my thoughts on Aachen so far: as soon as we got off the train we saw border police checking passports of brown people, it took over an hour to find a restaurant that both myself and my fiancé found acceptable (e.g. was not unhealthy fried food and also open), there was a store unironically selling DSL in 20 fucking 26 like it was a good thing and our hotel room has a fucking IoT smart lock with a fucking PIN code on it.

also, weed here got legalized in the most useless way possible.

ragequitting and going back to Paris is quite attractive honestly

like I want to reiterate, DSL is BAD.

it is about fiber, docsis 3.1+ and 5G man.

and they say the US is backwards

yo come to FREENET we got DSL

is the DSL free? because that is what DSL is worth in 2026.

@dysfun we LOVE Amsterdam trust me on that one

@ariadne I'm here for the negative comparisons with suburban Seattle. That should really smite the Germans.

@bremner yeah Aachen has real woodinville energy

@ariadne dsl is honestly fine with fttc, i think maximum speeds only doubled when we got ftth

@ariadne you’re in aachen rn? dang

@hypha yeah and it sucks ass

@ariadne been to Utrecht yet?

@ariadne before fttc dosis ran miles around dsl for like 3x the price and abysmal uplink

@ariadne i think it’s named that because it’s not paid by minute

but it’s just as misleading as german ad-supported tv which calls itself “freetv” but where i have not figured out a good way to actually watch without paying someone extra monthly

@charlotte FTTC only makes engineering sense if it is a plant upgrade in preparation for future FTTH development

@ariadne yeah and now i think they actually dropped the dsl entirely in this building

@charlotte ok but you agree that "we have DSL" is a weird thing to put on a poster in 2026, yes?

also I saw someone cosplaying as an indigenous person, which I mean, I knew that was a thing, but to see someone actually doing it? feathers and all? 💀💀💀

@ariadne it seems normal for an internet service provider?

appropriating my heritage isn't ALT you fucking grrrrrrrrrrr

alpine better fix its governance at this damn conference i swear to god, I am really putting in the effort here

this place is actively a cognitohazard to Ariadne

this is like how Frankfurt has a rave museum

does it have raves? no

but it has a museum about raves

same energy tbh

@ariadne like dsl sucking in my apartment complex before fiber makes sense, it’s fucking massive. my parents got 50Mbps down (idk how much up) stabilly before the fiber upgrade in a building built in the early 20th century. the alternatives meanwhile was just cable (with horrible buffer bloating and uplink issues, you don’t know as a consumer if you are getting pure shit (eudocsis 3.0) or something decent (3.1+)) with the local cable service apparently so desperate to get people to sign up that they tried intimidating my mom door-to-door
how good the 4G/5G network is highly variable ofc but it should be noted that germany’s 5G network is mostly/entirely 5G NSA even if isps and the government claim that it’s almost all 5G SA

Aachen: come for Charlemagne, stay because your Linux ISO is still downloading due to having fucking DSL

@ariadne like i think based on speed tests on my phone i get 50Mbps down and 100Mbps down for 4G and 5G respectively, the closest tower reasonably should have a fiber connection and i don’t think it fares better in actually densely populated areas

@ariadne oh yeah germany also hasn’t gotten the memo about that. all based off of the stories of a guy who has never even set foot in america ofc

well it is good to know that Accor hotel group is against the sexual exploitation of children I guess

but also: why the fuck did they post this?

what in the pizzagate is going on here?

@charlotte @ariadne oh we have, just a lot of idiots actively choose not understanding that it's not ok

There's a certain type of German, usually 40s or older, usually male, who refuse any social change. "It's ok if I do it", "It's not meant like that", "It's harmless!", "But we've always done it!" and similar phrases. They tend to ruin every community you accidentally allow them in. These fucks are the reason I stay away from almost everything where I expect the average age to be over 35.

@ariadne Europe is the real land of contrasts after all

Switzerland(?): ah yes we have 10 gig as the premium home option

Germany: YOU WILL TAKE ZE DSL FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!!!

@ariadne you mean to tell me that 250Mb/s DSL for 30EUR/m isn’t fast or a good deal?

(In all seriousness, that’s one thing I will miss about the place I’m currently moving-out of. 20EUR/m for 1Gb/s down and 300Gb/s up on FTTH… one can dream in Germany)

@elly did you know with good governance you could have 1gbps symmetric fiber at that price? it was one of the things I miss from Oklahoma, actually.

@elly this is what I mean. 30 euro for DSL when you can get fiber at the same price point in other countries is kinda, you know, backwards

@elly I mean it is impressive that they have managed to get 200+ mbps out of DSL, but DSL is still shit and interleave is still shit and

@ariadne @elly because of historical quirks we now have ~800 megabit downstream over (copper) G.Fast in Canberra, Australia.

I paid 11k AUD out of pocket for a fibre install, which will be 100/month for 1000/50 megabit in a few years.

@elly @voltagex the NBN is a policy failure

@ariadne this is the country whose hotels have functioning ISDN connections in each room in most cases, so temper your expectations accordingly

Also I’ve heard so many complaints about how they spent so much money bringing eastern Germany to the 90s after the wall fell that they couldn’t afford to keep the rest up to date