hetzel.net

My Alternatives to Telekom

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@timohetzel So the Telekom guy asked customers to vote by cancelling, because that’s the only metric he understands.

— wacholderpolka, May 5, 2013

If I wanted to cancel (I do; the contract runs until 2014), what alternatives would I have without taking a shovel to the street myself, as the Telekom spokesperson so nicely put it? I need a reliable, uninterrupted connection to run things here. No network, no Bits und so.

M-net fibre

My favourite: Munich’s municipal utility and M-net are building their own network across the city. A little bird tells me it’ll be years before they reach my place, literally the last house before the town sign. But it should be worth the wait. M-net officially recognizes that it is just a cable.

3G/LTE

Apart from there being no suitable plans, there’s no reception inside the building. One or two bars of EDGE is as good as it gets.

VDSL from O2/Vodafone

Both competitors use Telekom’s rented line. But there’s no free line left at the building connection. Telekom would have to release the line I use now and let a competitor take it over. Would the switch happen without an interruption? I’m not going to gamble on an unsecured changeover.

Kabel Deutschland

The service makes people furious, especially where it’s constantly disrupted or slow. Others dislike the poor traffic shaping during speed tests and the throttling of file sharing after 60 GB a day. Some of that may be justified on a shared medium like cable TV, but failing to disclose these interventions really isn’t.

The hotline says my location is theoretically wired for a 100/6 Mbit connection, but there’s probably a large apartment block with many potential sources of interference between me and the next distribution point. There’s no option but to try it. If the line is good, I may even get more than 6 Mbit/s upstream. I ordered the business plan for an effective €35 per month, giving me:

  1. A fallback if Telekom has a technical outage.
  2. Protection against a likely weeks-long outage if I switch to a Telekom competitor on the copper pair.
  3. A fun opportunity to tinker with VPN bonding and perhaps boost my upstream to 16 Mbit/s.