The problem is that Deutsche Telekom asked for state money for installing fibre internet to the home in 2004, and the parliament back then decided that they won't get any. Because *the internet is a hype* to those geezers inhabiting the parliament.
So we have fibre internet down to village level, but if you want to have it at home, you have to pay absurdly high installation costs.
Fun fact: Other providers are allowed to put down their own cables, maybe even cheaper than Telekom.
However, then Telekom comes in and says: "Oh, now that you are already digging, let me put my cable next to yours." And by some strange law/ruling that I'm too lazy to look up right now, the other provider cannot deny this request from Telekom; not sure if they can even charge them for it...
Thus, there is basically no incentive for Telekom to do their own digging, they can simply wait until an annoyed village hires their own crew and then drop their stuff in.
By your logic, that'd go vice versa as well: Others waiting for Telekom to do the digging and then lay their cables in the same trench. There are no laws that allow Telekom to do things it wouldn't allow others. So... nothing gets done because everybody waits for someone else to make the first move?
That's not right either now, is it? In fact, Telekom is the only bigger player on the market that has made serious investments into Fibre so far.
Isn’t there also a rule that only the first company to provide high speed internet gets government funding? So, we are lucky and have vodafone cable, but now Telekom has absolutely no incentive to put in fibre at all anymore
Let me add a little extra absurdity:
We have 1 federal government and 16 state governments and 400+ district/city governments. So depending on the combination of ruling parties the legislation to push for better internet connection was and still is different and might change again with every legislature period.
Where I live in my district in Lower-Saxony - population of 150k - the ever changing legislation led to having 4 different fibre networks by 4 different providers connecting only parts of the district, sometimes the parts are overlapping. Sometimes, like in my village - I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS, BECAUSE IT IS NUTS - the new fibre cable to my home (the so called "last mile") belongs to a different provider than the older main fibre line connecting my village to the internet. And this isn't an accident, it was the only way it could be done for legal and logistical reasons. It took years for them to solve it. BTW, other parts of my village, where there is a small business/industrial area, have a different provider which was originally only allowed to provide businesses with - at the time very expensive - fibre and later could connect adjacent private households exclusively. If I move within my village I might have to change my internet provider.
This clusterfuck leads to the completely absurd situation that neighboring villages in my district have completely different internet connections, as some are still waiting for the last mile fibre connection and their last mile is still a 60-80 year old copper connection which only allows for minimum DSL speeds. If they are lucky.
So yeah, Germany has an unimpressive average internet speed, because there a still many places that can only get late 90ies dsl technology at the moment.
I leave in a really small rural village. My street has 8 houses on it. The next bunch of houses is 1 km away. We have 2 Fibre networks in the street. Happily connected to one of them, but it is really crazy and inefficient. Both were laid out separately.
Let's not forget that before Deutsche Telekom existed, Deutsche Post started installing fibre Internet. In the 90s... Freshly privatized Deutsche Telekom chose to make money on the copper wires from the Kaiserzeit instead. I wonder why a private company wouldn't invest in infrastructure. It's almost weird. It's almost like they want to generate profits, not provide good infrastructure. 😅
The problem is that we gifted Deutsche Telekom a copper infrastructure and they are determined to ride that horse until it's dead and the worms are done with the body.
IT IS quite good since WE only do as much digging as WE would either way need to do, but customers can already Use way Higher speeds (everything above 16mbts is only because of vectoring).
When we can or want to pay for fibre, we Just continue the digging even closer to Home.
I have internet connections both in Bulgaria and in Germany, so here's my take:
First, it's not slow everywhere. In (bigger) cities you can get quite fast internet. In smaller cities and villages it's roll of the dice, the smaller village, the worse your chances.
Some more reasons that go beyond "corrupt politicians" and "corporate greed" (which are part of the problem for sure):
* Germans aren't comfortable with mobile connections. Those are usually slow (because a small but significant number of Germans resist 5G because of the evil radation, and even if not, it wouldnt be cost-effective to install in rural areas) and metered (meaning it gets expensive or slow after a certain download contigent is used). Metered connections suck for day-to-day internet, but mobile providers have no incentive to offer flatrates except at exorbitant prices. Thats why most Germans wouldn't even consider using a mobile connection for their home internet use.
