[HN Gopher] Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doe...
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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
Author : sschueller
Score : 746 points
Date : 2026-04-05 18:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sschueller.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (sschueller.github.io)
| deafpolygon wrote:
| if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you'd
| be right!
| poly2it wrote:
| This article would be so much better without the generic AI-
| generated images everywhere.
| sschueller wrote:
| Agreed but I didn't want to just take random images from the
| web that I don't have the rights too and I my artistic skills
| are not good enough.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You could just not generate extra images that aren't relevant
| to the article. I like the charts and diagrams even when
| they're AI, because they serve a purpose. But the extra
| images for flair or whatever are completely pointless and
| even annoying.
| sschueller wrote:
| Ok thanks. I will keep that in mind for my next post.
| heystefan wrote:
| Please ignore them, the images definitely helped
| understand the issue better. Don't anchor on a couple of
| grouchy hn posters.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Hey there were a lot more before the feedback, the
| irrelevant ones have been removed[0]. The remaining
| images in the article are good :)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652734
| Svip wrote:
| I would go a little further (and apologies for being rather
| blunt): but I find the over-use of irrelevant images to be
| rather insulting, as if I am unable to maintain focus on an
| article, without the frequent shiny object.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily call that further. The images I
| like are relevant because they visually explain things
| that are helpful. The images I don't like are irrelevant
| because they serve no purpose other than to Be Images for
| no good reason.
| nunez wrote:
| You can search for Creative Commons images on Google. Though,
| honestly, a longform piece would've been much better than the
| glitchy face horror show that is that "fiber-laying in
| Germany" image, which is a composite of hundreds of thousands
| of random images from all sorts of places!
| 0xsn3k wrote:
| i agree, i do like the article content itself, but the AI-
| generated images (clearly nano banana btw) really kill the
| credibility. even just using stock images with the watermarks
| clearly visible would be better
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to
| the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the
| way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were
| privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British
| Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed
| competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate
| maintenance fees, of course).
|
| The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free
| market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being
| sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and
| pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around
| the 24 mb ADSL level
|
| Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a
| new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling
| it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre
| to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last
| bit over existing phone lines
|
| Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading
| existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually
| much more expensive than just running fibre
|
| We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is
| fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
| 0xy wrote:
| They stopped upgrading their network because government was
| publicly implying they'd do something nationally on
| broadband.
|
| Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's
| cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do
| 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
|
| Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the
| neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and
| better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been
| sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
|
| TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner
| city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal
| upload speeds to protect our investment.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the
| time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
|
| Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans
| a 1GB monthly cap.
|
| And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c
| per _megabyte_. To be fair, they would let you do things
| like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
| November_Echo wrote:
| > TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the
| inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with
| abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
|
| Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest
| margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead
| us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation,
| that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote
| communities.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| I disagree, Sol Trujillo became ceo of Telstra in 2005 and
| immediately started cutting everything to the bone, Kevin
| Rudd didn't even get into power until 2007 and the NBN
| wasn't announced until 2009, fairly large gap there
| consp wrote:
| We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom
| getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them
| blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up
| all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable
| companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of
| their infra for free without the "share space" requirement
| (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by
| municipalities and it took a while to get them all in one
| company), and the cable companies decided not to invest in
| anything. And now we have the fiber-to-the-bottom where they
| are installing as fast as they can, but only with a
| governmental monopoly in place with dubious sharing agreements.
|
| Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken
| over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me
| 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from
| across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights
| since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes
| are all marketing bs).
| 0x3f wrote:
| In the UK, they split the infra provider (Openreach) from the
| consumer company (BT). So it's no longer BT giving access to
| the other providers.
|
| In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and
| they're on a level playing field with other providers.
|
| That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression
| is there are no large differences between providers on the
| same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to
| packaging and customer service in the end.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Australia has the absolute worst internet
| roughly wrote:
| > The US and German models are consequences of just yelling
| 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually
| being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine
| competition.
|
| The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters
| centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That's the point,
| not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw
| coming.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The UK could have had it decades ago, but the Thatcher
| government didn't allow it. Instead the UK gave permission to a
| couple of companies to dig up the streets and lay
| infrastructure in places of their choice. Those companies later
| merged into one shitty company called Virgin Media. The places
| they targeted were easy, dense neighbourhoods. BT, on the other
| hand, was required to provide everyone in the country with a
| phone line, no matter how remote. Today Virgin Media offers
| asymmetric gigabit and it's still the only choice for many
| because real fibre rollout is happening at a glacial pace. They
| also get people to sign 18 month contracts which aren't
| terminated if you move house. In some places, like mine,
| existing conduit means some ISPs are allowed to run their own
| fibre and these are some of the best connections available
| today. But most ISPs still get you to sign 18 month or longer
| contracts. The shitty ones, like Virgin Media won't even
| terminate your contract if you move to place they don't supply.
| ttul wrote:
| In my small island community, I participated in a municipal
| committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the
| island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the
| community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the
| home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670
| Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via
| coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either
| terrible option.
|
| Our little committee investigated all manner of options,
| including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new
| undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing
| anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there
| was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the
| undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the
| power company's own signaling).
|
| Sadly, the municipality didn't have any capital to invest a penny
| into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just
| called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and
| asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they
| were "investigating" laying an undersea fiber to power a
| municipal fiber network on the little island.
|
| A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and
| began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if
| you have to fake it.
| bestouff wrote:
| [flagged]
| HauntingPin wrote:
| [flagged]
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > ...one day, one of the municipal counselors just called
| up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked
| them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they
| were "investigating" laying an undersea fiber to power a
| municipal fiber network on the little island.
|
| They called in a favor that put pressure on the company
| from public expectations.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Yes. What do you think happens in a competitive
| marketplace? Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with
| Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own
| console. That's literally competition.
|
| The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't
| matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All
| they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they
| behaved according to that information. That's how it
| works.
| karlgkk wrote:
| Frankly, I think you're trying to poke holes in a
| straightforward concept. And now you've dug your heels in
| and you're trying to justify it. But... let's ignore
| opinions and interpretations...
|
| > Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips
| for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
|
| This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You
| even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and
| Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even
| the most charitable interpretation of this statement
| could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that
| you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties
| involved.
|
| If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry
| matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong
| about? :)
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| That isn't actually refuting his original argument. Just
| proving his example false.
|
| Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man
| fallacy thrown in.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| I don't understand this line of thinking. The spreading
| of a false rumor is an example of a competitive
| marketplace? If this took place in a different domain
| wouldn't it be fraud? That it was in the public benefit
| seems orthogonal.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| It is not fraud to claim that one is considering doing
| something, and publishing that information.
|
| Imagine how that would actually play out if you were
| right. (You're not)
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| But in the case of the grand parent the company had no
| intention of following through and did it seemingly at
| the request of the friend.
|
| > one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up
| a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked
| them for a favor: put out a press release saying that
| they were "investigating" laying an undersea fiber to
| power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
| kulahan wrote:
| Yes, if a simple unsubstantiated rumor is enough to get
| your competitors to spend potentially millions of dollars
| to fight you, that's a competition. Literally what else
| could it be?
|
| It can be two things, anyways. You can utilize fraud to
| manage your competitors expectations. CEOs lie constantly
| about the state their products are in, in order to drum
| up more sales.
|
| It has absolutely zero requirement to be beneficial to
| the public in order to be a competitive marketplace.
| They're also competing to make as much profit as
| possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the
| public.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > They're also competing to make as much profit as
| possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the
| public.
|
| The end result is plenty of cheap stuff for people to
| buy. It's why free markets have full supermarkets and
| socialist markets have long lines.
|
| Take the free market in software, for example. My entire
| software stack on my linux box cost me $0.
| kulahan wrote:
| "Companies optimize to make as much money as possible,
| which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically
| follow. I get what you're saying, but it's not related to
| the concept of companies trying to make as much profit as
| possible. Some will simply chase higher profit margins.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Some will simply chase higher profit margins
|
| That's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.
|
| > "Companies optimize to make as much money as possible,
| which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically
| follow.
|
| Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price
| of kerosene by 70%.
| nnevod wrote:
| >That's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.
|
| Law of supply and demand works in the really free market,
| when providers are essentially infinitesimal and are not
| able to exert their will upon consumers. If a single
| provider is capable of significantly affecting the prices
| and supply of the whole market, it can bend law of supply
| and demand.
