Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Who are the providers that misbehave

The article is about T-Systems (AS-DTAG), which is the largest ISP in Germany and basically the company we mean when we talk about net neutrality violation here.

Look at the speeds of their exchange points: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 - 34 Gbps total: 1x 20G, 1x 10G, 4x 1G. Seriously, 1Gbps!

Now compare with another ISP with only 25% the revenue: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 - 890 GBps total.



This reflects only the peering capacity available for public peering and only what has been documented by each ISP for that network. Private peerings (that are direct connections to another network) are much much more cost-effective and easier to scale for a large ISP. In any case you can safely assume that DTAGs peering capacity by far exceeds one or the other Tbit, but it's also far from being sufficient capacity after all. They may also be the largest ISP in Germany by user count, while other metrics may vary ;).


Private peerings are very cost-effective for DTAG because DTAG usually takes money for them.


While that is certainly true, that is not what I meant. For one, it's very cheap to reach such exchanges for companies like Hetzner, because they usually operate their data centers on the same campus, to safe exactly on that backhaul cost to the exchange. By implication all the ISPs are expected to extend their network into these facilities to pick up traffic. While it's true that some ISPs operate big POPs near exchanges, it's not where their customers are. And both users and data center operators rightfully expect a professionally built network with redundancy etc. In that respect it's not necessarily unfair that they charge for the traffic. (While it is certainly unfair that they don't upgrade their connections to extort outrageous prices from other market participants and what's much worse to contain internet growth on a large scale, which is why Germany is a fairly under-developed country in terms of internet connectivity).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

But also, people who work for exchange point operators are the only ones left flying business class in the telecom industry. At the same time public exchanges are a single point of failure in the network that one should(!) design around anyway. There are much cleaner solutions you can design into a network at a fraction of that cost.


For our reference, you may want to check that list, it is really outdated/onesided [1], and not reflecting the reality. Better refer to ookla/netindex or other similar services [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_Inte...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/americas-ugly-t...


Yet you can expect Cable service (Kabeldeutschland/Vodafone) to be to be lossy/congested at every days peek hours.

Whereas DTAG _does_ way better.

I dont like it, but as others have said: Relying on transit peering will not work well once you reach certain traffic levels.

Also you can get Servers from Strato (DTAG Sub) for about the same price as from Hetzner and pump your Traffic directly into a Tier1.


That is simple not true (telekom customer). And I know a lot of people on Telekom.

We even needed to contact Github to change our peering since the default route from Github to DTag just sucks.

Our overall bandwidth with Telekom simply sucks. Most networks are really really slow, compared to Kabel Deutschland.


> We even needed to contact Github to change our peering since the default route from Github to DTag just sucks.

and they were like "sure cosider it done"?


> and they were like "sure cosider it done"?

no. they tried to find a way with us. but after that it didn't worked they changed the routing and it worked.


Vodafone doesn't just offer cable service but also DSL and VDSL, and that's rock solid.

The cable service slowdowns are technology inherent. But that's a last-mile problem and not a backbone problem. Also, these providers aren't trying to use their customer base to extort money from hosters.


Agree on the last-mile part

yet i doubt that buying from a (DSL-)Reseller is improving service quality and prices are roughly the same.


I'm a Unitymedia customer in Germany (200mbps down, 10mbps up for 42€/month including VoIP) and they have been pretty good in terms of speed. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. They also make sure that you get a little extra bandwidth so even with overhead you will actually see those advertised transfer rates in the wild.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: