If you sign a new contract with an internet provider in Germany , you will have to wait up to three weeks until somebody comes and turns one switch and you have Internet.
In South Korea they will connect you on the afternoon of the same day.
Sources: I am German and my neighbours are Korean (not the best Korea kind of Koreans)
Internet in Germany is abysmal, and not only in the countryside.
I live in Berlin, our capital. I can't work from my studio since internet is too slow there. I know whole companies having moved their offices to different districts because they did not get sufficient internet. At the place I am currently at, I have LTE and officially it's listed to be in the highest category in terms of speed: I have about 1 mbit/s download. Some base station seems to be broke, but that is the case for months, and I would not even know where to complain about this. I’m actually only writing this while waiting for my software to update, so I can finally start doing something. And again, this is central Berlin, not somewhere remote.
For the "why?": in 2013 our chancellor Merkel said (on the NSA scandal) "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland." which translates to "The internet is unchartered territories for all of us." – in 2013! As far as I know, they only have Wifi in the Bundestag (the parliament) for like two or three years, and I would not be surprised, if most of our politicians still read their emails printed out on paper.
Seriously, it is that bad. Germany is in the stone age in this regard.
It's bad, but it's not universally bad. I'm in Berlin and have 400MB/S at home But our apartment was built in 2011, so that might have something to do with it.
It's even worse: when you cancel a contract, they can turn it off remotely, but when you get a new contract, a technician has to come out and turn it on.
If you already have the connect with the company, comcast can switch it in 20 minutes. (I did a direct move from one comcast to another comcast location)
Yessir, same thing in Denmark. Ordered Wi-Fi for my new apartment two weeks before I moved there, just so I knew it would be activated when I moved in. Ridiculous.
I do think some of the new fiber companies are same-day, though.
> On one occasion I was given a complimentary hotspot+SIM to use while waiting for the installer to show up. That wasn't a good sign.
Doesn't necessarily even work. My current flat is apparently rather well shielded, before I ordered a microcell I couldn't even send an SMS from inside the flat unless I stood in front of an open window.
I get full signal on the balcony, barely any inside with the door closed. It was a painful few weeks before my wired 'net issues got resolved.
Also funny bit: the flat L-shaped, the AP is at the end of long arm (because that's where the study is).
I don't get any wifi when standing in the small arm either. Took me some time to realise why: the elevator is in the crook of the L, so blocks the signal.
It's possible but it means moving the cable modem & AP there, then adding cabling back to the study (or buying a CPL kit and hoping it works well enough). So far it's really not been worth even considering, the small branch is just the kitchen and I'm not much of a cook so my internets requirements over there are limited.
I could also put some sort of wifi repeater there, seems simpler than moving the AP, but even that's not been much worth investigating for now.
Vodafone does this. They also explained to me i get to keep the Mifi+SIM, to use it in case the landline goes out (edit: never had to use it once in 3+ years).
Not sure how this is not a good sign, i suppose they do that pretty regularly? Also, in my case the announce 4-week window was 2 weeks in the end, so not sure if there's much of a complaint there.
Are we really expecting to just summon things at will now?
Same in Perth, Australia, a major city -- and IIRC, Canberra too. This was 2013-ish. I was amazed, appalled, and confused -- a service visit was unnecessary. I think if you signed up for the massively overpriced privatized carrier Telstra, it was faster -- but any competitor ISP using their copper had that two-week setup delay.
For what it's worth, NBN Fttp (and maybe other connection types?) is same-day, usually within the hour. Launtel even have daily rates so you can quickly switch to them if you need a backup provider.
Here in Canada, depending on your ISP (Rogers, in this instance), the activation is instant. In fact, they only give you a two-hour window to get home and plug your modem in, otherwise you have to call and have them re-send the activation ping.
Yes, it is ridiculous, and very common with Telekom (though there is a difference wrt. existing vs. new connection, that takes a couple of days usually everywhere) but of course the old tenant didn't have internet on the appt. Of course.
to be fair i always got the exact date and somewhat accurate time for when the switch will be made. I think when switching providers this is mandatory by law to ensure of the continuation of services...
