Comment by adwn
Whenever you hear a German entrepreneur talk about the biggest obstacles they have and are facing, it's never crumbling infrastructure or slow internet. The number one complaint is always excessive bureaucracy and crippling regulations.
> Slow internet access and slow build out of fiber network
We don't have dial-up anymore. High-speed access is not a problem for commercial and industrial sites, and rarely a problem for remote work in residential areas. Despite what some commentators like to imply, you don't need 1 Gbit/s for productive work. 100 Mbit/s is usually fast enough, and if your browsing experience is still slow, it's most likely caused by round-trip delay, not bandwidth.
> low wages in European comparison
That would actually help commercial output and competitive position, not lower it.
At my former company we paid 900€/month for 1Gbit/s, which we required. That's definitely a problem when the same performance is available for ~50€/month a few kilometers over the border (in the Netherlands).
In rural regions workshops output is limited by their internet speed as the can only download that many CAD files from customer per day.