But it's possible it's just my personal bias.

* Old Androids are not repairable because they're shit, not because a megacorp works hard to make repair impossible

* Old Androids may be hacked by a pegasus-like software (just like most new smartphones anyway), but at least the operating system does not lock you into its own closed ecosystem.

You may disagree, and correctly, because it's in part irrational, but many Europeans just dislike Apple and consider Android a more open/free ecosystem.

Based.

Fsk Apple. Soy aah

However, I remember the anecdote of how France has two different companies for the trains and trainstations. The first ordered trains which were a little bit to wide for the trainstations, due to a miss communication.

When I read about this, I thought „this could have been Germany too.“

That's nothing compared to what German authorities can do to me. Germany is a country where you get police searching your home for torrenting movies or making stupid jokes on Facebook. So yeah.

Also about enshittification - one could argue that our local ISPs never left that phase to begin with.

don't they do local downlinks? at least for countries they have an agreement with or where the infrastructure is available?

Then you call their customer support, tech comes out, it's not raining anymore and everything works, and the problem doesn't get fixed.

FTTH here in Australia is the same, you’re stuck using the network providers device, which just provides an Ethernet port, and a POTS port if you’re in to that sort of thing, with your LAN device connected behind it.

There was fierce lobbying back in the day (shout out to Simon Hackett / Internode) for our national broadband network to be simple dark fibre and that ISPs could build on top of that to provide innovation and differentiation.

Instead what we got was a bunch of ISPs that resell the National Broadband Network’s expensive wholesale plans with little in the way of either differentiation or innovation.

Edit to add: what the sibling comments said too.

There's also a EU law which says that users should be able to bring their own modems / routers, so AFAIK providers say that this particular terminal device is still "on their side of the network".

I've seen such devices come in two varieties.

One is a separate device which plugs on the optical network, does the encryption and stuff, and then exposes an ethernet port which is connected to the actual router which does wifi, etc. With SFR and Bouygues, it was trivial [0] to replace the ISP-provided router with one of your choosing. You get the normal external IPs and you do your thing. The ISP router sleeps in its box in storage. This was my setup up until a few years ago, with both these providers. Now SFR has moved to CGNAT, but the setup is the same, so I expect users to still be able to switch routers (but I haven't tested, since I'm not a client anymore).

Then there's Free, who provides a single device that connects to the fiber, does routing, wifi, etc. In this case, it's possible to flip a switch in its settings for it to act as a bridge (don't know how wifi behaves in this case, if it stays on). It then only accepts a single downstream client, which gets the external IP. SFR had a similar setup for DOCSIS.

I'm not familiar with how Orange, the biggest operator, functions. But I understand they have a general tendency to be a PITA so YMMV with them.

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[0] For Bouygues, this device only talked on a tagged VLAN100 for some reason. On the SFR, the network expected you to send a client id in the DHCP request.