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AS3320 (Deutsche Telekom) Peering Racketeers and EU laws on Net Neutrality
It's been known for some time that AS3320 (Deutsche Telekom/DTAG/DT/Telekom.de) has reinforced their Peering Extortion Policy, this consists in demanding astronomical money for direct interconnection while any normal ISP would do this free of charge. It's mesmerizing that a German court even told Meta/Facebook that it's ok for DTAG to do this [0].
The situation has become so bad that DTAG customers tell us that saturation are now round the clock and that even low bandwidth activities are very painful to do.
We're no fan of global dictatorships, but this to us, looks like a blatant violation of the EU directives on Net Neutrality; so the question is, how could a court of such a great and examplary Free and Democratic country that is Germany, approves of DTAG's behavior? Isn't this blatant corruption?
PS: DTAG customers, we encourage you to submit them complaints.
Comments
DTAG is a T1 ISP, they don't do PNI for free unless some requirements are met, but with DTAG's payed peering costs being roughly 20 to 30 times more of other T1's I do agree that it is extortion since DTAG is "needed" if you have german customers.
I think their unethical business practices wouldn't be relevant if they'd affect only their customers that voluntarily subscribed with full knowledge.
The problem here is that it's a national telecom operator using their customers and their customers' ignorance for blackmail, which in fact would probably have no customers if those customers would have the possibility to choose something else.
So the question is more about, are they allowed to cheat their customers as per EU laws?
Capitalism says the customers will choose other ISPs due to bad service from DTAG.
No, capitalism says the customers are dumb and never choose anything. 1&1 for example outsources a lot to DTAG.
Money is everything, bad reviews don't matter if youre the only option. EU law probably says no but when did EU law do anything useful?
Isn't EU economy all about extortion and fines nowadays. And milking US corps is probably the most favorite kind of income now.
Yes except it isn't enough to keep us afloat.
We're talking about customers that don't have that choice, if they had then that situation wouldn't exist in the first place as DTAG wouldn't have the power of nuisance to do this.
So, that is our thinking. Unless somebody has significant time and money to launch a procedure at the EU scale, then nothing will happen.
Well, Meta/Facebook has a lot of money and they failed, Germany just wants to keep their DTAG monopoly going probably. Lots of lobbying and shit.
I might consider doing some tests by just having DE-CIX DUS/FRA and other T1's and see if I can ignore DTAG's insane prices by just going direct peering and other good T1's.
You can do that with certain T1 until you reach a certain traffic volume to 3320.
DE-CIX is a monopoly as well. Their prices are waaay to high and much much more expensive than transit.
1x 100G = 2400 - 2800 EUR monthly, just think about how many PNIs you can establish with that amount monthly.
And people in Germany even start to believe that DE-CIX is the internet, but it's just a company that is making a lot of profit.
Yeah thats what I am planning, or a cheaper T2 that has DTAG.
I am working on that with some people luckily, and its still way cheaper than DTAG, 2400-2800 for 100G is cheaper than transit from some expensive T1's though.
Especially, as this is mostly double-paid (eyeball -)Traffic: Their receiving broadband customers are paying the traffic and the sending Hosters/ISPs also have to pay for it.
And currently they are working on triple-paid traffic, encouraging the EU to legalize an additional fee for content providers, as they would send so much traffic, they would have to upgrade their network.
DTAG is already congested like crazy
Laxatives required?
DTAG is ransoming other so called Tier 1, so it's not going to work. The first people to have notified us of the problem are from one of them and told us that saturation have been ongoing since late August and that DTAG is totally uncooperative.
Yessir.
Once I get around to Germany I'll try my hardest to figure stuff out. I'll keep you in the loop
Hi,
DTAG is T1? Internationally? Mymymy, times really got bad if this is true.
But yes, DTAG had always moon pricings. Thats normal. Instead of delivering a competitive product to the customers, they will just use the fact that they have tons of infrastructure in the earth by history.
Fashion let you pay easily a 3-5 digit factor of the actual production cost ( scam? dictatorship? -- well yes, maybe ).... your going into a restaurant and suddenly, just because you want them to give you a coke, you will pay 2-10x the regular price for it ( or worst )....
This usage of monopoly is just what our society build for us and what we either continue or fight against it.
So, just like someone already wrote, let the DTAG users feel that its time to leave DTAG.
If you dont have enough market influence then, well make a business decision if you want to improve things for DTAG users, so these users can just remain lazy and make DTAG rich ( for what ever ), then do it. Or dont do it.
But (missusing) your economical situation to put on pressure on others or to enforce your will on them is how our world works currently. No matter if eastern, western, global-south or on the moon.
If you dont want that, then well, fight it by making personal and business decisions not supporting such behavior.
