internet as we’d like to see it. That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention. You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.
- danogentili 10mo agoThe current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act. South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).
- stego-tech 10mo agoBecause western governments (and those whose governments were modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and corruption. It’s why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked, or reversed reforms like net neutrality or “nutrition labels” on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to “fair share” regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is hugely influential, and the industry is almost exclusively made up of rent-seeking slumlords at this point, particularly at the top (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, etc). It’s why DMCA reform is blocked, why pirates get jail time while AI grifts get a hand-wave, and why right-to-repair or data privacy remains a fractured and piecemeal reform instead of a national agenda item. The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.
- fweimer 10mo agoIs doing business with Inter.link really structurally different from getting connectivity to an exchange like DE-CIX and doing business there? I know that in theory, you get settlement-free peering at exchanges, but only for those networks that participate. And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it doesn't mention its name.
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoDepends what exactly you're buying from them L2 yes. L3 no
- bbzylstra 10mo agoI'm surprised to read an obviously AI written article ("This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction") from a tech/news site. Does anyone else find this weird? It make me question the editors note about how much background research was actually done.
- unethical_ban 10mo agoIt didn't seem AI to me.
- oasisbob 10mo agoThe easiest way to notice it is its excessive use of what Wikipedia calls "negative parallel construction". [1] It's a super common genai tic > This isn't about efficiency—it's about extraction > The problem isn't your connection to Vodafone—it's Vodafone's restrictive connections to the rest of the internet. > Vodafone's exit from public peering isn't an isolated technical decision—it's part of a broader pattern of large telecoms trying to reshape internet economics in their favor The more obnoxious signs though is the excessive length, loose structure, repetition, and lack of serious editing. Writing ~3000 words used to take quite a bit of effort, so you'd need to be at least a strong enough writer to organize and structure your thoughts to make it that far. Now it's so easy anyone can put out tons of generated content on whatever topic they want. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- littlestymaar 10mo agoIt looks like the website was founded not so long ago, and I guess AI-generated slop is the only way to make a profitable web media nowadays.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- bbzylstra 10mo agoAlso, am I going crazy or do the "comment" and "share" buttons under the header just tick up but don't allow you to actually do anything? This feels like a vibe-coded website but it could be Firefox being weird.
- littlestymaar 10mo agoThe disclaimer at the top of the article is really mind blowing: > We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
- alienbaby 10mo agoit sounded to me like an AI generated article covering it's ass, or at least written by someone who did naught but AI generated research as their own 'research'.
- uyzstvqs 10mo agoIt's very simple. I host my stuff on a network with an open peering policy. If you as an ISP somehow have peering issues with that, then that's a you problem. I will not pay a ransom to some shady middleman that you decide to use because your network admins are too lazy. I will (rightfully) blame you and tell your customers to switch ISPs if they have issues. Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it isn't.
- LaurensBER 10mo agoThis is a very reasonable approach until somehow your competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany network. As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoThe network is buying transit from someone
- lwn 10mo agoI recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month. The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
- LaurensBER 10mo agoWhile this is great when it works it does raise some interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money, should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a utility but not on the same level as water or sewage. I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
- redserk 10mo agoWhy make the assumption that municipalities must treat their internet services as a second-rate utility? Many local governments are competently run. If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water.
- markdown 10mo ago> If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power, sewer, and water. More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal power than without internet.
- VWWHFSfQ 10mo agoI don't find that it is usually even possible to have internet without power. How would that work?
- binome 10mo agoInteresting take, but generally large, incumbent eyeball networks have refrained from open peering at IX's for decades at this point. They maintained presences, but usually just to grab a few specific peers they wanted, not to peer broadly with everyone across the exchange, and the bulk of traffic from large providers into eyeball networks comes across PNIs or on-net CDN nodes, not IX. If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you agree to peer in.
- meibo 10mo agoThe Telekom story mentioned in this article is 100% as bad as they make it out to be, most of the users we support with issues reaching our services are with Telekom Germany. Or in an authoritarian nation that blocks access to western services.
- amaccuish 10mo agoCan confirm, recently moved to o2, it was insufferable. For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/ EN https://netzbremse.de/en/ https://netzbremse.de/en/
- mft_ 10mo agoWould you recommend o2?
- amaccuish 10mo agoCan't complain so far, reddit loads in the evenings again.
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoIsn't 02 Telefonica? I don't believe they peer either
- ThinkBeat 10mo agoUsing Starlink as your Internet provider does not protect you in any way when it comes to changes in pricing, speed or connectivity.
- Jackson__ 10mo agoYeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for his $1T payment.
- PhilKunz 10mo agoexcept the only infrastructure to replace is the satellite dish, and not the fiber that goes into your home. Or am I wrong here.
- pimeys 10mo agoAwesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants. What a time to be alive.
- immibis 10mo agoDeutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000€ per month per gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still at their sole discretion.
- mtmail 10mo agoThe issue here seems to be the landlord.
- socksy 10mo agoPart of the issue is that the landlord gets any say whatsoever about a public utility.
- pimeys 10mo agoYes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable. I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
- lifestyleguru 10mo agoHow one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.
- naIak 10mo agoRefusing to peer directly is not “killing the free internet”. This level of hyperbole doesn’t help your argument.
- immibis 10mo agoyes it is? This level of normalcy bias doesn't help your argument, either.
- globular-toast 10mo agoWhen can we start doing meshnets again? I was excited about it in '05 long before I could afford networking equipment. 20 years later and we've only regressed.