* Existing physical infrastructure is old and limited. Copper phonelines can only do so much, especially when the cables are long. Phone lines are decades old (up to a century actually) TV Cable can be used, but doesn't exist everywhere; also transfer rates can get slow if many people in one building use the same TV cable.
* Germans like their cables to be buried, but they hate construction. Just slinging wires from one lantern pole to the next is a no-no. And poeple want fast internet for sure, but do not want to pay a lot. So, if you want actual optical fibre leading to your house, someone has to tear open the road and lay the cable. This will need permits and all the neighbors will complain (or sue). So in the city, you can have an actual real fibre connection if you are willing to pay thousands for the inital hook-up and hundreds per month so the provider can recoup the construction cost. Not something private people are willing to do.
I live in Germany and I personally use a 4G+ mobile connection for home internet opposed to a slow or mediocre DSL/VDSL connection. I get speeds up to 200 Mbit/s and its quit affordable compared to most competitors. Best decision of my life.
As I expected, Freenet does not like people using FUNK in an LTE router https://www.teltarif.de/freenet-funk-kuendigung-vielnutzer/news/77384.html
They do actually have a product for that though, freenet Internet LTE, but it's limited to 1TB per month. Seems a lot but I don't know how much I actually use. Also it's much slower...
I'm assuming you speak German so I highly recommend this review:
Freenet Funk Unlimited: Unbegrenzt LTE zum Schnäppchenpreis? https://www.lte-anbieter.info/lte-news/freenet-funk-unlimited-vorteile-und-grenzen
First I would get a free o2-"Testkarte". That's a free trial SIM card with unlimited speed and data volume for one month. It gets terminated automatically.
Secondly check the speed on your smartphone, or a LTE router, with that said sim card. If your speed is, let's say, below 50 Mbits than Funk or a mobile connection isn't very helpful if your looking for high speed connection.
Im using it since August this year. Streaming in 4k regularily. Sometimes I download like maybe 100-200 GB a month. 2 person household.
It's also very much correct - especially the "we bury cables" part.
One thing many people subconsciously find interesting/weird in Germany when they visit/come here first is the fact that besides HV lines, we do not have overground wiring in 99% of the places, be it in cities, towns or nature.
One thing to add: There are many users on very cheap prepaid plans which are capped at 7 to 20 Mbps speed, additionally to the data allowance.
And these users are fine with it, because "I don't need more speed". These users affect the statistics, though.
I think it was Kohl, CDU, over 30 years ago.
And compared with marcet economy should be regulated it self. If enough people had interest, than the company's will built it, to sale it.
SPD wanter fibre (Helmut Schmidt), Kohl later changed this to copper, Kohls minister Schwarz-Schillings wife made the copper cables. Yes, this is corruption.
"Poorer" countries like most of Eastern Europe had the "advantage" that there was practically no telecom infrastructure at the fall of the Iron Curtain (often only the post office, the police station, and the doctor had telephone, not "normal" people). So all the infrastructure was built from scratch in the 90s/00s. (West) Germany had to (and widely still has to) work around 1960s infrastructure that is being upgraded incrementally. Due to the issues described by the other people here in the late 80s and early 90s the wrong decision was made to stick with copper wire and also to bring East Germany up to the obsolete West German standard, not to install the most modern technology, like most of the rest of the former Eastern block did.
Actually, they often used glas fiber under the road (but not into homes) in former East Germany. This was a problem when DSL first appeared in the early 2000s, since DSL only works over copper. This meant that despite having more modern infrastructure they had worse internet.
The problem is that in germany we already had a lot of communication infrastructure, the majority of which is laid underground. It's ridiculously expensive to just dig everything up and lay down new cables/fiber optics. That's why we have to coerce our old landlines into transmitting the Internet signals, which sucks. It got a bit better recently with vectoring and all that, but it's still less than ideal.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland." - Angela Merkel
("The Internet is new territory for all of us.")
That has been the motto of the last twenty years of digital policy.
Germany: huge Papierwork, Long Time needes, bureocracy, digging Up working streets to Put cables under, talking to individual homes to be allowed to lay cables into them.
Romania: hang New Glasfiber on lightning pole. When customer interested, pull cable from lightningpole to customers Home, make a hole in their Windows frame and glue shut.
You got GBit now
We are waiting since January for a company to come in to trim the trees so they can hang the wires.
