Also in Germany, I recently paid a bill by EC at my dentist, and it took over 2 minutes for the transaction to go through because they have a shitty old reader that connects individually for every transaction, and also over a shitty link (maybe GPRS only?).
I remember in uni the corner store near my apartment used dial-up (or possibly ISDN since at the time that was the telco's default solution for "I want 2 lines") for its card reader. If you were in a line of customers it was fast but if the store was empty you were waiting for 30-60 seconds while it connected...
We had one that dialed through maybe with a 56k modem but probably slower. Ended up sticking it on the fax line because a customer couldn't pay over the phone when it shared the same line.
