The reliability of T-Mobile Germany
As child I already learned that the German Telekom is not the most friendly and providing company in the world and due to the past experienced I avoided it like the plague for many years. Recently, however, with an US iPhone used in conjunction O2 in Germany I desperately waited long for an unlock possibility to arrive, and eventually decided some 6 months (or so) ago that it’s time for the 3G/UMTS update and had to take the bitter pill T-Mobile Germany is.
I have to say I really regret it. So much that this Saturday morning is a good time to write about it. Not only is it the most annoying customer care company calling ever 1-2 month asking me what other stuff they can sell to me, no: not even their basic network functionality works solidly. Never before was I more often off-line than on-line. Very often non-German server are simply not reachable. Most notably my daily email check in the morning does just lead to “The connection to the server … failed.” and international sites like engadget.com are not reachable. Strangely this morning other Germany sites like heise.de did work, just not our comanpies website and mail server. And this is after a total cellular network
meltdown that made headlines even in all regular German newspapers when their network went off-line, national-wide, … And this morning I called to complain about my ongoing “network routing issues” and the person told me (after the automated voice system failed to understand my request) that:
.. they have a known network issue right now and are working on it, … Voice calls should work, but I’m lucky that some German internet sites work for me at all. …
Now this was a 7 AM when I got up and now at 10:30 PM it is still not fixed, …
I even went on asking him if, deduced form my ongoing intermitted problems, they have weekly network problems. But the guy did not wanted to comment. I take this as yes.
I’ll now try to get rid of this iPhone contract early, because, frankly, my first US (UMTS-less, G1) iPhone my girlfriend keeps using with an O2 SIM and network always works without a glitch.
The worst part is that I often get a near heart-attack in the morning because the first thing I get to see is a “failed connection to our companies e-mail server”, that always kicks in some “oh my god are some our servers down” emergency mode in my brain.
I really wonder how Germany’s largest phone and internet provider can have so many ongoing basic “routing” or similar problems. I mean routing some data packets from cellular towers properly should not be too much of a deal with a network also connecting some million of landlines for analog, digital ISDN and DSL. Or are those landlines messed up right now, likewise? Thanks god I cannot tell as my landlines are covered by other providers that apparently do care more about their customers.
