I expected the wifi situation in Dublin to be good. And it is. Even the smallest café or shop you might spend more than 15 minutes in offers free wifi with a not necessarily great, but pretty decent downstream. But the average (!) household in my perception has a downstream of over 20 Mbit available. This is very different from Hamburg, or Germany in general. It really isn’t that hard, Germany should get there. But with phenomenons like the “Störerhaftung” (the operator of a wifi basically is responsible for what happens by use of his wifi), this isn’t gonna happen.
Which is a shame. And embarrassing for Germany.
They don’t seem to have PINs around here, and no activation of your SIM card is required. Which comes in very handy. The cost is okay, I think. I’m with Three at the moment, and I went for a 20€ top-up which comes with free data for one month, free SMS to every Irish number and free calls to other Three customers.
I had to ‘activate’ full mobile Internet access, though. Because, disguised as a ‘security feature’, websites with adult content are blocked. Websites like urbandictionary.com. A-hem.
Besides that, I’m more than satisfied. I’ve had like two minor connection hiccups since I’m here. Compared to Hamburg and O2 for a provider, that’s just incredible. And again, embarrassing. For O2, mostly.
