There's a division running through Germany. You can't see it. But here, deep in the country’s
heartland, it runs along this highway. People on either side live mostly the same
lives. They use the same water, are served by the same police, pay the same taxes. But
there’s one difference: If you live south of the highway, in the town
of Wolmirstedt, you can surf the internet with the kind of high-speed connection you'd
expect in 21st century Germany. But move just a couple of fields and a highway
away to the north, to the village of Mose — and you'll barely be able to watch a movie online.
The two communities, located a two-hour drive west of Berlin, are a miniature version of Germany’s internet situation.
Across the country, in the darker spots on this map, areas surrounding cities have high-speed
access to the web — while in the lighter areas, there are communities that are de-facto
internet deserts. And increasingly, this is a problem.
But why has Germany failed to roll out faster internet?
And what could be done to fix it? The story of the village of Mose and its fight
for better internet shows everything that is wrong with Germany's internet rollout.
And this man is at the heart of that fight.
Politicians have been promising faster internet to people like him and places like Mose for more than a decade.
But again and again, national targets were pushed further into the future.
First to 2018, then to 2025 — and now, some speak of 2030.
This is a story of how political decisions can shape infrastructure.
It is a story of how markets and bureaucracy can help — or hinder — development.
And it's a story that suddenly gains urgency when the pandemic hits and shows how a bad
internet connection can literally impact your life.
But first, let's see what this is all about. When we connect to WIFI at home, it is a bit
like turning on a tap. We don't think about where the internet comes from, or how it gets
to us. It's just there. But the internet is a stream of data. Just
like we need pipes to bring us water, we need cables to bring us the internet.
And like the size of pipes affects water pressure, the material of cables affects how much data
can flow through them. In Germany, there are essentially three options:
There are old phone cables made of copper — they are the least powerful. Then, there
are TV cables, which allow for somewhat faster connections. And finally, there are “fiber-optic”
cables, which transmit data as light and are, by far, the fastest option.
That is why the kind of cables connecting the internet to your home determine how fast
your internet can be — and people in rural regions like Mose’s home state Saxony-Anhalt
often draw the short straw. In the village, the internet still runs through
a bunch of old copper phone cables dating back to the early 1990s.
Unlike the town just a couple of fields and a road away, no-one updated the connection
here to TV or fiber-optic cables.
But why is the situation as it is? In researching this story, we identified three key factors: Politics, market failure and
bureaucracy. And when we looked at the first factor — politics
— we realized that the idea of fiber optics goes back decades.
Back in the early 1980s, West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, developed
a 30-year plan to replace copper phone lines with fiber optic cables.
But soon after, his conservative successor, Helmut Kohl, killed off the project.
To this day, chancellor Kohl’s reasons are subject to debate.
But West Germany did not roll out fiber optic cables on a large scale — and neither did
Germany when it rolled out phone connections in its East after the country was reunified
in 1990. "It’s a timing question: It would have taken
too long. And second, it’s a question of costs: Who should pay for this?
My name is Torsten Gerpott, I am a professor of telecommunications management. As long
as we’ve had the Internet, I’ve focused on the internet
"It’s easy to say: Well, why didn’t you put fiber into the ground — if there’s
nobody to finance it, then it’s difficult." The 1990s were ruled by the free market. The
Cold War was over; places like here in Germany’s East suddenly were part of the free-wheeling
West, creating ripples that reached even places like Mose.
Which brings us to the second reason for why Germany’s internet rollout is so bumpy:
Market Failure.
This 1990s wave of privatization also included
Germany’s state-owned telecom giant Deutsche Telekom, which operated the country’s phone
connections.
The idea was that once the market was privatized,
companies would compete over customers — which, in turn, would force them to make people the
best offers possible. But that free market did not pay much attention
to places like Mose — rather companies focused on commercial areas and inner cities.
Little villages like Mose were left out in the cold.
They simply were not interesting enough to profit-driven companies. The connections they
were offered were often cheaper and slower than fiber optics.
And policies from governments under chancellor Helmut Kohl, to Gerhard Schroeder, to Angela
Merkel encouraged companies offering second-rate connections.
As recently as the mid-2010s, Merkel's government was introducing a new round of subsidies for
connections as slow as 50MBit per second. "50MBit goal was possible to reach based on
copper cables if you fine-tune a little bit with technology around those copper cables
— but it’s still copper cables. The Deutsche Telekom, which is our big incumbent
company, was just upgrading their copper cables because that was the smallest investment for
them to reach this goal." And you get what you pay for — experts say
some of these connections will already be outdated in a few years.
"This strategy of subsidy, funding old technology to live a little bit longer, was actively
prohibiting or hindering the fiber optics rollout — it was really counter-productive."
But why, you may ask, don’t communities in a free market take things into their own
hands, apply for funding, and build their own fiber network?
The problem is that current rules make such efforts complicated for them.
And this brings us to what in our research, came up as the third great obstacle to Germany’s
internet rollout: bureaucracy.
And there is something else: The more we looked
into the history of Germany's internet rollout, the more we realized it was never really a
top priority for politicians — especially when it comes to places like Mose.
Remember how we said connecting to the internet at home is a bit like turning on a tap?
When it comes to water, people in Germany know the water will come — and it will be
clean. Access to clean water belongs to what is known
as the "Daseinsvorsorge". That is a list of basic public services that everyone has a
right to. Which raises the question: In an age when
people work from home or attend classes online, shouldn’t access to decent internet be on
that list of necessities? To some, that sounds like a dream of tech-radicals.
"You have to set priorities in politics. You can spend the dollar or the euro only once.
Overall, I am not that sure whether there are no other areas that should be of higher
priority.” But others say that our lives have moved online
to such a degree, everybody now needs good internet.
"You have to have a right to it, because without it you cannot participate in society"
People here in Mose learned that the hard
way when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
So what now? How can Germany get out of this mess?
"You can tackle the problems directly: talking
about bureaucracy, of course, you need to simplify bureaucracy, you have to make it
less complicated." Germany has already got rid of some red tape
and included a “right to the internet” in a new law.
And the number of faster connections — including in rural areas, shown in this graph — is
on the rise. But when it comes to powerful glass fiber
connections, Germany still lags far behind countries like South Korea or Sweden.
And if you were wondering that the connection problems in places like Mose might be solved
by 5G mobile internet or Elon Musk's satellite network, they won't.
The experts we asked all agreed that cable infrastructure will remain crucial in the
coming decades. Here in Mose at least the future is — slowly — coming.
People were even promised that soon, they
could get glass fiber connections all the way to their homes.
One thing the story of Mose's painfully slow internet roll-out shows us is that none of
the chancellors of the digital age managed it very well.
But Angela Merkel's era is coming to a close. September's elections will decide who follows
her as chancellor. And the job of speeding up Germany's internet
will be waiting on their to-do list.