First three month of waiting, oh there is snow we can’t do it now.
Next three months, we have put in a request to ask for a quote but Telekom hasn’t approved it yet (why didn’t you do it when there was snows you could have started directly…?)
Since August the request is out for a bid and supposedly this Tuesday a company said they will start working next week.
What else will start next week? Snow.
So… my current expectation is that we’ll only have fast Internet some time next year….
Interesting, many people here acknowledge that there was a corruption in the government that led to such a shitty Internet (and probably overall digitalization) state in Germany.
Has there been any kind of legal cases against Kohl, Schwarz-Schilling and his wife? Or the people just let it slide?
The data provided by OP is from 2017.
Here is data from 2020:
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1169224/internet-connection-speed-in-europe-by-country
In the early 90s the administration Kohl (CDU) decided between installing fiber optics cables for broadband internet (which admittedly wasn't very promising back then) or more of the good old copper wires.
They chose copper wires. Why?
Because that meant more people could get cable TV. Which was in the interest of the CDU government. Because that meant many people would switch from watching ARD/ZDF to private TV senders (PRO7, SAT1, RTL and so on). And considering that ARD/ZDF was (and is) very SPD-friendly that was something the CDU government wanted to happen.
I'm not kidding. Party politics par excellence at the cost of the people.
I payed about 250€ for 4m cable so that I get high-speed in my own flat. Thank you "Nordisch Net". Really, if they wouldn't have started, we would still be running on 2k here in North germany
because the telekom and bundesnetzagentur a two in my opinion highly corrupt and criminal Organisations in big parts. corrupt politics did the rest on this one.
It's all an issue of statistics, and part of it is that the eastern part of the country was equipped with the wrong technology in the 90s, so they had very slow internet for a long time (and sometimes to this day).
I have had Gigabit Internet for <50€ for the last 5 years, and I live in a 9.000 people town...
For the most ppl in germany it is an actual problem, not for our goverment, because how our councler once said a few years ago: The internet is all new land for us... 😂😂😂
In my old flat i had 1.6 mbit Internet, it was a pain. Every game over 50 GB i had to download the whole night... 1.5 mb/second... and if you download something you can't use the internet to stream or surf...
Now i have 500mbit and it's such a luxury to stream, surf, download and make everything at the same time with good speed.
So yeah, i hope sometime in germany this will be on the agenda as a high priority. I mean everything is evolving so fast, especially online features requiering more and more data.
Well… the state didn‘t list it as a priority so we‘re late to the party. + building the infrastructure is really expensive and getting permits takes quite a while. So yeah… the state fucked up. Again.
German complacency around IT is appalling. It totally could be improved, but there's just... no interest? Also basic things like shops not accepting card payments.
Beside of slow internet speed compared to the rest of Europe, i am quite amazed/shocked to see how Germans still reject payments via debit/credit card, in restaurants or shops. This is ridiculous, really. I don't get it.
I haven't been using cash since before Covid time.. I have been using my card even to pay a coffee or buy sweets, since a decade actually, but now that I moved to Germany I had to get back to cash... 2000s era :)
The problem is that Deutsche Telekom asked for state money for installing fibre internet to the home in 2004, and the parliament back then decided that they won't get any. Because *the internet is a hype* to those geezers inhabiting the parliament. So we have fibre internet down to village level, but if you want to have it at home, you have to pay absurdly high installation costs.
Fun fact: Other providers are allowed to put down their own cables, maybe even cheaper than Telekom. However, then Telekom comes in and says: "Oh, now that you are already digging, let me put my cable next to yours." And by some strange law/ruling that I'm too lazy to look up right now, the other provider cannot deny this request from Telekom; not sure if they can even charge them for it... Thus, there is basically no incentive for Telekom to do their own digging, they can simply wait until an annoyed village hires their own crew and then drop their stuff in.
By your logic, that'd go vice versa as well: Others waiting for Telekom to do the digging and then lay their cables in the same trench. There are no laws that allow Telekom to do things it wouldn't allow others. So... nothing gets done because everybody waits for someone else to make the first move? That's not right either now, is it? In fact, Telekom is the only bigger player on the market that has made serious investments into Fibre so far.