|
| >Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price
| of kerosene by 70%. They (I suppose, don't know for sure)
| had plenty of margin for that, and as price-demand
| relation is not linear, increase of volume was larger
| than margin reduction. That is often not the case, and
| race to (quality) bottom and shrinkflation happens.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Standard Oil made more money by lowering the price. They
| had margin to do that by being very good at lowering
| costs.
|
| > race to (quality) bottom
|
| When people aren't willing to pay for quality, there's no
| point in increasing the costs for more quality.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| The math doesn't support this. There is great confusion
| about this point. Imagine, for example, that there are
| people that want to buy one unit of a product made by a
| monopoly that is a greedy corporation trying to maximize
| profits. And to keep things simple, make everything
| discreet in dollars.
|
| 10 people are willing to pay $2
|
| 5 people are willing to pay $3
|
| 1 person is willing to pay $4
|
| and no one is able or willing to pay more than $4
|
| So this would be the demand curve.
|
| Now, let's do the supply curve. Keep it simple and assume
| a constant cost of production equal to $1 per unit.
|
| The question is, if you are a _greedy corporation_ , then
| how much should you charge to _maximize your profits_?
|
| You should charge $2.
|
| At that price, you will make $10 selling to the poors, $5
| selling to the middle, and $1 selling to the rich. $16
| bucks in profit for the _greedy corporation_.
|
| If you charged $3, you would make $10 in profit selling
| to the middle, and $2 in profit selling to the rich, for
| only $12 in profit.
|
| 12 < 16. The greedy monopoly prefers $16 in profit to $12
| in profit. That's why it lowers prices.
|
| If you charged $4, you would make only $3 in profit.
|
| 3 < 16
|
| In other words, it is profit maximization + law of demand
| + law of one price that drives down prices in the face of
| a demand curve.
|
| People get this all wrong, they think that it requires
| perfect competition or some set of unobtainable market
| assumptions to make stuff affordable, it does not. It's
| just the law of demand (charge more and you get fewer
| customers) plus the law of one price (everyone pays the
| same amount).
|
| This is why things like government subsidies to the poor
| to help them buy stuff actually drives prices up. It's
| why businesses wage an eternal war to be able to price
| discriminate. Health care, for example, would be much
| more affordable if hospitals had to post their prices and
| could not charge different rates to different people
| based on what they could squeeze from their insurance or
| based on how much money they had. It's why programs to
| help the poor by giving them more cash to buy stuff end
| up making things unaffordable for everyone else. It's why
| section 8 rental subsidies drive up rents. It's why
| during the covid subsidies, the new car price index went
| up from 147 to 188, but after the imposition of tariffs,
| it didn't change at all. So much of the world is
| explained just by some simple math, the law of one price,
| and the law of demand.
|
| Because the companies are already charging the most to
| maximize their profits. They are not charities. Whenever
| a business says "if I have to pay this extra tax, it will
| just drive up prices", then ask them "Are you a charity?
| If you could charge more, then why aren't you charging
| more now? If you can't charge more now, why do you think
| you will be able to charge more tomorrow?"
|
| Now, I'm not saying that there is no relationship between
| costs and prices, and that everything is set purely by
| demand and the law of one price. To get supply in there,
| you need more assumptions about the type of competition
| and the cost curve. But in general, supply only enters
| into the picture in that if you raise a firm's costs,
| then some firms go out of business because they can't pay
| the higher costs, and for the firms that are left, there
| is less competition, and it is this reduced competition
| that allows (some) of the increase costs to be passed on
| to consumers.
|
| Always remember -- firms are already charging the most
| they can possibly charge in order to maximize total
| profits. That's the normal state of affairs, and it is
| what drives prices lower. Whether you are modeling a
| monopoly, or monopolistic competition, or an oligopoly,
| or perfect competition, it does not matter. They always
| charge the most they can possibly charge, and the law of
| demand, working with the law of one price, drives prices
| down.
| kulahan wrote:
| Except it doesn't scale at all like this. There are
| companies selling sandwiches on private jets for $150/ea.
| Some people sell a candle for $5 at Target while others
| sell them for $45 at a farmer's market. If you're making
| websites for a living, it's common advice to raise your
| prices to keep away people who aren't very serious or who
| will balk at every expense.
|
| There are countless companies working with excellent
| profit margins.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| None of those are monopolies, unless you consider someone
| selling a sandwich on a particular plane as a monopoly
| and the people on the plane are your market, in which
| case it is exactly this situation, and why that sandwich
| doesn't cost $100.
|
| So instead of trying to think of complications, you need
| to first understand the argument, and then you can see it
| everywhere once you understand it.
| kulahan wrote:
| I'm simply saying it's incorrect to assume that
| everything everywhere is as cheap as possible. This is
| true in MANY INDUSTRIES, but not everywhere, and it's
| absolutely nothing like a rule.
|
| You, I think, are tying it into a larger discussion about
| monopolies, but I'm not sure that makes sense because if
| you're a monopoly, you don't have competitors to beat on
| price, so you again would not charge the least amount
| possible. That makes no sense.
| nnevod wrote:
| Plenty of cheap stuff is a consequence of companies
| interested in people's money and, yes, presence of at
| least nominal competition between providers (i.e. they
| can be essentially a cartel, mirrioring each other
| exactly, but each still wants to step into other's money
| supply and retain its own). Choice for customer is
| present but also equally nominal.
|
| In deficit economy, economic agents aren't really
| interested in people's money, and competition is between
| consumers - who'll bid higher and offer something of real
| interest to provider. So providers hoard stuff and there
| are long lines.
|
| Benefit for public is not a boolean, it's a spectrum.
| Lots of cheap poor stuff readily availible is better than
| having to compete for stuff, but less good than having
| choice between cheap poor stuff and more expensive better
| stuff, for example. For the latter, you need non-nominal
| competition and providers having to compete whithin the
| market, not outside of it, and also each individual
| provider having infinitesimal effect on whole market.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Maybe i misinterpreted the original comment, but having
| the government step in to pressure a company is not
| _usually_ what i find people mean when they talk about
| competitive markets. Let alone when the pressure is
| through a side channel.
| MajorTakeaway wrote:
| Sometimes commenters all over the internet write like this
| because they just got incredibly jealous after reading the
| parent post. I've been thinking more and more about how
| most posts are jealous or depressed outtakes against the
| world, system, or other person. This fundamental human
| behavior won't change, and is as reflexive as a
| monopolistic company reacting to a press release, proving
| the parent correct despite their scathing response of the
| child.
|
| It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here
| because both sites are insufferable.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > What exactly did they prove?
|
| They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically
| provide functional competition, if you think about it, the
| Western-style free market is very keen on creating and
| maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help
| you here.
|
| > The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a
| potential competitor (municipal fibre).
|
| The OP is about free market failures, not about
| competition. As another example, many people have pointed
| out that there is much more competition in China than in
| the US. Hope, this is enough for you to understand the
| difference.
| kortilla wrote:
| Western free market doesn't create monopolies. Where did
| you get that idea?
|
| The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily
| regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying
| fiber is a great example of this).
| greedo wrote:
| Or in places where network effects make it impossible to
| compete.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > Western free market doesn't create monopolies.
|
| To quote myself: "the Western-style free market is very
| keen on creating and maintaining monopolies"
|
| Guess who's the highly influential investor, with strong
| connection to the WH who said the following:
|
| "Competition is for losers".
|
| This sums up pretty well what the free market is keen on.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It is well known that individual businessmen often want
| to reduce competition, because it's best for them. That
| is why the government's important role in the free market
| is to _promote_ competition. But just because the market
| is imperfect and can be captured without the government
| making sure that people play fair, does not mean that the
| free market is "a lie" as TFA claims. It means that it's
| imperfect, as are all human endeavors.
| what wrote:
| > to quote myself
|
| Okay, totally meaningless, it didn't prove anything.
| kortilla wrote:
| A participant is not the market. Competitors very
| famously hate competition.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily
| regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying
| fiber is a great example of this).
|
| No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the
| problem with a free market.
|
| It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber,
| it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or
| government action (such as eminent domain) it's
| impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will
| always be some person with property right in the way of a
| cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you
| bury a line (including pointing out that it's very
| temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say
| no.
|
| It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a
| difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just
| have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns
| that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how
| much harder that is if the land owner is related to or
| owns stock in a competitor company.
|
| We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the
| US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of
| way that ultimately grants burying rights near public
| roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those,
| it'd be almost impossible.
| kortilla wrote:
| Property rights are regulation. You're just vehemently
| agreeing with me. Markets filled with laws that make
| entry difficult are subject to monopolies.
| danaris wrote:
| If property rights are regulation, then so is anything
| that allows you to ignore them.