Those stories about how Kohl messed up the "future of Internet in Germany forever" by going for his buddy's copper instead of fiber in the late 90s never made sense to me. How about just trying again instead of just giving up?
a) Germany has a very high population density (232 people per km^2)
b) Germany is kind of rich
These two factors makes me think there is something else at play. (Germany would be able to afford doing it all over again, but right this time.)
And then there is this - wow, lack of GSM coverage in such a densely populated country?
In my experience this would would only be explained by systematic incompetence, systematic corruption or a combination of the two.
It is a problem, but not in the extent this article or people make it out to be.
There are 3 nation wide 4G networks, every home has old landlines.
What is a true problem however is the political unwillingness to force cell providers to cover areas with very little population.
It is not economically useful to invest in very rural areas, if you would have to invest 2x to go from 95% population coverage to 99% (numbers made up).
The conservative party (CDU) is "business friendly" to the persistent detriment to quality of life of a majority of citizens in a lot of areas.
T-Mobile was part of the Deutsche Post when it was still a government organization and it is still a big shareholder.
If you travel through Germany it feels like huge problem to be honest.
My girlfriend lives in northern Germany and going around in Germany by train is just a big waste of time, because most of the time you have 0 signal as soon as you are outside of a city.
For example traveling by train from Vienna to Bremen takes around 8 hours, but I basically need to stop working as soon as I cross into Germany. 0 Signal.
If you are in the Netherlands, Czech Republic or Austria and you cross into Germany it's like traveling back in time. Very often you are lucky to have some EDGE reception, while at the other side of the border you had high speed LTE.
Traveling by ICE (German high-speed train) it feels like this has improved a lot over the last years. I am traveling through Hamburg, Berlin to the south in the direction of Munich and most of the time I have 4G coverage, even with O2/Telefonica, the worst of the three providers coverage wise.
ICE is the worst transport, compared to the local lines that are now provided by commercial companies - I'm not talking about being on time (it's a fantasy), but Internet in the train itself in 2019th doesn't work at all. I used it regularly in 2018th, and it was ok - I could use that time to write a report in google docs, push some code, find information, etc. In 2019th, it simply doesn't work - I gave up, and either tether from my phone (if there is a signal), or just sit and read.
The coverage in Germany is really bad outside of the cities, area between Kassel and Fulda, and then further to the south is just a black hole. But when you enter into Austria on a train, you can say this just by seeing how fast internet is in the train, and there is a strong mobile signal...
Another issue on the third generation of ICE is that the windows have a coating meant for blocking out heat which is also very good at blocking cell signal.
The provided wifi is done via external antennas and multiple carriers and usually quit a bit better, however there are still long parts where it's unavailable as well. Also quite limited at 200MB of volume.
Anecdata of course, however i once had to be online while on the ICE from Augsburg to Dortmund (that's a 6hr ride).
In preparation of a demo, i spotted one last bug in our system, which i tried to squash together with a few programmers from the manufacturer, being online in Skype and Teamviewer basically the moment i sat down in Augsburg and managed to work around it when i had to exit the train 6 hours later.
This was around 2016, and at least on this ride there weren't much areas without reception.
Not denying the base problem though, once you get used to LTE you'll begin to notice if you ever drop back to 3G, or god forbid, Edge...
The CDU is business friendly in the same way the Republicans are business friendly - it sure appears that way at first, with tax breaks or lowering regulations, but in the end it bites everyone in the ass, even businesses, when that means this allowed everyone to not progress and be left behind while around you other countries improved and got their shit together. Internet is one of these things, photovoltaics another (we used to be good in Germany, then the CDU (and to an extent the SPD) needed to protect the 20k workers in coal and created laws and regulations for that, in the same way killing off the PV industry with around 70k workers).
The existing alternatives (e.g. DSL pushed to and beyond its limits) are "good enough" in the short term, especially for dense population centers, making it hard to justify the cost of an actually good fiber solution.
I'm Swedish. Have family in Berlin, so I have some exposure to that reality too.
Trying to figure out how things got kinda right here and kinda wrong there. The 90s was a while ago. The way I heard and remember it: it started with someone really, really prescient in the Stockholm water/sewage department figuring out that it would be kinda smart to lay some dark fiber when they were digging up the streets for maintenance, anyway. This would probably be like 1994-1996 or so. Then this continues to happen in smaller cities, etc etc.
I'm probably missing some critical steps.