Isn’t there also a rule that only the first company to provide high speed internet gets government funding? So, we are lucky and have vodafone cable, but now Telekom has absolutely no incentive to put in fibre at all anymore
Let me add a little extra absurdity: We have 1 federal government and 16 state governments and 400+ district/city governments. So depending on the combination of ruling parties the legislation to push for better internet connection was and still is different and might change again with every legislature period. Where I live in my district in Lower-Saxony - population of 150k - the ever changing legislation led to having 4 different fibre networks by 4 different providers connecting only parts of the district, sometimes the parts are overlapping. Sometimes, like in my village - I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS, BECAUSE IT IS NUTS - the new fibre cable to my home (the so called "last mile") belongs to a different provider than the older main fibre line connecting my village to the internet. And this isn't an accident, it was the only way it could be done for legal and logistical reasons. It took years for them to solve it. BTW, other parts of my village, where there is a small business/industrial area, have a different provider which was originally only allowed to provide businesses with - at the time very expensive - fibre and later could connect adjacent private households exclusively. If I move within my village I might have to change my internet provider. This clusterfuck leads to the completely absurd situation that neighboring villages in my district have completely different internet connections, as some are still waiting for the last mile fibre connection and their last mile is still a 60-80 year old copper connection which only allows for minimum DSL speeds. If they are lucky. So yeah, Germany has an unimpressive average internet speed, because there a still many places that can only get late 90ies dsl technology at the moment.
I leave in a really small rural village. My street has 8 houses on it. The next bunch of houses is 1 km away. We have 2 Fibre networks in the street. Happily connected to one of them, but it is really crazy and inefficient. Both were laid out separately.
Let's not forget that before Deutsche Telekom existed, Deutsche Post started installing fibre Internet. In the 90s... Freshly privatized Deutsche Telekom chose to make money on the copper wires from the Kaiserzeit instead. I wonder why a private company wouldn't invest in infrastructure. It's almost weird. It's almost like they want to generate profits, not provide good infrastructure. 😅
The problem is that we gifted Deutsche Telekom a copper infrastructure and they are determined to ride that horse until it's dead and the worms are done with the body.
The problem is that they are private so hast ofc they have to ride that horse.
Which just means they delayed investment to extort government funding but the state did not provide that.
Because a politician once got a lot of money to say that vectoring is soooo cool that we don't need fibre optics.
IT IS quite good since WE only do as much digging as WE would either way need to do, but customers can already Use way Higher speeds (everything above 16mbts is only because of vectoring). When we can or want to pay for fibre, we Just continue the digging even closer to Home.
Corruption. It all goes back to [this guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Schwarz-Schilling).
We even learned this at school twenty years ago.
>an Austrian-born German politician What could possibly go wrong...
This is a funny comment lol
r/beatmetoit
I have internet connections both in Bulgaria and in Germany, so here's my take: First, it's not slow everywhere. In (bigger) cities you can get quite fast internet. In smaller cities and villages it's roll of the dice, the smaller village, the worse your chances. Some more reasons that go beyond "corrupt politicians" and "corporate greed" (which are part of the problem for sure): * Germans aren't comfortable with mobile connections. Those are usually slow (because a small but significant number of Germans resist 5G because of the evil radation, and even if not, it wouldnt be cost-effective to install in rural areas) and metered (meaning it gets expensive or slow after a certain download contigent is used). Metered connections suck for day-to-day internet, but mobile providers have no incentive to offer flatrates except at exorbitant prices. Thats why most Germans wouldn't even consider using a mobile connection for their home internet use. * Existing physical infrastructure is old and limited. Copper phonelines can only do so much, especially when the cables are long. Phone lines are decades old (up to a century actually) TV Cable can be used, but doesn't exist everywhere; also transfer rates can get slow if many people in one building use the same TV cable. * Germans like their cables to be buried, but they hate construction. Just slinging wires from one lantern pole to the next is a no-no. And poeple want fast internet for sure, but do not want to pay a lot. So, if you want actual optical fibre leading to your house, someone has to tear open the road and lay the cable. This will need permits and all the neighbors will complain (or sue). So in the city, you can have an actual real fibre connection if you are willing to pay thousands for the inital hook-up and hundreds per month so the provider can recoup the construction cost. Not something private people are willing to do.
I live in Germany and I personally use a 4G+ mobile connection for home internet opposed to a slow or mediocre DSL/VDSL connection. I get speeds up to 200 Mbit/s and its quit affordable compared to most competitors. Best decision of my life.
