FTTH

"Einem geschenkten Gaul sieht man nicht ins Maul" or as many readers might more easily recognise "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth".

Now living in (Bavarian) Swabia this expression is not one easily accepted by the locals. Those from northern England will agree with this attitude: “you don’t get owt for nowt”. The Swabians are particularly noted for their thrift and a few years ago, the Swabian housewife was used by Mrs Merkel as the ideal finance manager. In fact today, the German Finance Minister, Wolgang Schäuble, a Swabian, was retired from his post and was elected Speaker of the German Parliament. He had to go to make way for a new Finance Minister who will be from one of the coalition parties Mrs Merkel is currently talking to, to form a new Government - will probably be Christian Lidner from the FDP Liberal Democrat party.

This evening a selected few of the citizens of the parish had been invited to the Rathaus - town hall or better said parish offices - to be told about the forthcoming arrival of Gigabit fibre-optic cable network in the parish. The selected few had all received a letter from German Telekom to say that they could sign up to get the cable laid totally free of charge in to their houses. "FTTH" or "Fibre To The House" in good old Swabian. One had to understand the sceptics who had thrown the letter and brochure in the bin. Especially when you consider that the 100% Swabian Günther Oettinger had been EU Commissioner for Digital Economy from 2014-2016 and set much of the broadband policy but couldn't pronounce  a single word in English.

However this evening it all became clear. The Bavarian State has a subsidy programme for parishes with houses with less than 30 Mbit/s internet connection. In our parish, the two village centres have connections that can take up to 50 Mbit/s  but 69 of the outlying houses have less than 30 Mbit/s. Thus the parish council now has a pot of around €700,000 to connect these 69 houses which require around 40km of laid cable.

Telekom won the tender and now just need a simple signature on a one sided form to say, yes I want the connection. And it really is totally free, the cable laid in to the house, a box screwed on the wall and that's it. No obligation to use Telekom to provide your telephone & internet connection, in fact no obligation to do anything. You can continue to use your old copper wire phone line. It's just like the roads or rails - the infrastructure is made available but you aren't forced to buy a car or take a train.

At one point, I simply had to ask the man from Telekom why on earth anyone would refuse and basically all he could say it was the "owt for nowt" problem. Too good to be true.

Luckily the deal does not require 100% sign up in order to go ahead and seemingly even those who now don't sign up will still get the chance to have it when the diggers are passing their properties, planned for some time in autumn 2018. Just for the parish it will then be more expensive  and thus endangers the idea of social solidarity. No doubt many of the 2600 parishioners who will not be getting this "benefit" will be complaining but as we all know, the balance will be found in other ways. As one of the attendees said, now it's us who are a step ahead after decades of being behind.

The Blip is of the Parish Mayor who donned a Telekom jacket presented to him by the Telekom employee who gave the presentation. We got little packets of jelly babies!

In other news, the weather has been great again and due to stay for a few days.