|
| Once you get down to the level of property rights, the
| only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.
|
| Property rights are some of the _earliest_ and most
| _basic_ things protected by governments--indeed, to a
| large extent they precede governments, being protected
| with force by the people who wish to assert them.
|
| Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights,
| and try to run fiber across someone's property without
| their permission, and they're likely to come out with a
| shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the
| steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly
| quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Ok, let's imagine property rights are gone. Now it's
| impossible to build a fiber line without also employing
| an armed guard of that line. Sure, the open market allows
| for anyone to build out their lines where ever they like,
| but since we've eliminated all property rights and laws
| it means the most natural thing to do to your competition
| is sabotage.
|
| That means if you are a new comer, you have to employ
| significant military strength to guard and defend your
| line going in. Otherwise, existing powers will simply
| stomp it out as soon as they get a whiff that someone is
| trying to compete with them. That, or they'll simply take
| your line by force.
|
| That is probably the most difficult form of entry because
| it requires someone to be independently very wealthy
| before they could dream of putting in new infrastructure
| and it requires them to enforce their own property rights
| since there's no government doing that.
|
| Are you an anarco-communist by chance? That's about the
| only group I'm aware of that would advocate for the
| complete elimination of property rights, but they also
| usually don't advocate for a "free market".
| pdpi wrote:
| The "only" place monopolies tend to emerge in is any
| market with a significant barrier to entry. Regulatory
| regime can be one such barrier, but e.g. up-front capital
| costs and network effects are other barriers to entry
| that can and will lead to monopolies.
| peyton wrote:
| The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:
|
| > The telecommunications industry in China is dominated
| by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China
| Unicom and China Mobile.
|
| A little slippery to bring China into the telecom free
| market discussion and contrast it with "Western-style"
| while failing to mention the structure of its telecom
| industry.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_ind
| ustry_in...
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:
|
| Untrue - in the context of the OP, telecom is just an
| example. Look at the title.
|
| > The telecommunications industry in China is dominated
| by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China
| Unicom and China Mobile.
|
| "More competition" doesn't mean "no monopolization".
| Communications are political everywhere, I'd be surprised
| if they were a subject of less control in China than in
| the US. However, even on Amazon and even with tariffs,
| there's more competition between Chinese sellers than
| between sellers of other origins.
| eru wrote:
| Free markets don't automatically do anything. There's
| nothing automatic. It's about giving individual people
| the opportunity to take action.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Free markets tend toward monopoly which restricts
| individual people's opportunities for action. In this
| example, there was a cable monopoly mentioned. The only
| way to coerce it (not even to defeat it in some way) was
| through baseless deception, not free market competitive
| action. The monopoly remained.
| otherme123 wrote:
| > Free markets tend toward monopoly
|
| Not true and oversimplification. Some markets tend toward
| monopolies, but you rarely will get one unless
| enforced/protected by a state. If you navigate through
| history, you will find almost exclusively monopolies on
| salt extraction, coal mining oligopolies (with the help
| of worker unions), silk... Curiously, the Standard Oil
| was accused of being a monopoly, and the proof was they
| were offering _lower prices than anyone_ thanks to their
| scale, destroying the competence. The reward for offering
| low prices was disolving the company (notice that they
| never reached the hypothetical price hike stage).
|
| It is also common practice for the state to declare
| something "public utility" or "natural monopoly", on
| things like snail mail distribution, telephone or TV,
| that were clearly not a natural monopoly and could be
| offered by free market. Here fall a lot of ISPs, that get
| a "public utility" status and only then can abuse that
| monopolistic position with the help of the state.
|
| A lot of free market sectors tend to atomization: think
| hair or nail saloons, masonry, plumbers, carpenters... if
| you know someone in the sector, it seems that as soon as
| they get a size over 5 or 6 people, two of them always
| decide to split and go by themselves.
| miki123211 wrote:
| You're right on most of these, but wrong on telephony.
| That actually was a natural monopoly.
|
| It's exactly how OP describes it. It's unproductive for
| multiple companies to maintain disconnected, parallel
| telephone infrastructures. The most productive use of
| resources is to lay more wires to more houses, not to lay
| more wires to places which have already been wired up for
| telephone service by somebody else. That creates a
| monopoly, and the government should step in.
|
| With modern tech, you can mandate local-loop unbundling
| and fix some of this, but that wasn't possible with 1970s
| (and earlier) phone infrastructure.
| otherme123 wrote:
| We use "natural monopoly" too freely and too quickly,
| almost as a free card to actually implement monopolies
| that last for decades. Anecdo-time: in my small city
| there is a small "natural" monopoly in public bus
| service: the municipality offers a monopoly on which
| buses can operate in the city, that lasts for 25 years or
| so. I lived through a renewal that was a bit rocky, the
| bus company went on a strike, and as a result there was a
| vacuum of monopoly for six months. That resulted in a
| flood of other companies, big and tiny (as in 1 bus only,
| serving 1 very demanded route), doing the routes. They
| were as cheap as it gets, offering month cards
| outrageously cheaper than previous public-natural-
| monopoly. It was so cheap, and the offer was so high that
| cars seemed to vanish from the city center, that was so
| full of buses that you didn't even check the timetable:
| you just waited for the next for 5 minutes.
|
| Eventually the municipality renewed the previous contract
| with the same previous company, a contract that forbids
| other companies from entering the city center, and we
| went back to the worse service we were used to. Of course
| they were a lot of narratives: they were trying to
| capture the market, drive competence away and then hike
| the prices; they were bounded to bankrupcy at such
| prices; that many buses were damaging the roads, and
| others. But the reality was that for a brief time we had
| the best bus service in the modern world.
|
| As for telephone wires, we went through some years,
| between copper-IDSN and fiber (the DSL bridge) that a lot
| of companies found a way to make it profitable to put new
| copper cable parallel to what it already existed. The
| only thing the municipality did was to make it mandatory
| that the first to install it must use a wider-than-needed
| conduct (a solution much less disruptive than giving a
| natural monopoly, latest shown by new small companies
| born everywhere), so if a company wanted to add more
| cable later could use the same tubing. Predictions about
| company A blocking their tubing showed false, as other
| companies could retaliate in other places. No second
| tubing was allowed until the first tube was full, this
| was the only state intervention in the issue. The same
| tubes have now the optic fiber.
|
| I am not fully anti-state, but there are undeniable
| overreaching everywhere, and a lot of zealots of
| intervention that are itching to issue mandates and
| interfere with everything, and then fix what fails with
| more interventions.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Markets are just a tool. This tool functions on
| information. OP explained how information (in this case,
| the rumor of a competitor laying fiber) caused action
| within the market.
|
| Hmm. Seems the tool is working as expected.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| So this shows competition works, but I thought the original
| post was about the free market. When the two companies were
| asked to fill a need for the people, they refused, and the
| people were not otherwise about to independently provide
| the service based on their own funds. I feel as though if
| the only way of getting companies to do something without
| organic competition is to use underhanded methods (such as
| lying about another competitor), then the free market has
| some places for improvement, no?
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Competition works up to a certain point its best for
| short term returns and not for long term as the time and
| capital investment increases the chances of monopolies
| forming increases. This is the reason why I think most
| public infrastructure should be invested in and owned by
| the government. Let companies compete on building,
| running and maintaining it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| In other words, competition works, and lack of competition
| leaves you vulnerable.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems incorrect to call this competition.
|
| I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much
| more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And
| in this political environment, corporations can engage in a
| variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they
| can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media
| hit pieces and so-forth.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| It's clearly competition. The incumbent company saw a
| potential competitor and acted upon it. That's literally what
| happens when there's competition. It doesn't matter that the
| competitor didn't actually exist if the incumbent behaved as
| if it did exist.
|
| I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It
| seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit
| that competition is good and necessary.
| postsantum wrote:
| No, it's called market manipulation. OP's action caused
| spending at the expense of the companies. Not going to
| "won't someone think of the shareholders", but calling
| competition is misleading
| joe_the_user wrote:
| OK, I should have said "economic competition" though I
| imagined that it was implied.
|
| If you just say "competition", you can point at the efforts
| of ten people to gain a seat on the politbureau as a clear
| case of this.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| If they ever find out they've been duped, they'll certainly
| go out of their way to make something worse down the line
| at the expense of the people.
|
| These are the kind of short-sighted tactics that
| competition and capitalism breeds that belongs in luxury
| markets, not utilities or essentials.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Local municipality power companies put fiber in the ground
| whenever they put power. The result is fiber almost everywhere
| at very low cost. Even along rail and major roads.