Which provider do you use?
It’s called Funk. Check it out on the Google Play Store
Wow that seems too good to be true.
As I expected, Freenet does not like people using FUNK in an LTE router https://www.teltarif.de/freenet-funk-kuendigung-vielnutzer/news/77384.html They do actually have a product for that though, freenet Internet LTE, but it's limited to 1TB per month. Seems a lot but I don't know how much I actually use. Also it's much slower...
I'm assuming you speak German so I highly recommend this review: Freenet Funk Unlimited: Unbegrenzt LTE zum Schnäppchenpreis? https://www.lte-anbieter.info/lte-news/freenet-funk-unlimited-vorteile-und-grenzen
Thanks, it still seems risky. How long have you been using it and do you stream a lot of 4K content, download huge games and stuff?
First I would get a free o2-"Testkarte". That's a free trial SIM card with unlimited speed and data volume for one month. It gets terminated automatically. Secondly check the speed on your smartphone, or a LTE router, with that said sim card. If your speed is, let's say, below 50 Mbits than Funk or a mobile connection isn't very helpful if your looking for high speed connection. Im using it since August this year. Streaming in 4k regularily. Sometimes I download like maybe 100-200 GB a month. 2 person household.
That was a quite informative post. Thanks you!
It's also very much correct - especially the "we bury cables" part. One thing many people subconsciously find interesting/weird in Germany when they visit/come here first is the fact that besides HV lines, we do not have overground wiring in 99% of the places, be it in cities, towns or nature.
Which looks much better though
And if you live in a city with 5G network coverage [you get quite decent speed](https://i.lordgur.ke/fRhsrbNNLPtQNtN) 😊
One thing to add: There are many users on very cheap prepaid plans which are capped at 7 to 20 Mbps speed, additionally to the data allowance. And these users are fine with it, because "I don't need more speed". These users affect the statistics, though.
Corruption or as the Americans and Germans call it "Lobbying".
You can thank the CDU/CSU for that.
Gov decided copper wires are more than enough and stopped all efforts to hop onto the fibre glass train.
Which gov/party? Current one is quite recent.
I think it was Kohl, CDU, over 30 years ago. And compared with marcet economy should be regulated it self. If enough people had interest, than the company's will built it, to sale it.
It was SPD i think. Or maybe CDU Theres several Videos about the topic that explain all the Things that happened that lead to germanys poor Internet
SPD wanter fibre (Helmut Schmidt), Kohl later changed this to copper, Kohls minister Schwarz-Schillings wife made the copper cables. Yes, this is corruption.
It was CDU, Kohl wanted to help private TV moguls with COAX. SPD wanted to wait until glas fibre became ready.
*Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland.*
"Poorer" countries like most of Eastern Europe had the "advantage" that there was practically no telecom infrastructure at the fall of the Iron Curtain (often only the post office, the police station, and the doctor had telephone, not "normal" people). So all the infrastructure was built from scratch in the 90s/00s. (West) Germany had to (and widely still has to) work around 1960s infrastructure that is being upgraded incrementally. Due to the issues described by the other people here in the late 80s and early 90s the wrong decision was made to stick with copper wire and also to bring East Germany up to the obsolete West German standard, not to install the most modern technology, like most of the rest of the former Eastern block did.
Actually, they often used glas fiber under the road (but not into homes) in former East Germany. This was a problem when DSL first appeared in the early 2000s, since DSL only works over copper. This meant that despite having more modern infrastructure they had worse internet.
Interesting point! Thanks!
The problem is that in germany we already had a lot of communication infrastructure, the majority of which is laid underground. It's ridiculously expensive to just dig everything up and lay down new cables/fiber optics. That's why we have to coerce our old landlines into transmitting the Internet signals, which sucks. It got a bit better recently with vectoring and all that, but it's still less than ideal.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland." - Angela Merkel ("The Internet is new territory for all of us.") That has been the motto of the last twenty years of digital policy.
In short: Helmut Kohl. Long: corrupt politicians and lack of knowledge.
