Free these mobile contracts, Deutsche Telekom

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!

International Tracking Links

I’m currently building a new ERP for our company. To make life easier for our customer service they have direct links from within any order to the parcel tracking. We ship most of our items with DHL Germany. Other than with DHL Express the parcel will not be delivered with DHL in the destination country but with the local company instead. DHL provides us with a match code/UPU once the parcel reaches the destination country.

I already built a lot of icons for this but I wanted to improve this even more for our customer service. So where available I tracked down the URL for the Track&Trace in the destination countries – if available the direct link to the result page without any need for our people to put in the match code into another form and submit it.

I’d like to share this list, maybe it’s helpful to anybody else. If you have suggestions, improvements or want to add missing companies, just drop me a line.

This project on Github

Read more