- immibis 10mo agoRight now. There's Freifunk in Germany. But we're all terrified of laws now. There was a time when hackers would dare to sticky-tape cables out their window and across the street. Not any more, everything's all nice and regulated and a strict order is harshly enforced. If I place a fiber anywhere outside of my apartment I expect to be deported.
- everfrustrated 10mo agoInter.link is openly peering on IX's tho. So I'm unclear why the angst. https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/ https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoNo guarantees of performance to peers, no one's carrying peered traffic to other peers or upstreams. That's giving free transit/route leaks
- metanonsense 10mo agoIronic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“
- IlikeKitties 10mo agoDo not switch to Vodafone. Even without their peering it's still a horrible ISP
- trvz 10mo agoEven the first paragraph is wrong: > There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free. When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
- ElijahLynn 10mo agoThank you for writing this article. It is a rare take on what is happening, and not everyone has the expertise to write it. It seems easy enough to share to consumers who may be affected by this. And it does have some action steps too.
- vitorsr 10mo agoTelefonica does this. Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5 mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several other networks and appliances connected to it. I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away. So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as well. To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering locally.
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoThe logic is money. Also if something goes wrong with their traffic ratios, Telefonica would have to pay for transit.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 10mo agoI think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.
- 20after4 10mo agoMesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with, it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet without some major technical breakthroughs.
- sunshine-o 10mo agoI do not think this is about replacing the current Internet and watching Youtube or Netflix using a mesh network. It would be more about having a slow, free and backup internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the same time as the grid). I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.
- fortranfiend 10mo agoWow, thanks I hate it.
- lxgr 10mo ago> Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much data they send to Vodafone customers. As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that it's possible to send any data over Vodafone's network. (My DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in multiple seconds.)
- 1a527dd5 10mo agoGermany is on a weird path; first the nuclear power withdrawal and now this. It's all a bit topsy turvy.
- lxgr 10mo agoGermany has had a weird approach when it comes to the Internet for several decades, but sure, it must somehow be related to recent nuclear power policies.
- glitchcrab 10mo agoIt doesn’t make sense to conflate a decision made by the government with that of a private company, just because they happen to be in the same country.
- Starlevel004 10mo ago> When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point—maybe four or five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is abandoning. Tab closed
- cachius 10mo agoWhy?
- Dilettante_ 10mo agoAI writing cadence I presume. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683
- cachius 10mo agoThanks. I thought it was something factually wrong.
- galaxy_gas 10mo agoIt is also likely factually wrong as most major ISPs use GGC for popular traffic
- mft_ 10mo agoIs anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone or Telekom?
- rurban 10mo agoNo. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster. We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still
- inemesitaffia 10mo agoUse the same provider
- Nevermark 10mo agoCompanies claim mergers of competitors are good because they increase efficiency, to get permission to centralize markets to a far greater degree than any cartel could. Once under more centralized control, new and old efficiencies are moved from customer benefits per charge, to conglomerate revenue per expense. The centralization enables the change, and defends it from competitive pressure. And regulators keep falling for it, because industry money has so many ways to push watchdog decisions in the direction they want, under the cover of relentless PR. -- It would be a very blunt instrument to require companies that reached 50% market share, or $500m valuation, for more than three years to split into independent companies. In any way they wanted to organizationally and asset-wise, as long as the highest valued component was valued at less than 60% of the original. (Strategically owner/leadership designed breakups often result in a greater sum value. So more than one component may end up worth more than 50% of the original.) A very very blunt economic instrument, indeed. But I really think markets would become more dynamic, competition fiercer, technological growth faster, economic growth higher, and customer benefits greater. Great for the labor market too. Both in job creation and economic mobility. The continual emphasis on developing new leadership talent for success created spinoffs would be significant. Startups would have fiercer competition in terms of incumbent adaptation and innovation, but lower passive barriers based on scale, brand, etc. Billionaires would continue to be minted. Warren Buffet adds value to many companies without creating self-serving keiretsu out of them. Other billionaires would tilt more toward the multi-founding pattern, instead of the single-company (or tree of controlled subsidiaries) mogul type. (I am aware that some markets, especially some utility type markets, "want" to be monopolies due to objectively high costs of duplication. But even those can be made more decentralized and more competitive by increased modularity on functional lines, and similar decompositions, suited to specific economics and practicalities.)
- lorenzk 10mo agoI have had sporadic problems with Vodafone Germany’s IPv4 routing for months, sent detailed analyses and refused in advance to pay for any technicians they might send because the problem could not be on my property. They sent two technicians who confirmed my view. Then they charged me 160 EUR for them without fixing the issue.
- noAnswer 10mo agoYou have to go to forum.vodafone.de: 1. State stat the error also occurs with the Vodafone router. 2. that you already have done a factory reset of the Vodafone router. 3. that you already have turned your Vodafone router off for 24 hours and it didn't fix the error. 4. that you already talked to the hotline multiple times. After that you have to pray that someone with the same problem comes along and endorse your problem. Like, "I have the same problem since...". This sometimes conjures a Vodafone guy who tells you he has informed the technicians. Than you have won and within less than a day the error is gone. I was six month without IPv6 even though the error message was clear. The forum route finally worked.
- 0xbs 10mo agoThey are NATing the IPv4s, i.e. multiple customers are sharing the same IPv4, which can cause problems. I called them and told them that I absolutely need to do port forwarding and asked nicely if I could get an exclusive IPv4. The support said „Of course, let me check the box in the UI for your account, should be active by tomorrow“ and done. You have to get lucky to get someone who understands your problem and is willing to fix it, though.
- ExoticPearTree 10mo agoGreed. The shortest explanation. There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe. And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra. I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.