It was a weird bottom-up-thing happening. Would love to get a deeper understanding from someone who was there.
"One important part of Stockholm’s modern ICT history is the company Stokab, founded by the
City of Stockholm in 1994. The deregulation of the telecom market, which had taken place
the year before, was the reason for establishing the company. Despite proposals by a number
of national parliamentary parties to divide up what was then the Telecommunications Admin-
istration into an independent, neutral infrastructure organisation and a service organisation, it
remained intact and instead became the company Telia.
Stockholm’s politicians believed that a neutral stakeholder was needed who could provide
basic IT infrastructure to all on equal terms in order to generate competition, diversity and
a range of choice within telecommunications and data. To achieve this, the IT infrastructure
company Stokab was formed through a political consensus. The company’s mission is to build,
lease and maintain a passive fibre-optic network to help foster favourable conditions for IT
development and the positive development of the Stockholm region."
> These two factors makes me think there is something else at play. (Germany would be able to afford doing it all over again, but right this time.)
Conservatives in politics. Since 1982 the Conservatives were in government 30 of 38 years (Kohl 1982-1998, Merkel 2006-now). Many of their members of parliament still have their employees print out emails. Technophobic lot they are.
We could afford a lot of things in theory, in practice conservatives love their tax cuts and helping the auto industry to live off of ICEs instead of incentivizing them to go green. Same for solar and wind energy, more jobs got lost in that sector in the last years than the fucking brown coal industry still has remaining, and they've still decided to grift billions to the brown coal / energy companies.
Seriously, Conservatives are a plague, no matter the nation, and especially in times of widespread drastic changes.
This is just crazy talk. On the one hand, Merkel gets constant praise for being a scientist, on the other hand she's a conservative (questionable by any standards) that is technophobic. Please.
Additionally, Merkel never ruled alone, it's been either a coalition with the SPD or the FDP, neither are conservatives.
Please don't spread misinformation and if you actually believe "Conservatives are a plague", go see a mental health professional, because you're dangerously radicalized.
Merkel also shut down nuclear power plants didn't she, causing Germany to increase dependency of coal? (At least until solar/wind can take over completely). So much for her environmental ideas. I would take a German nuclear power plant any day over coal.
Yes, a lot of her policies were closer to the Green party in Germany, who have been asking for the immediate end of nuclear power for a long time.
I'd prefer nuclear of coal as well, but there's a significant number of people that are terribly afraid of it on a pre-rational level. From what I understand, it's the idea of a run-away process that "doesn't feel natural", i.e. can't stop it burning by just not putting in more coal. It seems like "humanity should not meddle with the power of the gods", but they're usually explicitly anti-religious.
Nuclear power was first shut down under Schröder with a coalition of SPD and Green. The shut down was then cancelled by Merkel just to shut it down again shortly after the Fukushima disaster.
Interesting. So I guess Merkel had the right intentions (keeping nuclear seeing it was the greenest / lesser-evil option), but also the expected characteristics of a politician.
> I would take a German nuclear power plant any day over coal.
I'd prefer ditching both. Germany lost more jobs in the solar and wind industry than there are left in coal ffs, we would stand way better in the Energiewende if it were not for Conservatives in government. When China started dumping solar the German government did nothing, and wind was famously sabotaged by Conservatives ("10H Regel").
Nuclear fission cannot be operated safely and in contrast to the US we don't have ample lots of empty space away from civilization where we can chuck the waste into - we are not even close to finding a permanent disposal site.
> On the one hand, Merkel gets constant praise for being a scientist, on the other hand she's a conservative (questionable by any standards) that is technophobic.
Merkel herself is a scientist, but her cabinets? They are a whole different lot, and not in a good way. "Internetausdrucker" is a good way to describe most of Merkel's cabinets.
> Additionally, Merkel never ruled alone, it's been either a coalition with the SPD or the FDP, neither are conservatives.
Yeah, but the responsible ministry has always been in the hands of the CSU (1982-1991, 2009-now) and the CDU (1991-1998). As you know the Chancellor and the Ministers they appoint set the political direction.
I'm too young for the first generation of Conservatives under Kohl, but I can fairly well judge especially Dobrindt and Scheuer to be utterly incompetent, with Merkel doing nothing to keep them in check (and to be fair, neither did Seehofer and Söder, to whose party they belong).
