The big German ISPs don't have Netflix caches within their infrastructure, which might be part of the problem here. Last mile infrastructure might be even worse though.
Germany is rather odd compared to the other countries with its adoption of broadband tech - for example you see a decent bit of FTTH/FTTx in NL, NO/DK/SE (muni owned, early adopters), etc.
Then you go to Germany and it's mass of DSL (and some areas cable). I wonder what happened or why?
Not an expert on the topic, but IIRC this is the rough outline:
- The main ISP of Germany is Deutsche Telekom, a formerly state-owned company that was privatized ~25 years ago, which Germany still holds stock in
- In the past Telekom was awarded big contracts to expand broadband access across the country
- Telekom is/was really slow at fulfilling those contracts, and at the same time behaves in an anti-competitive manner towards any independent ISPs that try to fill the void
- The government doesn't punish any of that behaviour like they rarely do with a big German company, even more so with privatized ones that they have a stake in
To also be fair towards Telekom a bit, Germany is a very decentralized country, which is a boon in a lot of situations, but also challenging for any infrastructure projects. Part of the contracts was that they also have to expand broadband access in all rural parts of Germany.
I'm not sure that's (entirely) it. I don't know if this is why Netflix doesn't do it, but Germany doesn't have the same First Amendment laws as the US. In particular, there are some writings that are illegal under German law. Thus, locating a box in Germany that could potentially hold material that is illegal under German law is ill advised. That the box is operating simply as a local cache doesn't seem to change the lawyer's perspective.
Akamai has hundrads of cache boxes at German ISPs, including at this one.
There are some issues at play here:
1. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay crycry). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.
2. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.
This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.
in 1981 the (west) german government passed a law that over the next 30 years a nationwide fiber net should be established. sadly, in 1982 when helmut kohl (a conservative) became cancelor these plans were scrapped. instead we got cable tv.
one reason was cost of course - cable was 60% cheaper than fiber.
another much darker reason was: the public tv back then was, from a conservative standpoint, very leftish (e.g. shows like "monitor" or "panorama"). the conservative leaders couldn't control public tv, but they could open the gates for a nationwide private tv sector. and they did.
Yeah, you will not see the additional hundreds of Gbps of "internal" Netflix traffic, but you may very well see smaller increases as small ISPs that aren't approved for "full rack Netflix appliances" pick up Netflix traffic over the routeservers.