| ttul wrote:
| Absolutely. Once you're laying anything at all in the ground,
| tossing down a fiber costs nothing.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Either side of the spectre lies enshittification:
|
| - more competition comes with margin squeezing and cheapest
| source for service or goods
|
| - less competition brings the monopoly, the dream of any
| capitalist (owner, not user).
|
| Either way comes enshittification, and there's no middle
| balance, it drifts towards one of the sides always.
| jimbooonooo wrote:
| we still had luxury goods without monopolies, so I think I'll
| take more competition please.
| WalterBright wrote:
| During the Soviet Union years, tourists to it knew that the
| thing to do was pack blue jeans in their luggage, which were
| highly desirable under communism. Wearing blue jeans in the
| USSR was a mark of status.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| This German supermarket system has strong compettion , low
| margins but it is cheap and reliably good quality what most
| German wish.
|
| So I disagree.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| False dilemma
| toofy wrote:
| this is a great example of where the government should step in
| and say "welp, you took too long, we're now funding municiple
| fiber and we'll give it to everyone cheap. sorry."
|
| i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward
| but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable
| and decide their best course of action for profits is to do
| little to nothing.
|
| if a community has been screaming for fiber internet for years
| and the service companies cry "oh it's just too expensive" when
| we know that isn't true, then the people who pay the taxes
| should say "ok, apparently you're not up to the job, you and/or
| your business model is clearly a failure, we'll do it and
| provide it cheaper than you would have anyway."
|
| maybe this would force the competition we know can often work.
| if they can't figure out a way to do it without subsidies, then
| we'll do it ourselves. you can call it "spooky government" all
| you want, but that's just another term for "us"
|
| something to the effect of: ok, this thing has become integral
| to society. ceos, you have 5 years to compete and prove that
| you're up to the task by delivering A, B, and C for $N. can't
| do it? not up to it? no worries, thanks for trying.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| If it was easy to do with a lot of margin it would have been
| done by someone else in the private sector. In fact, they
| tricked these companies into making investments that weren't
| worthwhile for them. Sounds like the kind of people the
| deserve the shitty internet they have.
| delusional wrote:
| This is a fundamental problem of value creation and value
| extraction. Just because the ISP's can't extract the value
| of adding the additional fiber capacity doesn't mean it
| doesn't confer that value to the customers. We live in an
| age of value extraction, what's colloquially known as
| "enshittification", that can't go on forever. Somebody has
| to create the value that is being extracted.
|
| It's the old Marx quote: "From each according to his
| ability, to each according to his need". Except you know,
| the opposite.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I have a lot of ability. I'm not gonna flex it for others
| without pay that gives me significantly higher living
| standards than the average person. Are you going to force
| me to work?
| delusional wrote:
| Thanks for writing a reply. I was wondering why this
| comment was floating around 0. I realize it's pretty
| contentious politics on HN, but I figured the
| philosophical point is at least interesting anyway, and
| that HN would be able to separate the two. Your reply
| helps me adjust that assumption.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| No, however there's a bunch of people with your abilities
| that will do it because they're capable of seeing that
| something as crucial as internet access is a public good.
| You can choose to not work, plenty of us will make things
| move forwards without you, nor care about your living
| standards.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| If you could find people to do this work below market
| rate this wouldn't be a problem to begin with.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. A lot of companies are very
| risk averse and will sit there creaming off profit and not
| making any investment.
|
| If someone came to you and said - you have two choices:
|
| Work incredibly hard, raise a lot of money, build a bunch
| of infrastructure. And at some point in the future you will
| make some more money.
|
| Or - keep taking your very nice high guaranteed salary for
| the foreseeable future.
|
| What would you pick?
| econ wrote:
| I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable
| locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense
| often only because they already are in the business.
|
| I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a
| lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just
| one.
|
| It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or
| fiber with profit?
|
| Here public transport is required to cover all routes.
| Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that
| different?
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Depends on how much margin there was. Sounds like there's
| not enough.
| philipallstar wrote:
| The problem is all the regulatory stuff that means the
| bigger you are and the longer you've operated for the
| better you understand and have relationships with the often
| pretty inept regulatory bodies that can stop you.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Then as the local government, maybe start by removing
| that regulation. Or if the regulation is required, you're
| going to have to pay a premium for people willing and
| able to put up with it.
| philipallstar wrote:
| The problem isn't knowing the solution. The problem is
| incentives.
| miki123211 wrote:
| If people truly want something and it can be done profitably,
| just start a company and do it yourselves.
|
| If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want
| that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it
| can have it cheaper.
|
| With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in
| some tax or other.
| sirtaj wrote:
| This line of thinking comes up so often, but ignores second
| order effects. I don't need schools because I have no
| children, but I will certainly depend on well educated
| children entering the workforce.
|
| Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire
| service because no building I visit is currently on fire.
| vasco wrote:
| Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples
| everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized
| in practically every country on earth, and then apply the
| thinking the guy above you gives for everything else.
|
| In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right
| now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to
| a fair degree.
|
| But not for example if it is to supply only a small
| island of rich people just because they happen to want to
| live there and force the rest of the state to supply
| them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just
| outright subsidized everything and we can't market
| economy everything either
| sirtaj wrote:
| I agree with you. The internet is now important enough
| that it's required for almost everything past basic
| sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to
| the internet, so it's not even optional any more.
| Terr_ wrote:
| As precedent, the framers of the US Constitution
| specifically authorized the government to run a national
| service provider of last resort...
|
| In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it
| became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred
| today it would be the US Networking Service.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If people truly want something and it can be done
| profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.
|
| There is a specific problem with last mile services: It
| costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down
| every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
|
| So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore
| no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just
| charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service
| forever. If no one new enters the market, that never
| changes.
|
| However, if there _is_ a new entrant that installs fiber,
| the incumbent has to do the same thing or they 're going to
| lose all their customers. So then they do it.
|
| Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what
| percent of the customers you have, but they currently have
| 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge,
| if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to
| recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then
| you're offering the same service or the same price, so
| there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now
| that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then
| allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which
| means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to
| go out of business first because customers will stay with
| them by default when you both charge the same price. And
| since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone
| to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the
| incumbent.
|
| Which means that if the customers want someone to compete
| with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves.
| At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to
| install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the
| money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even
| choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber
| service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which
| then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local
| residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber
| networks instead of just one.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that
| whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their
| ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the
| profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or
| not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of
| MVNOs.
|
| And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't
| think it is mandated here, since not every place has
| multiple options like that, but many do. If you have
| municipality owned fiber (stadsnat) it always work like
| that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so
| different ISPs.
| toofy wrote:
| why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits
| to a certain group of people just because they exist.
| they can use magical competition and build it if they
| want a piece.
|
| if an area has been waiting for... (what would it be now?
| around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these
| companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if
| we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should
| we let them in? they have refused to do anything for
| literal decades... even worse, many of these companies
| took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they've
| refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for
| decades.
|
| (i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe
| competition can often work really _really_ well. but if
| we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we
| 're not seeing clearly.)
|
| think about how long that is, like some people become
| grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95
| days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be
| able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban
| areas.
|
| some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect
| the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the
| marketplace is... decades later if we have to build it,
| why should they get a piece?
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even
| better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in
| Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.
|
| Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly
| enforceable requirement to actually build out
| infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went
| wrong.
| toofy wrote:
| im saying we shouldnt give them subsidies at all. if they
| cant make it work in the marketplace, if they arent up to
| the task, then the competitive marketplace is a failure
| in that instance. and thats ok.
|
| no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and
| we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in
| the case of fiber, we _know_ this is the case. there are
| plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid
| and cheap af.
|
| its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work.
| often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.
|
| a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those
| failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky
| government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance"
| and move on with our day.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The physical cable that goes to every house is a natural
| monopoly. Really it's even more like the conduit the
| cable is installed in. Doing that part more than once is
| both fairly inefficient and tends to market failure.
|
| The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly
| competitive market. You may also have providers willing
| to use more expensive terminating equipment and then
| offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of
| fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect
| of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly
| as narrow as possible.
|
| Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the
| municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers
| again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_netw
| ork...
| EliRivers wrote:
| _just start a company and do it yourselves._
|
| Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that
| competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to
| charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of
| years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at
| the behest of Comcast and chums.
|
| I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the
| behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite
| outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder
| to do.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to
| Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they
| (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.
