Internet problems: According to a survey, more than one in three people has problems with the Internet

Enlarge image

smartphone users

Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance / dpa

More than a third of people in Germany feel slowed down by internet problems almost every day.

This is the central result of a representative survey by the opinion research institute YouGov, which was commissioned by the Frankfurt Internet node DE-CIX.

38 percent of consumers in the Federal Republic struggle with noticeable delays in Internet use several times a week or even daily.

Only eight percent of those surveyed stated that they never experienced impairments when accessing the Internet.

The survey was conducted at the end of May, and YouGov interviewed 2,100 people aged 18 and over.

According to the results, young adults and those working from home see themselves as the victims of the technical problems.

But more than a third (34 percent) of the age group over 55 years reported in the survey that Internet connections often lagged.

On average, people from cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants complained more often about speed restrictions than people from cities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.

In the survey, those affected blame external causes for the poor network quality.

41 percent named network congestion as the reason for the delays they experienced, 32 percent poor local network expansion and 19 percent said their internet provider didn't offer enough bandwidth.

Twelve percent suspect the reason for the problems with slow servers from content providers such as Netflix.

Only ten percent of those surveyed see the causes in their own household, such as the use of outdated laptops or smartphones.

Problems with different applications

Respondents most frequently encounter the problems after work, it is said, when video or music streaming with Netflix, Spotify, YouTube or other services causes problems (35 percent).

A good fifth of the survey participants experience speed problems when working from home, for example during video conferences, webinars or when using cloud applications.

But even applications that don't actually require a large bandwidth are sometimes disrupted.

This includes transactions such as online banking and online shopping.

Here, 18 percent of those surveyed complain about a bad internet connection.

On Tuesday, new figures from the Federal Network Agency suggested that Internet connections used at home often have weaknesses.

The Bonn authority has just published its "Annual Report on Broadband Measurements", which covers the period from October 2020 to September 2021.

The report contains information from around 484,000 landline measurements that citizens have made themselves.

According to the measurements, 83.5 percent of the users received at least half of the contractually agreed maximum data rate.

During the measurement period, a good one in three users received the full data rate that was contractually guaranteed or even more.

"The results are not yet satisfactory," said the President of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller.

»Customers still often do not achieve the promised internet speed.«

mbo/dpa