> Please don't spread misinformation and if you actually believe "Conservatives are a plague", go see a mental health professional, because you're dangerously radicalized.
A huge part of the reason is that the providers had to pay well over 50 billion € for the frequency licensing.
Back in the early 2000s finance minister Eichel wanted to achieve the "schwarze null" (positive budget), and in attempting so, this idiot fucked up digitalisation in Germany for decades, as the providers had to take out huge loans and had to re-pay them instead of being able to invest in building out the networks or offer affordable services!
The problem is compounded by idiot NIMBYs believing that radiation is harmful and causes cancer - in many of the total blackout regions it is local citizen groups that vocally protest against phone providers putting up masts for years now (and there are no laws that give providers eminent domain rights or other enforcement tools), and the recent 5g conspiracy theories have made the situation even worse. Ironically the same people then complain why young people leave and no one new moves there.
>the providers had to take out huge loans and had to re-pay them instead of being able to invest in building out the networks or offer affordable services!
What's your alternative? Should the licenses have been given away to some blessed companies? I hardly think you can fault the regulator for holding a proper auction. The failing here was clearly on the companies' part as they overestimated the impact UMTS would have. That the companies then have the audacity to try to get the money back from the government is slightly shocking - "plz socialize these losses lol".
The problem is clearly solvable. The government could just pay for the coverage to be built out (payment pending operational towers, obviously).
> Should the licenses have been given away to some blessed companies?
Yes. Give them away for free, limited for a year and under condition of network buildout, and have interested companies submit business plans. The four with the best business plan win the frequencies. If they don't manage the required buildout, the license gets revoked.
This is the correct answer, and again and as usual downvoted on HN. The reason we have shitty coverage is due to gasp economical incentives, who would have thought.
Same with DSL btw, but thats another story.
> I find it weird how rarely Germany ends up in British/American media, however how many similar issues they have...
The UK has enough shit to deal with on their own plus the five eyes "close friend" network, no surprise that no one bats an eye for the oddities of German politics.
The US is, well, the US. They are so big they don't need to care about anyone else, literally. 40% of Americans haven't ever been outside the US, 11% never been out of their state (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5259681/Study-40-...) - so why should they care about us Germans?
> But frankly not many people speak of 5G nutcases in Britain either.
This is rough, and honestly the only hope is probably something like starlink. They’re not going to invest in 5g in places where 3g isn’t even profitable.
It’s a shame that there’s not “right to use” in the 900mhz or other cell frequencies if no spectrum usage exists in the area. It seems a few people could put together a small, internet-only cell provider.
Few years ago I visited a friend living in outskirts of Frankfurt (the richest german city), quite effluent suburb still belonging to city proper. The cell signal was weak and calls dropped all the time, apparently related to overhead flights.
Generally I've noticed problems and missing signal in trains outside cities, too.
If you rely solely on things you read online, you might think that the US cellular infrastructure is a backward, antiquated, uncompetitive, monopolistic disaster, and that the progressive and forward-thinking European societies have done far better.
Yet the reality is, every time I go to Europe, I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities (I’ve been in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Zurich in the past year). And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.
> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.
Don’t have a dog in this, but just wanted to say this is not at all true. There are so many places nowhere near wilderness where you would struggle to find a useable 4g connection.
(I’ve lived near some places like this in the northeast - I have to guess that the avalys has not traveled around that much in the US)
I'll second this, at least as of a few years ago. I used to regularly take the Amtrak train into Boston's South Station. The area near Mansfield, MA. had basically no signal, despite being in a suburb. Not sure if that's improved since then.
I'll add my anecdote: last year I took a long bus journey two ways between Hamilton, Ontario and the Philadelphia area. At one of the transfer stops, Binghamton NY I think, I picked up a 14GB SIM card and activated it in my phone, and it had signal almost the whole way to Philadelphia, I was watching videos the whole way, and made two video calls. Population density on the east is higher, but it's not that high, cutting through Pennsylvania.
Switzerland's cell coverage is consistently ranked in the European top 5, along Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. I work at a company where hundreds of employees get to commute and work on the train, sometimes 3-4 times a week (pre-covid), and I don't know anyone who complains about cell coverage or speed.