| deaux wrote:
| What does giving money to Verizon have to do with
| _municipal_ (i.e. operated by the municipality) broadband?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Municipalities don't know anything about the job and few
| have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently
| experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story
| where they personally stepped in and saw their local
| government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey
| that's great, but how is some random municipality without
| an elder tech god living with them supposed to get
| "municipal" internet without contracting with an ISP who
| actually knows how to get that work done?
|
| We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't
| have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell,
| they struggle to just fill potholes.
| toofy wrote:
| i was only using fiber as just one example. but in the
| case of fiber, there are plenty of non rural areas that
| still can't get it and are stuck with terrible options.
|
| even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them
| from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or
| a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are
| educated intelligent people in rural areas...
| VorpalWay wrote:
| That is not how it works here. Municipality owned fiber
| is common here in Sweden (called stadsnat). Often several
| smaller municipalities join together and co-own the
| venture.
|
| A common variation is that they just provide the physical
| infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use
| on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so
| usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I
| don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.
|
| As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually
| a larger problem in the cities than out in the
| countryside.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I
| read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly
| about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their
| own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-
| wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass
| laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines
| their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their
| infrastructure.
| ididieicueu wrote:
| > There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are
| against this and try to pass laws preventing it.
|
| There's a reason POLITICIANS are against this and try to
| pass laws preventing it.
|
| There, fixed it for you.
|
| Let's not pretend this is a red or blue problem. It's a
| big boot hovering over your head problem. It's a
| politician problem.
|
| It doesn't matter if their colour underwear matches
| yours. This is about people in power doing what they can
| to stay in power while guaranteeing their easy money.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| lol he thinks big ISPs upgrade their infra or care.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Did I say that? No, you made it up. Why you chose to make
| that up, I can only imagine (or should I make things up
| too?)
|
| Also everybody else responding to me is ignoring the
| point that most rural municipalities can barely afford
| keep their roads marginally flat, let alone tear up the
| roads, lay fiber, then repair those roads. Municipal
| fiber is a pipe dream in most scenarios, but workable in
| reasonably high density regions that have a tax base to
| work with.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Counterpoint: rural fibre is unbelievably expensive and
| starlink is solving it in a better way.
| toofy wrote:
| i'm sorry, but no, starlink is not comparable to fiber.
|
| better than dsl? i mean, sure? but absolutely not even
| close to better than fiber. there's a reason data centers
| in rural areas run fiber for miles and miles to their
| centers and aren't on ... starlink.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _starlink is not comparable to fiber_
|
| Straw man. It doesn't need to comparable. Just
| sufficient. If a rich rural community wants to pay to lay
| fiber into the boonies, they can still do that. But it
| shouldn't be a shared cost across society. (I live in a
| rural community.)
| hakfoo wrote:
| What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into
| effectively every house in the country?
|
| We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones
| or electricity in the boonies..."
|
| Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them
| a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in
| exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the
| network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers
| actually pay the regulator instead of the service
| provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event
| expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real
| teeth.
|
| It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for
| 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least
| initially, but the cost would be funding making sure
| people in rural counties are getting modern
| infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more
| and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into
| effectively every house in the country?_
|
| Subsidies.
|
| > _making sure people in rural counties are getting
| modern infrastructure_
|
| Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more
| than sufficient.
|
| Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit
| fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired
| internet for Starlink because it's cheaper and good
| enough and they can also put it on their truck when they
| travel.
|
| My property value does well from the subsidy. But it's
| inefficient.
| axus wrote:
| My charitable interpretation: adding a turn-key
| competitor is a better way to incentive the incumbents
| than a long fight to add a government competitor.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| That's the opposite of what was proposed above. Stop paying
| them altogether and replace them in the places where they
| aren't competing. I think that was the message.
| kaelwd wrote:
| Australia did that but also paid out the telecom companies a
| gazillion dollars for infrastructure that had only been
| privatised like a decade earlier.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| they voted a conservative government who did what
| conservative governments do.
|
| what did people think abbot and turnbull were selling?
| wasn't better service for users, it was servicing telstra
| and murdoch.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _where the government should step in and say "welp, you
| took too long, we're now funding municiple fiber and we'll
| give it to everyone cheap_
|
| Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing
| operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the
| cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat
| more than once?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _In which way this is a viable strategy that you can
| repeat more than once?_
|
| I'm not saying commit to bluffing. But after the other
| guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be
| petty is kind of dumb.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Or not if you want the threat to work a next time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not if you want the threat to work a next time_
|
| You don't care if it works next time. It worked this
| time. If it doesn't work next time, build it next time.
| therealpygon wrote:
| Cool, but isn't this "the next time", after "the next
| time", after "the next time" already? These companies
| have been threatened, sued, and incentivized in numerous
| ways over many years, which has yet to be successful, and
| yet it seems like you are suggesting "just one more time"
| will be the impetus for change...this time...you
| swear...probably?
|
| Note: I don't disagree or agree, rather, I'm pointing out
| how flawed the logic is that just one more time will be
| what it takes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn't this "the next time", after "the next time",
| after "the next time" already?_
|
| No, it's the time that it worked. The cable company
| upgraded. That's all that matters. Whether it's happened
| many times or not is irrelevant. The next time will come
| next time.
|
| > _which has yet to be successful_
|
| OP said they laid the fiber. It was literally successful.
| Preemptively striking your service provider because they
| might screw you in the future is silly.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > after the other guy has folded, continuing with your
| threat just to be petty is kind of dumb
|
| Your community is still going to be paying whatever the
| cable company wants to charge for the service. There's
| definitely a reason to run it yourself.
| lazide wrote:
| If the outcome is you need to pay the next time, but not
| the first time.... Doesn't it at least save you from
| having to pay for it the first time?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Isn't this the Chinese system? Using state corporations to
| spur competition.
| glitchc wrote:
| > this is a great example of where the government should step
| in and say "welp, you took too long, we're now funding
| municiple fiber and we'll give it to everyone cheap. sorry."
|
| In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the
| government, tying the case up in court for years.
| troyvit wrote:
| > this is a great example of where the government should step
| in and say "welp, you took too long, we're now funding
| municiple fiber and we'll give it to everyone cheap. sorry."
|
| That's what my town (Longmont, CO) did! We had laid a fiber
| loop around the city back in the '90s for traffic signal
| coordination. Over the years the town would engage different
| private companies to try to get them to lay fiber (or even
| directional wifi) to the door. None of them took off, so the
| city decided to do it themselves. Xfinity tried to sue us and
| ran a weak attempt at astroturfing, but after about five
| years of concerted back-hoeing most of the town has gigabit.
| It isn't 25 gigabit by any means but it works.
|
| Bonus: you call a 303 number for support and somebody who
| lives here picks up like "What can I do for ya, hun?" (I
| exaggerate, but not by much). Half an hour later your problem
| is solved.
|
| Edit: It's $50/month for that.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map
|
| https://communitynetworks.org/content/municipal-ftth-
| network...
|
| _How to Build a Fiber Network on a Small-City Budget
| [video]_ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhtdBZbOMc
|
| _Getting Fiber to My Town [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 - September
| 2020 (126 comments)
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my
| internet backwater of San Francisco.
|
| Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only
| have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
| fragmede wrote:
| What speed can you get from Monkeybrains?
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I believe they only offer up to 100mbps. Having 1Gb down
| from Comcast is definitely useful at times. I just wish I
| could get more than 30Mb up.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Sounds like you do know a way: Buy a spool of fiber and lay
| one from your house to the nearby block. Make it public
| knowledge that you're doing this and sharing internet with
| your neighbours (even if you're not). The incumbent will
| quickly upgrade your area.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| ROW?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission,
| especially if nobody notices.
| franga2000 wrote:
| A few years ago I learned that the only thing keeping me on
| 20/2 ADLS was a few 100 meters of already built but empty
| cable channel. I easily could buy that much fibre, borrow a
| fibre splicer and cable puller, patch it up to a relative
| in one of the already wired buildings and share their
| gigabit link with my entire apartment building. Half of my
| building was on the ISP that owned the empty channel, so
| moving to a competitor would've directly hurt their bottom
| line.
|
| Except that opening the manholes is a crime, using the
| ISP's channels would be at least a civil cause of action,
| laying such infra requires a municipal permit... The ISP
| was not worried about such "competition".
|
| Now try doing this in the US, the land of endless red tape,
| NIMBYs and HOAs. And without having an already dug cable
| channel. Sure, that's going to scare the probably multi-
| billion-$ incumbent ISP...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| People are too afraid of breaking the law. Look at every
| multi billion dollar company - all of them got where they
| are by breaking the law. How's it going to look in front
| of a jury when the government says "this man illegally
| brought cheap and fast internet to a neighbourhood?" The
| companies don't even have narratives that nice.
