The boneheaded decision to "privatize" rail by creating a state-owned corporation competing with itself, a network of regional corporations with extremely inconsistent funding and separate corporations for various services like literally maintaining infrastructure definitely has resulted in "too much DB". Although I sincerely doubt attempting to actually open up those "markets" by introducing foreign corporations like National Express really does anything other than cannibalize rail services even further.

I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").

We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.

Sir, with this comment you signed up to auto-renewable two years contract.

Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.

Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.

Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.

The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).

GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.

However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network

1: https://ssz.fr/gdp/

There are some economics of scale that work best at the country level.

Even with the EU single market, mobile phone operations almost always follow country borders. You'll get a different set of providers in Germany than you'll get one km away on the other side of the Rhine in France. Even though some of them may have the same name or the same ultimate owner or both, and even though you can roam on the other side of the border, you'll have a contract with a different entity, and different people will build and maintain the networking equipment.

Conversely, in the US, the major carriers all have nationwide coverage.

Thing is, mobile networks are national affairs. A bunch of small countries has a lot of small telcos. Germany has 3 (2? not sure with the mergers) large telcos.

I rarely encounter outright congestion in Australia tbh, but then again I avoid watching videos on the train.. so that's probably indicative of something :D

Coverage is decent on Telstra, but if you're out of town reception is rarely any good, presumably because there's little to no incentive to improve it when there's no on around to need it.

Better coverage may be claimed. But as you know, Australia is a big place.

The few farmers I know have a rough idea of the on-the-ground cell coverage. They say things like "this side of the hill/town" usually. I've seen them deliberately walk to the other side of a silo to make a call.

I assume that the coverage maps are assumed cell-tower-coverage-if-shit-is-not-in-the-way. No surprise radios are common.