1. What's the logic here? Because a business is trying to reduce its expenses, it's wrong on any matter by default?
2. You are aware that DTAG does not peer at DE-CIX, so whether "peering is most dense" there has exactly no influence on whether Hetzner gets good connectivity to DTAG?
3. You are aware that Hetzner does peer at DE-CIX with 200 Gbit/s, with an open peering policy?
4. You are aware that Hetzner even peers at AMS-IX in Amsterdam with 100 Gbit/s? That link almost certainly is even more expensive than the one to DE-CIX.
1. The idea was to make an example of the company favoring cost effevtiveness over quality. which may not be bad ... but it should underline the cheap-assiness.
2. dtag is ofc present in frankfurt and at de-cix, with little capacity for public peerings as mentioned.
This and your 3/4 each make sense, as they represent a legit business interest for the different sides.
Hetzner preffering cheapass open and dtag preffering scalable private peerings.
Problem i see is Hetzner externalizing the cost of private peerings.
Which in return plays into 1. and the example of them externalizing other cost factors.
1. How exactly is labor, land, power, or dark fiber lower quality in east Germany (if we ignore the fact that Nuremberg doesn't really qualify for being cheap nor for being in east Germany)? If anything, the subsidies might suggest that operating a business is actually more expensive, which is why it's being subsidised.
5. You are also aware that they operate some 170 Gbit/s of private peering?
6. Which costs exactly are they externalizing with regards to peering in your opinion? So far, your argument seems to be "they don't pay as much as DTAG would like them to, therefore, they are externalizing the difference between DTAG's wishes and what they are willing to pay" - which isn't exactly how you determine externalities.
Without any additional details your contrasting of "cheapass open" vs "scalable private peerings" seems completely baseless. Why is DTAG not the cheapass for skimping on their public pairings?
That's not how it works. While there is an east/west divide in Germany, it's along the former border. Bavaria is amongst the most expensive places in Germany in regards to labor and land. Also not more government subsidies than anywhere else in the former West.
Sure, you save a lot by going east. But that means the real east, i.e. the new states.
I'm really dubious of the claim that labor in .de is super expensive. I know that most software devs there make way less thank 100K euro's/year. That's much, much lower compared to the US. Housing costs (buy/rent) in .DE are much lower compared to the US as well.
I have coworkers in Berlin who are pitching me to move over there because it's so easy to live well there.
Edit: I think the problem with "high labor costs" is not monetary, but bureaucratic. It's damn near impossible to get people to work near 40 hours a week. It's hard to get them to do on-call shift work. It's also really difficult to fire people in .de
Note that in this subthread we were just discussing differences in costs within Germany, nothing more, nothing less. Nobody claimed that labor and land was expensive compared to say the US. Only that it is much, much cheaper in Chemnitz than in Nuremberg. Just 200km away from each other but worlds apart in operating costs.
If DTAG asked for 1 EUR/Gigabyte, would you still maintain that position? 10 EUR? 100 EUR? Is there any point where you would consider the behaviour of DTAG inappropriate/unfair?
BTW, nobody is denying that they in fact are an important ISP, where "important" means "lots of customers", which in turn means "lots of power". Someone holding a gun to your head also has a lot of power and thus is important to you - but power in neither case automatically implies that any offer the powerful party is making is a fair offer, be it that they ask you to give them all your money to avoid being killed, or that they ask you to pay massively above-market rates to avoid being unreachable for their customer base.
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.
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.