|
| Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The
| key is knowing which laws you can break, how much you can
| break them, and what's likely to happen if you're caught.
| When an illegal good thing is caught, the response is
| usually to slap on the wrist and legalise it.
|
| A lot of current ISPs did start out illegally too.
|
| Don't splice into other people's fibers though. That's a
| much worse crime of property damage.
| franga2000 wrote:
| You can break the law if you have money. That's it.
|
| You won't be in front of a jury for "setting up fast
| internet". You'll get caught climbing into a manhole with
| electrician tools and charged with terrorism. The jury
| will be fed a story of how you had expensive specialized
| equipment on you, so this was a well-funded professional
| attempt at sabotaging critical infrastructure. You'll
| have a shitty public defender who will only realise that
| fiber in this case is about internet not clothing because
| he first read the file in the taxi to the courthouse.
| You'll take a plea deal because you can't afford a trial.
|
| The system doesn't work how you think it does, at least
| not for the people on the ground.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You'll have money because you'll be selling fast internet
| to people. If YCombinator startups can make it work, so
| can you. Wear a hi-vis vest.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space
| utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of
| the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities
| only give these easements to a tiny number of players.
| It's a textbook government granted monopoly.
| franga2000 wrote:
| To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't
| want five different fibre lines going to every apartment
| building. That's more construction, more space use and
| more material costs. Ideally, we'd have one run going to
| every building, which the ISPs could share. Instead of 5x
| the fibre to every building, we'd get 5x the buildings
| with fibre.
|
| To put it another way, the building of infrastructure
| should be a monopoly, but the use should be free (as in
| speech, not beer)
| MarioMan wrote:
| > I don't want five different fibre lines going to every
| apartment building
|
| It's funny that you'd mention this. My apartment fiber
| has four lines going into my unit, all under AT&T
| service, apparently for redundancy. I only use one.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/Ss19AKk
| petra wrote:
| Is there a possibility to create a wireless point-to-point
| link ?
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Yes. You can actually buy pairs of antennas (basically an
| AP pair) that do just that. The only downside is that the
| signal quality varies based on weather.
|
| If you want something more or less weather proof, you can
| get microwave P2P links that run in licensed bands and you
| don't get any signal interference from similar nearby
| antennas.
|
| Both WiFi and Microwave equipment act just like bridges and
| you can connect them to a switch or router.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| We have an ISP (Monkeybrains) that offers this in SF but
| it's only up to 100 Mbps each way.
|
| I recently tried AT&T fixed wireless which runs over the
| mobile network but it seems too congested to offer high
| speeds so ended up back with Comcast.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Sadly, the municipality didn't have any capital to invest a
| penny into that fiber_ [...]
|
| Would borrowing money (issuing a bond) be an option in cases
| like this? Pay it off over the course a decade (two/three?),
| and make the payments part of the fee put to users?
| ttul wrote:
| Yes, they could have borrowed money. It requires a
| referendum, but I believe it would have passed. Alas, many
| small community politicians are retired folks (who else has
| time when you're getting paid $500/mo) and in my case, they
| just didn't get how crucial this stuff is.
| wisemanwillhear wrote:
| I think this demonstrates that while there are many factors at
| play, including difference in geography as many have pointed
| out, the main factor is priority. American's generally have
| different priorities, sometimes that just prioritizing our
| personal comfort by not having to fight against the current
| "system". So, even if we would love to have better internet,
| other things are more important. I'm one of those people. My
| cellular based rural internet would be considered poor by most
| people on Hacker News, but it's good enough for us. I have no
| motivation to pay for faster. I only rarely download large file
| and have always been willing to let them download in the
| background and come back hours later. If I'm going to campaign
| for something I currently have far bigger priorities.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
|
| Sometimes it works in ways you don't expect though
| https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-ins...
| ma2kx wrote:
| Init7 has on its blog another amazing write up
| https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US
| which demanded network unbundling, splitting up the
| fiber/connections versus the internet service, demanding
| wholesale rate access to infrastructure. It was good.
|
| Then the courts decided, meh, we just don't like it. We are
| going to tell the FCC otherwise. It all went away. The
| incumbent local carriers have now had monopoly power over huge
| swarths of the infrastructure. No access to dark fiber.
| https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerat...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Associat...
|
| Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling.
| But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber
| if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah,
| well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down
| congress's law because "innovation" sounds better.
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
|
| It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the
| court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make
| happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow
| competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was
| such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition.
| These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything
| they want! Bah!!
|
| I think it was a other case,
| frmersdog wrote:
| And this is almost certainly the direct cause of the Dot Com
| Bubble bursting.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4
|
| We were bamboozled on a massive scale.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Why isn't france your European example? Its larger and better
| served than switzerland
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| Any sources?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like
| natural monopoly.
|
| And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies
| but then have the state give control of a given market to a
| single or a couple of monopolists.
|
| The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-
| dependent small and large business people whose livelihood
| depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.
| underlipton wrote:
| The ultimate irony being that these people are the most likely
| to vote against social safety nets. "No free lunches" and such.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's not a good article at all...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841
| tickerticker wrote:
| I wish this kind of perspective (international comparison) could
| be applied to several areas of the USA economy: tax compliance,
| campaign finance, and banking regulation. Good work, OP.
|
| In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of
| them fiber.
|
| As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast
| majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is
| your biggest obstacle.
|
| My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie.
| That way, the enemy is a smaller target.
|
| Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass
| the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other
| states.
|
| If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product,
| that would get political hackles up.
|
| Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your
| argument.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans,
| replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for
| electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with
| various residential housing developments scattered around. What
| was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20
| Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is
| $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not
| high prices compared to Australia.
| chrismcb wrote:
| Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that
| regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have
| been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said
| monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free
| market
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as
| Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its
| grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where
| nonsensical, but because "it isn't real Communism/free market".
| emtel wrote:
| Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited
| power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would
| help.
|
| Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing
| interests and voting factions, meaning that free market
| supporters have limited power to enact their preferred
| policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a "pure"
| form.
| intalentive wrote:
| That's a nice story. In reality the "open society" is open
| to takeover by international finance capital. It's like
| running a server with "admin":"password" SSH credentials --
| a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders.
| Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their
| media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of
| their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their
| currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would
| be plainly idiotic and suicidal.
|
| "Open society!" coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no
| thanks!
| 0x3f wrote:
| Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we
| _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The thing is none of the "pure forms" are realistic outside
| of books.
|
| If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work,
| then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and
| free market.
| 0x3f wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true. What you're describing is the
| local optimum problem. Yes, the local optimum is better
| if you can't push through to a better one, of course. And
| heading merely 'towards' the better optimum often makes
| things immediately worse. But that doesn't make the
| better optima worthless, or ever-unreachable.
|
| It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a
| question of technology level, in the sense that
| governance is a form of economic technology. Which is
| what leaves it open to people saying it can be done
| better.
|
| The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a
| question of fitness to the current context.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Until you get a technology that makes people acting
| perfectly rationally, with perfect information and
| getting marginal cost equal to average cost[1], free
| market is never gonna work.
|
| And until you get a technology that prevents leadership
| to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to
| work.
|
| I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to
| happen.
|
| [1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty
| much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to
| be free.
| 0x3f wrote:
| I'm not sure I really understand. What do you mean by
| "never gonna work"? Because markets obviously do largely
| work, despite the fact that people are not perfectly
| rational and there are other inefficiencies at the edges.
| They have their degenerate cases, of course, but I don't
| think anyone would say markets "don't work" in general.
|
| Most successful economies are largely market-based, as
| things stand today. Even the successful command economies
| (i.e. China) use markets extensively.
|
| Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be
| perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what
| does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The
| nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of
| technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and
| is effective or not.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| With enough regulations, subsidies, strategic planning
| and government interventions when things turn bad, _mixed
| economies_ do the job pretty well, that 's right. And
| when the regulation is lacking the outcome is as well.
|
| And even these economies are structured around
| monopolistic and oligopolistic actors.
|
| They are as related to "free market" as northern European
| countries welfare state is related to Communism.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Right, those are the current technologies we have to make
| markets work in a particular way. They don't preclude
| other technologies which work with freer markets.
|
| Like there's a whole zoo of healthcare provision
| approaches, for example. Single payer can work fine (ala
| Norway), but so can Bismarck (ala Switzerland). The
| latter is a technological architecture that _enables_
| similar or better outcomes, while being closer to a fully
| market-based approach.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's not "closer to a fully market-based approach" any
| more than climbing a hill makes you closer to the moon.
