You Are a Cable

This translation was generated automatically.

Kids who grew up in the ’80s may remember this: the alien Alf wants to eat Lucky the cat and tries to make the idea more appealing. He grabs Lucky by the scruff and growls:

Lucky, you’re a doughnut.

Lucky doesn’t care. He’s a cat, and he runs away.

Tell Deutsche Telekom that it’s just a cable and it doesn’t care either. Its spokesperson bends the truth a little, and the new contracts are still coming on May 2.

The argument is a sham. This isn’t about traffic; it’s about hampering competition in the content business. Telekom doesn’t want to be just a cable. But that’s what it is.

This is about net neutrality, distorted competition, misleading “flat-rate” advertising, and the future of our internet. Write to the regulator—or whatever it’s called this week—and your members of parliament and MEPs. Tell them Telekom is just a cable: Germany’s biggest one, with 12 million connections, behaving worse than usual.

It’s tragic to watch business-school clowns run a technically sound network into the ground. I want a solid network, the best in the country, with fibre to my kitchen. I don’t want bargain-bin internet or a cheap connection. Dear Telekom, I’m willing to pay you a lot to stop treating me like an idiot and simply carry my bits. A monthly price, not little chunks for every 200 GB.

Here’s the funny part: in the US, Telekom isn’t the market leader. With T-Mobile USA, it’s an unprofitable nobody. It even advertises that it doesn’t behave as stupidly as the market leaders.

I think—and this isn’t news—we can write Telekom off.

Anyone who can find an alternative provider should cancel Telekom immediately. If there’s no alternative, at least tell the board why you can’t leave.

Maybe they’ll notice a wave of cancellations they can measure in Excel more readily than an angry hashtag. Here’s the cancellation assistant. It also warns the other providers not to try the same thing. I’m sure Telefónica and the rest are listening. All it takes is one letter, and your connection moves to another provider. A small, painless signal to Telekom: quarterly numbers down by 50,000 lines.

And if they call to win you back, tell them the EU will sooner or later shut down this dishonest “bandwidth management” on mobile networks as well as fixed lines. We need to act now.