I personally live next to a cow field and have access to 10 Gbps FTTH and 5G from two carriers.
Seems to me you go to only a specific part of Europe, i.e., central Europe.
I live in Europe and spend the last 3 years traveling/working around it. It is not one entity, and cellular infrastructure in one country implies nothing on that of another country.
So yes, Germany internet infrastructure and cellular prices is terrible, but Poland, Czech Republic, Ireland and many others got fantastic infrastructure, at least from my experience.
I think this comment is spot on. I've used cellular services in both Germany and Denmark extensively and they are nothing alike. Germany has spotty coverage; in Denmark, you have coverage pretty much everywhere even in rural areas. This is not just geography, it is also deliberate government policy.
Funny thing then: I did a 1 hour video conference at pretty high resolution from roughly the Belarusian border a few weeks ago. It definitely qualified as 'the edge of nowhere' rather than the middle and it worked flawlessly. This was using a cellular hotspot so yet another hop. The counter party was in Amsterdam.
In the major cities I've never had a single problem bandwidth wise either so I really don't know how you are set up for roaming but I'd be looking at my provider rather than at the infrastructure, which as far as I can see is pretty good.
Formerly in telecom infrastructure; this is correct. Due to the way roaming works, pre-LTE you’d be routed back to your home country while roaming (still the same way on LTE depending on network config).
> Maybe is your network/roaming data plan. Some(most) networks throttle/restrict your bandwidth when in you are in roaming.
Could also be their phone, different regions use different LTE bands which often do not overlap at all, so if their phone is a US-only model it may only support US bands leading to dreadful connectivity even when the network itself is excellent.
And even when there are overlapping bands, those may only be used by some operators, so depending who you're roaming with you might still be hosed.
> I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities (I’ve been in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Zurich in the past year)
Are you using an American phone? For Europe you'll ideally want something that supports bands 1, 3, 7 and 20; not all phones sold in the US necessarily will. Also, were you roaming? Some telcos will send all roaming traffic back to the home country (though this is no longer strictly necessary with LTE); this can indeed be pretty slow.
FWIW (using a European phone, on a network that does roaming sensibly), I've found LTE in Paris to be pretty good, and LTE in Germany to be a bit meh. And _awful_ in San Francisco (I'm not sure if it was a band issue, or if AT&T, who my network roams with, is just terrible).
> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.
Hah. I live on a hilly forested island. One of the secondary shopping centers has basically no coverage for at&t, no coverage indoors for t-mobile, and weak verizon coverage. Sprint has basically zero coverage of the whole island. When I bike around the island, I go in and out of coverage although I mostly follow the roads.
When we lose power, the towers shut off after 3-5 hours. Of course, that's better than my DSL which turns off instantly (I have a generator and a UPS for the DSL modem, but the remote terminal apparently doesn't)
You probably have a phone with a limited coverage of European 3G/4G frequencies and/or need to change a setting on your phone.
These cities all have ok to good coverage, but if your phone can't match the frequencies you might have an issue (yes, it's ridiculous, and it's the same for some people visiting the US from Europe)
> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.
Most of the land area in the US is wilderness, though (okay, maybe half? Certainly at least a third).
We’re used to having coverage along major highways through long stretches of the country - yes - but as soon as you make a turn for a rural road and drive for a few miles you’ll lose signal.
My experience is that Milan and Paris are great, and London is terrible as far as mobile coverage goes. None of the other cities I have visited were remarkable. The countryside is somewhat variable, mostly depending on terrain (there are few spots genuinely without coverage).
I never had issues in the US, but I never ventured into the countryside either. At least mobile plans tend to be much cheaper in Europe compared to the US.
If you've been to Zurich and your mobile reception was bad, you either were using a bad provider or your phone has issues. I'm on the swisscom network, and the only time I lose 4G is when I go to the mountains.
And if what you say is true I suspect the provider dependency is also true in the US as I hit quite a few holes when using an AT&T sim card on a road trip through the US.
Not really. Though this was 7-11 years ago, I went to college in rural mass and the entire town had no cell signal. No data, no calling. Only dial-up for internet. The school itself paid for a cable line and a symmetric 10 mbit/s line was shared by the entire college. It was a shit show, to say the least.
The US is worse still.
We had 1.5 days continuous driving without signal, including one town (Page).