|
| Also, if you call regulations "technologies" (which I
| don't disagree with) then "free market" means technology-
| free.
| 0x3f wrote:
| But climbing a hill does make you closer to the moon.
| There's nothing wrong with incremental progress towards a
| goal, assuming this is a goal for the free-market people.
|
| Also, I'm not sure a free market is technology-free per
| se. What you're talking about is specifically ancap-like,
| but most free market frameworks involve a state actor
| that should (among other things) not allow for itself to
| be weaponized against other market participants.
|
| Like the paradox of tolerance, you can't tolerate a free
| market for bribing your way to benefit from the state's
| monopoly on violence. I don't think the existence of this
| paradox destroys the value of free markets or tolerance.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| Totally, tons of govt. regulation and interference is what
| defines a free market. /s
| schubidubiduba wrote:
| Some markets just inherently turn non-free very quickly when
| left unsupervised. Especially infrastructure markets.
| simoncion wrote:
| Most markets inherently turn non-free when left unsupervised.
| That's the insight that folks like Keynes came to (as does
| any honest, informed observer with two or more functioning
| brain cells). That's why anti-trust and competition-
| preserving regulators and laws are essential. Without them, a
| very few powerful players form [0] cartels and/or
| tri/du/monopolies and enrich themselves vastly out of
| proportion with the value that they provide to their
| customers.
|
| [0] ...often legally protected...
| intalentive wrote:
| There won't be anti-trust as long as elections can be
| bought and there's a revolving door between regulators and
| industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.
| jatora wrote:
| Yep. But everyone's realized this ship has sailed in the
| US right? Regulatory capture is complete.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| No they don't. What happens is that people want to
| manipulate the market for a variety of reasons, so they do
| that, and then really _really_ smart people come along
| later and try to claim that those manipulators weren't
| actually the problem but the solution! It is completely
| backwards, like reversing cause and effect. It's like
| blaming a person for standing in the path of a bullet
| instead of the one firing the gun.
|
| Want a free market? _Stop messing with it._
| simoncion wrote:
| > No they don't.
|
| Yes, they do. Price competition and R&D are _expensive_
| activities. Businesses seek to maximize profit, as they
| 're not charities or governmental entities. Neutralizing
| competition (whether by eliminating it or colluding with
| it) and entering into private agreements with suppliers
| and vendors to box out any potential upstarts increases
| profit. Another fine way for a monopoly or cartel to
| increase profit is to make their product cheaper to
| produce by adulterating it with inferior ingredients, but
| mislead customers about the fact of the quality loss, the
| reason for the quality loss, or both.
|
| The natural stable state of a profit-seeking business is
| the establishment of a monopoly or cartel. You get the
| most profit when there is neither a need to compete on
| price nor a need to expend resources on improving one's
| product.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| That isn't really true though, monopolies are not
| sustainable. Pretty much the only way to create a long
| lived monopoly is to collude with the government (also a
| monopoly btw).
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...monopolies are not sustainable.
|
| You might be surprised to learn that the private sector
| can enter into durable agreements much like the public
| sector does. It's how things like mon/oligopolies and
| cartels form and persist.
|
| Anyway. I'd suggest you go read your histories, but
| you're either unlikely to, or don't have enough
| supporting information to understand what they're telling
| you. If you're young enough [0] to be alive thirty to
| sixty years from now, and you're living in a place -like
| the US- that's steadily dismantling its consumer
| protection regulations, then do pay attention to how
| things have changed between now and near to the end of
| your life. Take especial care to track down the root
| causes of the differences, rather than just uncritically
| swallowing whatever explanations you're handed.
|
| [0] ...and lucky enough...
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| Loool. It's pretty funny to have someone condescendingly
| tell you to think critically while they parrot the most
| banal, propagandized justification for government
| interventionism. One thing I'm definitely observing is a
| K shaped economy and massive inflation leading to
| worsening quality of life. I don't really wish to
| experience that same thing for the next thirty to sixty
| years thank you very much.
|
| Anyways, the problem with monopoly pricing is that it's
| unsustainable despite whatever agreements are made, as
| companies will defect and/or new companies enter. In
| other words, it's competition itself which prevents
| monopolies from lasting very long, and that competition
| comes partially from having a low barrier to entry. There
| is a reason why the most expensive industries tend to be
| the most regulated.
| db48x wrote:
| That may or may not be true, but in this case many cities
| signed exclusivity agreements with cable companies in the 60s
| and 70s when cable was becoming popular. Back then it was not
| technically feasible to have multiple cable companies sharing
| the same cable; the same set of analog channels had to be
| broadcast to every subscriber. Multiple subscribers, often
| hundreds of them in apartments, were attached to the same run
| of coaxial cable in a daisy chain or using splitters. Those
| agreements carried over to internet service once the cable
| companies started offering it. It made sense 50 years ago,
| but today it means that we haven't actually had much of a
| free market. Now the FTTH is cheap and readily available,
| that is starting to reverse simple because the monopoly
| agreements only apply to _cable_ networks, not to fiber
| networks.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Yes, the duopolies are due to regulatory capture in the US.
|
| A lot of ISPs need permitting that they will never get in order
| to enter a new market/location.
| hibikir wrote:
| And even with a free market, there's areas where making up the
| investment would be difficult, because the amount of effort
| divided by the number of likely subscribers, still wouldn't
| pencil out for 20+ years. A lot of Americans live in suburbs
| that are just low density enough that updating the infra to get
| fiber anywhere near the house is expensive, and then you might
| have quite a bit of fiber specific to that one subscriber. The
| difference in how much infrastructure you need vs a city is
| substantial.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has
| ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.
|
| The article initially does a good job of describing the
| situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of
| the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let
| natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's
| discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public
| utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through
| regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on
| wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.
|
| A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's
| pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for
| other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to
| compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would
| migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have
| been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.
|
| Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-
| occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a
| natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend"
| strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser
| didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a
| feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet
| explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a
| reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search,
| as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the
| marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.
|
| Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that
| provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too
| expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they
| operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel
| infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere
| in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite
| having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the
| phone company, which plays by similar rules.
|
| Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some
| competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular
| providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is
| currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a
| five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless
| market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which
| starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on
| requirement.
|
| Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the
| common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than
| they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than
| even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-
| worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is
| above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier
| plans.
|
| The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that
| are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of
| household that would like to download game updates in minutes,
| instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video
| streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise
| stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all
| providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-
| player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be
| beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same
| latency.)
| LoganDark wrote:
| > tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has
| ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.
|
| The point is that "free market" is a lie, not that the US ever
| had one.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than
| [40Mbps] are video game distributors
|
| No? I've been trying to download my MyMiniFactory library[0]
| and I'm currently getting 25MBps over 5 downloads. A single
| download will easily do 15MBps.
|
| [0] Which sucks, even at high speed - they have no API, no bulk
| download, and you're limited to 6 items at a time. I have to
| click through 1000+ items with easily 5000+ sub-items and
| individually download each one.
| dmix wrote:
| In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better
| customer support when the government allowed competition from
| smaller players. Telecom also got better when they allowed a
| foreign competitor to compete against the government mandated
| oligopoly. But the market is still heavily regulated in a way
| that benefits the existing monopolies.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think Canada is a great example of how not to do it, despite
| some price decreases in recent years. We seem to have (near)
| the worst of all worlds: huge geography, little competition,
| and government regulation that props up the oligopoly without
| driving prices down like Europe. Mobile data is even worse.
| xethos wrote:
| I'm running out my contract with TekSavvy (~$80 CAD for
| gigabit) before switching to Novus (~$60 CAD for 2.5), and my
| partner and I just switched to Fido (~$30 CAD for 80gig and
| international calls/SMS).
|
| Considering the geography and all the per-capita math (and
| pain), I don't think we're doing too bad as a country any
| more.
| gnabgib wrote:
| That last one is a phone plan.. not exactly apples to
| apples (it's good, but an 80GB/mo cap is rarely enough for
| home.. and nothing like a 2.5gbps internet plan).
| jeltz wrote:
| Canada is very urbanized so your huge geography does not
| matter much. It is much harder to get fast internet in a
| rural and mountainous country like Norway and they have
| succeeded way better than Canada. I think the Canadian
| telecom oligopoly is almost entirely to blame.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with
| better customer support when the government allowed competition
| from smaller players.