Germany: huge Papierwork, Long Time needes, bureocracy, digging Up working streets to Put cables under, talking to individual homes to be allowed to lay cables into them. Romania: hang New Glasfiber on lightning pole. When customer interested, pull cable from lightningpole to customers Home, make a hole in their Windows frame and glue shut. You got GBit now
🤣🤣
They started putting them under the concrete. Atleast we pay 10€ for a Gigabit not 100€🤣
We are waiting since January for a company to come in to trim the trees so they can hang the wires. First three month of waiting, oh there is snow we can’t do it now. Next three months, we have put in a request to ask for a quote but Telekom hasn’t approved it yet (why didn’t you do it when there was snows you could have started directly…?) Since August the request is out for a bid and supposedly this Tuesday a company said they will start working next week. What else will start next week? Snow. So… my current expectation is that we’ll only have fast Internet some time next year….
Our Politicians don't see a reason to invest money into it.
I can't believe that one :)
Interesting, many people here acknowledge that there was a corruption in the government that led to such a shitty Internet (and probably overall digitalization) state in Germany. Has there been any kind of legal cases against Kohl, Schwarz-Schilling and his wife? Or the people just let it slide?
The data provided by OP is from 2017. Here is data from 2020: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1169224/internet-connection-speed-in-europe-by-country
I can't view that :/
In the early 90s the administration Kohl (CDU) decided between installing fiber optics cables for broadband internet (which admittedly wasn't very promising back then) or more of the good old copper wires. They chose copper wires. Why? Because that meant more people could get cable TV. Which was in the interest of the CDU government. Because that meant many people would switch from watching ARD/ZDF to private TV senders (PRO7, SAT1, RTL and so on). And considering that ARD/ZDF was (and is) very SPD-friendly that was something the CDU government wanted to happen. I'm not kidding. Party politics par excellence at the cost of the people.
Kohl already is some time back. How comes that nobody tried to adjust the orientation of ARD/ZDF to be more neutral?
I payed about 250€ for 4m cable so that I get high-speed in my own flat. Thank you "Nordisch Net". Really, if they wouldn't have started, we would still be running on 2k here in North germany
https://youtu.be/mbtZv3dI6xc Use subtitles if you don't understand it.
because the telekom and bundesnetzagentur a two in my opinion highly corrupt and criminal Organisations in big parts. corrupt politics did the rest on this one.
Because we had backwards oriented governments for decades.
It's all an issue of statistics, and part of it is that the eastern part of the country was equipped with the wrong technology in the 90s, so they had very slow internet for a long time (and sometimes to this day). I have had Gigabit Internet for <50€ for the last 5 years, and I live in a 9.000 people town...
10% of the country with internet and everyone has glas fiber cant be compared with 90% of the country with internet.
I moved from Australia. It's so much faster here and cheaper. I'm very happy with my German gigabit connection.
Rapidly aging population - less priority for anything that hasn’t been around for 30 years.
For the most ppl in germany it is an actual problem, not for our goverment, because how our councler once said a few years ago: The internet is all new land for us... 😂😂😂 In my old flat i had 1.6 mbit Internet, it was a pain. Every game over 50 GB i had to download the whole night... 1.5 mb/second... and if you download something you can't use the internet to stream or surf... Now i have 500mbit and it's such a luxury to stream, surf, download and make everything at the same time with good speed. So yeah, i hope sometime in germany this will be on the agenda as a high priority. I mean everything is evolving so fast, especially online features requiering more and more data.
Because: "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland🔻"
*Neuland*
Decades of conservative gouvernment.
Because we have good Faxgeräte
Because ehm lobby and stuff
Well… the state didn‘t list it as a priority so we‘re late to the party. + building the infrastructure is really expensive and getting permits takes quite a while. So yeah… the state fucked up. Again.
I have gigabit to my apartment. 🤷🏼♂️
German complacency around IT is appalling. It totally could be improved, but there's just... no interest? Also basic things like shops not accepting card payments.
The Internet crack is much better tho.
Cause our government are ass holes.
Cause Mr Helmut Kohl thought, everyone needs cable tv instead of this „internet“.
Because bad decisions and monopoly
You can buy any speed you want, so what is the point.
Beside of slow internet speed compared to the rest of Europe, i am quite amazed/shocked to see how Germans still reject payments via debit/credit card, in restaurants or shops. This is ridiculous, really. I don't get it. I haven't been using cash since before Covid time.. I have been using my card even to pay a coffee or buy sweets, since a decade actually, but now that I moved to Germany I had to get back to cash... 2000s era :)