Also California, which is probably not the end of the world, I recall a tech centered region is there, right?, so it has more blind spots than people.
Fair point - though in those cases they did make the news. (The entire US is also just a much bigger place with a lot more cities, but you’re right that I did make that comparison.)
The London outages seemed common enough to not be news.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare carriers based on a unique outage; however the US does have something going for them: national roaming.
Typically carriers have arrangements between them to use competitors’ networks in areas where their own ones are unavailable.
This is unheard of in Europe which is a shame; it would be a much more efficient use of the spectrum if any subscriber could connect to any available carrier.
There was one large outage a couple of years ago. Other than that, I haven’t seen one in a decade. At least not at the level of the entire network; obviously local issues are more common, particularly in harsh weather.
It also depends on the phone itself. Different regions (and countries within those regions) use different LTE bands. Phones will generally support all bands within one region, but may not do so across regions.
Cell phones were widespread in Europe before they become so in the US.
In the "Bell System" phase US landline phone service really was "best in the world" because you had some public oversight over a private monopoly.
In 2000 in the U.S. you could pick up a landline phone that wasn't paid for, call the operator, and get your service turned on that day. At that time you could wait a few weeks in Germany to get a line installed or you could go to a cell phone shop and walk out with "a handy".
In the mobile age Europe pulled far ahead of the U.S. where mobile phones were held back by the stigma that texas oil wildcatter rich jerks had car phones in the 1970s.
> Cell phones were widespread in Europe before they become so in the US.
Are you using a small number of Western European nations as a proxy for all of Europe?
The US invented the mobile phone and deployed it very early on. 2/3 of Europe was too poor to afford mobile phones until the past 10-15 years. Eastern Europe only started getting widespread mobile phones with the rise of cheaper, high-function smartphones in the past five to seven years. The same is true in Russia.
The US matched most of Western Europe on 2G deployment, primarily lagging Germany, France and the UK. The US was far ahead of Europe on 4G deployment [1][2][3][4], and it's leading Europe on 5G deployment as well [5].
Western Europe's stumbles after 2G are why European tech companies have failed miserably to compete in mobile and the US de facto conquered that market in the West. It's why Apple today is a $2 trillion company (equal to 10 SAPs) and the old Nokia got killed off. Western Europe entirely squandered their brief 2G lead over the US.
[5] "The real reason Europe is falling behind on 5G" ... "Over the last decade there has been considerable public support to promote 5G in Europe. But in actual rollouts, Europe is fast falling behind lead markets in North America, North East Asia and Australia."
> Eastern Europe only started getting widespread mobile phones with the rise of cheaper, high-function smartphones in the past five to seven years.
This is not true at all. By about the turn of the millennium, from Romania to Poland pretty much everyone who was not elderly had a mobile phone. A basic Nokia model was not very expensive even by local standards.
Couldn't regulation make it possible for suffering communities to do their own equipment installation and then rent it out to a MVNO, is somebody privy to (european) details if anybody did it? Desperate communities are able to pull it off with their own fiber and then get an ISP on board, I wonder if something similar is possible beyond fiber/wifi.
An aside: the article opener is placed 25 km north of where Tesla builds its Gigafactory. Harnekop was not merely an army base, but GDRs main nuclear bunker. 15 km south of the Factory at Königs-Wusterhausen, Germanys took its first steps in public radio broadcast more than 100 years ago with tall transmission towers. It boggles my mind - radio broadcasts being "only" 100 years old and nowadays "everything is amazing and nobody is happy".
The title, and some of the context of the article, made me think of the 0G Manifesto [1]. I realize that the article suggests that German citizens want reliable bandwidth, and are not necessarily thinking in terms of a 0G solution, despite the opening digression about radio enthusiasts. But wouldn't it be liberating to have a fully decentralized mobi-net, hosted by everyone, for everyone.
What I do is that I turn on WiFi calling in my Android device. Works kind of OK for the most time. Another solution would be Fento Cells, which provide small BTS, getting the upstream connection via your internet. Yes, you pay for your phone and for your internet bills, but, in such places you are happy if this provides you with phone connection.
I didn't find this mentioned in the article.
In South Korea they will connect you on the afternoon of the same day.
Sources: I am German and my neighbours are Korean (not the best Korea kind of Koreans)