But no court will make it an easy life for us to avoid that conflict. Especially not the "great and examplary Free and Democratic country" where the judges will have to follow the law. And the law is made my politicians.... you know how the story continues ;-)
Always has been (since around 2000's I think)
Exactly, I like to fight against it but you can't kill a whole ant colony with a stick.
Leave DTAG for what? 1&1 uses DTAG for at least some customers, a lot of people can switch if they want mega slow speeds for the same prices. There is no real good alternative. Vodafone might be nice I guess if you have that option.
@layer7 does your strategy of using a T2 to reach DTAG work good?
Hi,
actually its very depending where you are.
Since the DTAG did not want to invest outside of the major cities, there are a lot smaller providers who invested. -- We are also not with DTAG, we are here with m-net ... 50 Mbit downstream, 5 Mbit upstream.... not as fast as the cities but fast enough to do all you want. DTAG would be 16 Mbit/s downstream here :>
In the cities its similar, but there others entered the market because DTAG was forced to allow access to their wire / fiber infrastructure by law.
If a customer does not know whats available, i suggest using the favorite search engine or as the city government.
Portals like check24 / verivox will also help to find something.
And thanks to 5G ( but actually also 4G ) you can even use Mobile stuff if you are somewhere in nowhere.
Actually DTAG has not this big marketshare in germany anymore. Its shrinking quiet fast afaik.
They made some competitive stuff like congstar but thats it.
Normally DTAG is actually one of the worst things you can do.
Yeah, one of my friends has them with super bad latency and mega packet loss, but he doesn't have any other option, and one of my friends is with 1&1 but that is still DTAG's network for him. Do you have the ASN for m-net? Pretty interesting in how to make a hosting business work in Germany without DTAG.
Hi,
i would say thats their ASN:
https://ipinfo.io/AS8767
But again... simply put your address in here:
https://www.check24.de/dsl/lp/2play/?wpset=bing_dsl&keyword=festnetzinternetangebote&tid3=keyword_internet_festnetz
or similar with verivox and let them search for you
There are options. But its highly depending where you are exactly located.
Good luck!
I am not in Germany
But my friends already checked and are kinda bound to DTAG only.
At least German xDSL DTAG customers always have the option to choose a different ISPs if they want to. Just to name some of the biggest ones on the German market who have contracts to rent DTAG xDSL ports to offer their own services. While O2 or Vodafone always use their own backbones, with 1&1 (and it's sub brands) it may differ depending on region if they use their own 1&1/Versatel backbone or just do a complete resell of AS3320. Vodafone in most cases don't offer the xDSL option any more if the address is covered through Vodafone own coax cable.
At least these three have contracts with DTAG also over DTAGs FTTH lines, while Vodafone just signed these contract, the other two are there for at least over a year now.
Only the very very few DTAG coax cable customers are bound to DTAG with no reseller options available.
But most end customers are not aware of how the internet works technically, what peering is at all and what overpriced peering like DTAG do, may means for them or effect the the reachability of services on the internet they want to use. They will just blame the services of being bad, websites xyz is slow or downloads from xyz are slow, streams from xyz are buffering or the gameservers of xyz are shit and have packetloss etc.
DTAG posted their statement regarding this
https://www.telekom.com/de/konzern/details/meta-steht-nicht-ueber-dem-recht-1079616
Thank you, I had missed their response.
It's great, not only do they publicly disclose ransoming other networks, they also provide other evidences of their dishonesty especially when they mention that traffic is being "pushed" into their network, as if this was happening by magic and not at all because their customers are requesting that traffic.
As for Meta, they should have been punished for having paid in the first place.
1&1 is using layer 2 bitstream access, but when they aren't connected to the BNG, they just resell Telekom/AS3320. AFAIK o2/Telefonica might be an option for your friend, as they are using l3bsa (handover at a central point - e.g. Frankfurt).
This is an excellent project that shows where layer 2 bitstream access is available to 1&1 in Germany:
https://n-thumann.github.io/easybell-carrier-map/
I've heard good things about the 1&1 network and have wanted to try it until I found out about a ridiculous policy they have: the "Zwangstrennung", in which they forcibly reset their customers' connections every 24 hours. This reset causes a short interruption that would likely interfere with long-running transfers (like backups) and any server applications that need a stable connection. According to 1&1, this policy applies even to their business fiber contracts, which is unbelievable to me. I can't take any company seriously that does this. (O2 also does it, from what I've read.)
So we've got Deutsche Telekom with terrible peering, and 1&1 and O2 who believe that even business clients don't deserve uninterrupted connectivity. It's a depressing landscape in Germany.
English version without translation fees:
https://www.telekom.com/en/company/details/meta-is-not-above-the-law-1079704