To give you some context this starts last friday. I attended border:none, a conference for web professionals that took place in Nuremberg. My parents only live an hour north and so I took the opportunity and swung by their place. Also my brother is among the best german model railroaders, his work is known all over Europe and, thanks to his website, worldwide. His club ran their yearly exhibition on that same weekend and as I hadn’t seen it in action before I went there to have a look at his new South Africa layout. Of course I took some pictures and back at my parents uploaded them to my dropbox. Well, at least I tried.
My parents have DSL6000, that means 6016 kbit/s down and 576 kbit/s up. However, as the line is too long, they only can use a fraction of this. It took ages to upload only one picture. I put my phone in the pocket and went upstairs to see my other brother. There is no WIFI reception upstairs and when I unlocked my phone in the attic the upload was incredible fast. I was stunned. What happend? Due to the lack of a WIFI connection my iPhone 5S ‘dropped’ to LTE, which is available in the area. LTE, however, gives me something similar to DSL16000 and all 40 images and two videos got uploaded in less than 10 minutes. You would like to cancel the DSL6000 contract now, put a SIM into your router and use LTE from there on. There is, however, one problem and it has a name: The carriers.
The contracts offered by Deutsche Telekom (and all other carriers in Germany) don’t have a real flatrate, you get your bandwith limited when you hit a ridiculously low amount of data transfered. Remove this, Deutsche Telekom, or at least lift it up to something useful, 50GB or 100GB would do for the beginning. Free these mobile contracts! It’s your chance! And your obligation. Make Germany fast!