• Björn Tantau
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    336 months ago

    Thanks, Kohl.

    Literally. For those who don’t know it was Helmut Kohl (chancellor during the reunification) who stopped a 30-year project to lay fiber throughout Germany to instead favour copper wires to help his old pal Leo Kirch build up a private TV network to rival the mostly left leaning public broadcast. And I thought one of his family members owned a copper plant or so but I wasn’t able to find an article about that.

    • Not a replicant
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      206 months ago

      Same in Australia. The libnats (right-leaning) broke the fibre-optic rollout by claiming it would be too expensive, and replaced it in non-metro areas with wireless, claiming 25Mbps was adequate. They didn’t mention that slow internet would benefit the Murdoch -owned Foxtel satellite services. And here we are now with internet services worse than some poorer countries.

      I chose Starlink because I will never get fibre optic, my only broadband option is geo-synch satellite, with speed and data caps, and 600ms latency.