Deutsche Telekom customers repeatedly complain that some websites do not load, audio or video streams play irregularly or even break. Software download? Yawning slowly. Sophisticated Online Gaming: Don’t Even Think About It. Online forums are full of them: When setting up a Windows 11 laptop for the first time the update will take five to six hours, you can read there. One gamer complains that the Eve Online servers are in England and traffic often has to go through the net in the Netherlands. Tracing the data packets revealed that the telco had caused huge delays in everything.
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Civil rights organization Epicenter.Works, the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF), the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations (VZBV) and Stanford professor Barbara van Schawick want to do something about it. network break campaign Started. On the website they write: “Telecom is creating artificial barriers at the entrance to the telecom network.” Financially strong services that pay the telecom giant “arrive quickly and work great.” Content providers that cannot afford this “slow down and often load slowly or not at all”.
According to consumer protection activists, this means: “Telecom decides which services we can use without any problems, thereby violating network neutrality.” They are therefore planning to file a complaint with the Federal Network Agency (BNETSA), which monitors compliance with the EU regulation for open internet in this country. To do this, they are looking for further customer reports, relevant measurement data or information from whistleblowers.
Only those well connected will pay
The background to Internet problems is the telecom’s peering policy – that is, when the telecom connects with other networks and large data exchange nodes. Without such mergers, Internet access services cannot function at all. If you only end up in the provider’s own network, it will not be high-end Internet.
Generally established peer practice is that a network operator creates more capacity when there is a risk of congestion on the information highway. In most cases there is no money flow as the connection developed is in the interest of everyone involved. But some very large operators deviate from this principle for monetary reasons.
Everyone in the industry knows that you have to pay telecoms “for the Internet traffic that you send or receive through them,” Dutch network expert Rudolf van der Berg complained years ago. The former German monopolist provides most of the world’s “full network nodes”. Only those who sign expensive special peering contracts with the company can get good connectivity.
Netzbreak activists also accused the telecom of deliberately sabotaging connections so it could collect money. Telekom is the only German provider that asks end customers to pay for online services, i.e. they charge twice. This is contrary to the requirements of a “neutral, free and fast internet for all”.
Telecom: “Lack of technical understanding”
The telecom countered, “The allegations made are false and reflect a lack of legal and technical understanding.” Neither violates network neutrality nor impairs network access for one’s own customers. In fact, the group has won all network tests and was recently named “Best Internet Provider” again for the 17th consecutive time.
Thomas Lohninger of Epicenter.works doesn’t want to be influenced by this. “The problem is widespread and has been known for years,” he emphasizes in the online discussion. Telecom customers faced artificial bandwidth constraints and their freedom of choice was infringed.
“We will provide details in our written submission to BENETZA, which will be presented in the next few weeks,” Lohninger announced. “Then we will provide further information.” Telecom prefers to respond to criticism with accusations: “When we criticized their stream-on offer in 2017, we were also accused of not knowing what we were doing. The ECJ agreed with us at the time. Was.”
“Major Market Partners”
Thomas King, chief technology officer of De-CIX, the world’s largest internet exchange in Frankfurt, confirms the challenges in peer-to-peer, without naming telecoms: “We are currently seeing a trend in which large market players are not only promoting Their Internet access business aims to “monetize network interconnections with private and business customers, but also often with smaller networks.”
This means that previously free connections between different network operators and, for example, content delivery networks (CDNs) or Internet service providers (ISPs) have become subject to fees. Not all CDNs or ISPs could afford or wanted to do this type of “paid peering”. This development affects the quality of the Internet, especially for private users.
“To ensure high quality for private clients, free contact with the public is essential,” King stressed. The interconnection market is fundamentally self-regulated, which has worked very well, at least so far. The insider emphasizes: “At DE-CIX we stand for a free internet and therefore fundamentally advocate as little intervention as possible by higher authorities.”
Friedrich Ufer, managing director of the VATM industry association, which brings together the market’s leading competitors, welcomed “the fact that the ‘netzbremse.de’ campaign takes a detailed look at the actions of telecoms. We also received complaints from VATM member companies. are obtained further.” Therefore, we will keep a close eye on further developments.
Broadband association Bracco pointed out that telcos are committed to data tolls at EU level. If big tech companies were to introduce such cost sharing in network expansion, it would benefit “all companies investing in modern networks” – for example through a fund.
Jürgen Bering from GFF Said at a recent conference of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).The campaign creators have already received over 100 individual user complaints on this topic. In the European Union, the right for end users to obtain information from the Internet regardless of origin or destination is legally enshrined in network neutrality. The regulator “maybe needs a little push.”
(vbr)