|
| What the CRTC did was force the big players who own all the
| infrastructure to allow _resellers_ to resell their services,
| and have to pay no more than cost to the big guy.
|
| Those "smaller players" have a marginal involvement in the
| entire network aspect. They usually host ISP emails and
| sometimes DNS. Some of them do provide better customer service
| than the upstream big guy. At least until they need upstream
| help to resolve your issue, then it takes forever.
|
| The other type of small players, who install their own
| infrastructure in smaller municipalities, were not impacted by
| this change. Some provinces (SK, QC) do give generous grants to
| those small players to install fibers. But AFAIK there is no
| federal involvement specifically to help them.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| This is about urban Switzerland. Way out in the country, we still
| have crap copper up on poles, which maxes out at 25 Mbits.
|
| But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let
| the competitors use it.
| sschueller wrote:
| Yes, that is sadly still the case but the expansion of the
| fiber build out is now rapidly moving forward. By 2030 +90%
| will have fiber
|
| https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kup...
| martinald wrote:
| That's actually terrible. The UK (which has been a laggard in
| FTTH in Europe until very recently) is at 84% FTTH coverage
| already.
| abc03 wrote:
| Currently also have copper and Sunrise cable. Just got the
| cables to the house two weeks ago. I'm now waiting for the
| local electricity company to get in-house installation.
| Everything at no costs. So yes, it's progressing fast.
| rettichschnidi wrote:
| Swisscom has to do better, as regulated by the government. One
| can get 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month:
| https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/landline-subscription...
| drnick1 wrote:
| > 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month
|
| This is a terrible value, and good luck uploading anything at
| 8Mbps...
| clcaev wrote:
| This factoring of a market to enable competition by centralizing
| minimal infrastructure seems the bedrock of best governmental
| practice. Are there other examples to lean on? How do we turn
| this into common knowledge?
| gigatexal wrote:
| what a well written article.
|
| makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy
| with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill
| imo.
|
| I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling
| Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole
| reason for being is to talk you out of it.
|
| I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.
|
| One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the
| electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can
| switch electricity providers like the article author can switch
| ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take
| advantage of customer acquisition incentives.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I'm in Zurich and I have 1Gb. My provider is offering higher for
| no additional cost - I'd have to put in a new modem/fiber-to-
| Ethernet adapter. However my home network is cat-5e and my switch
| is also 1Gb so I don't bother - it's pointless.
| strictnein wrote:
| Unless your house is gigantic, cat-5e can handle 2.5Gbps just
| fine.
| dmoy wrote:
| I get 1G (in the US) and am in a similar boat - I could pay for
| 8G, and my house is even wired for 10G. But..... all my network
| equipment is 1G, we rarely saturate it, and I don't want to
| shell out like a thousand dollars to replace my router, three
| managed switches, and three AP.
|
| Actually $1k might not even do it all, but I could probably get
| the switches and router for just under $1k and leave the WiFi
| at 1G.
|
| I suspect my 1G costs a bit more than yours though
| toast0 wrote:
| I run 10G on cat-5e, so don't let that be a blocker. Your
| switch and your devices and your router not doing more than 1G
| would still be an issue though.
|
| Of course, my internet is only 1g/1g unless I want to pay to
| upgrade the munifiber's equipment, and they use good telecom
| grade equipment, so I don't.
| userbinator wrote:
| All connections to the Internet are at some level "shared",
| except perhaps if you get a direct connection to one of the core
| routers. As others have mentioned, this is in a dense area and
| much closer to being in a LAN environment.
|
| The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G
| connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most
| sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't
| circuit-switched.
|
| Care to give a rebuttal?
| userbinator wrote:
| Apparently this discussion is full of people who don't even
| know how the Internet actually works. Not surprising for an
| article that is basically ragebait.
| andy99 wrote:
| What does one achieve with 25 GB internet? Are speeds actually
| usefully faster, or is there some other bottleneck that makes the
| practical speed the same as in the US?
|
| Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on
| clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are
| there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB
| internet beyond whatever is available?
|
| Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a
| blow against the free market?
| hparadiz wrote:
| I can actually get 7 gbit but have no idea what I'd use with
| it. I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it.
| simoncion wrote:
| > I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it.
|
| If the concern is cost (rather than recabling the house)
| Mikrotik sells solid, inexpensive gear. Its management UIs
| take a bit of getting used to, but are fine once you've
| figured them out. You can also find two-port Intel 10gbit
| NICs on the Newegg "Marketplace" for ~40USD [0], and -while
| most already come with modules (and you will be informed if
| they don't)- if the X520s you're sold don't permit non-Intel
| transcievers, the NIC's firmware can usually be easily
| modified to change that. [1]
|
| [0]
| <https://www.newegg.com/intel-e10g42bfsr/p/N82E16833106041>
|
| [1] <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fpatc
| hing...>
| db48x wrote:
| It's not official, but you don't always need to replace Cat5
| cable with Cat6 to support 10Gbps Ethernet. Cat5 might only
| get you a quarter of the range of Cat6 on a good day, but
| since the range of Ethernet is 300 feet you would need a
| really big house to have cables that were too long.
|
| But generally the real question is how often the extra speed
| would give you a real measurable advantage. If it's only a
| few times per month then it's probably not worth the extra
| subscription cost.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I routinely max out my 1Gbps connection downloading large files
| for work. 25Gbps would cut my waiting substantially. I'm not
| sure how likely it is that the server would be able to fill
| that pipe, but if such connections were common, they'd probably
| make it happen.
|
| If people don't actually use the extra speed then it's
| effectively free to provide, anyway. If providers could
| advertise 25Gbps while only needing the same capacity they do
| for 1Gbps, I imagine they'd do it just to bring in a few more
| customers. The fact that they don't suggests it would result in
| more usage suggests it would be useful.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| How many times has this argument been made?
| sschueller wrote:
| I heard that argument when I got 28.8k modem back in the day
| when that was quite uncommon.
| sowbug wrote:
| Enough to make https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| into a thing.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the article, or perhaps didn't read
| it?
|
| So the way the system works is each house has 4 physical fibers
| into it, that go into a central office without being aggregated
| up. Inside the central office any ISP can offer any speed vs
| price option they want, because they just patch you in at layer
| 1.
|
| So of course, most people wouldn't necessarily need to get
| 26Gbit. But if you want to offer it as an ISP you can, and it's
| up to customers to decide if it's worth the price.
|
| One obvious use case would be folks that work with high
| resolution video. Uncompressed 8K is about 8TiB per hour of
| footage. Compressed raw like RED cinema et all are more like
| 1TiB per hour at the high quality settings.
|
| 25Gbit vs 1Gbit for moving 1TiB is 5 minutes vs 2 hours.
|
| A quick google says the 25Gbit service from Init7 is $80 bucks
| a month.
|
| Sounds like an astoundingly good deal vs what's available in
| the US to me.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And a slightly more detailed Google search says it isn't a
| sold or universally.
| manquer wrote:
| Workloads emerge with higher capacity not other way around.
| Lossless media, to virtual reality applications all scale
| better with more available bandwidth.
|
| An average AAA game is 100-200GB today. That is not by
| accident, The best residential internet of 1Gbps dedicated it
| is still 30 minutes of download, for the average buyer it is
| still few hours easily.
|
| A 2TB today game is a 5 hour download on 1 Gbps connection and
| days for median buyer. Game developers can not think of a 2TB
| game if storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth all do
| not support it.
|
| Hypothetically If I could ship a 200TB game I would probably
| pre-render most of the graphics at much higher
| resolutions/frame-rates than compute it poorly on the GPU on
| the fly.
|
| More fundamentally, we would lean towards less compute on
| client and more computed assets driven approach for
| applications. A good example of that in tech world in the last
| decade is how we have switched to using docker/container layers
| from just distributing source files or built packages. the
| typical docker images in the corporate world exceed 1GB, the
| source files being actually shipped are probably less than 10Mb
| of that. We are trading size for better control, Pre built
| packages instead of source was the same trade-off in 90s.
|
| Depending on what is more scarce you optimize for it. Single
| threaded and even multi-threaded compute growth has been
| slowing down. Consumer internet bandwidth has no such physics
| limit that processors do so it is not a bad idea to optimize
| for pre-computed assets delivery rather than rely on client
| side compute.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And even at 1Gbps when I had it, the game servers couldn't
| keep up.
| simoncion wrote:
| I'll assume by "game servers" you mean "video game binary
| and asset distribution servers that support game stores
| like Steam and Epic and others".
|
| When I paid Comcast for 1.5Gbit/s down, Steam would
| saturate that downlink with most games. I now pay for
| service that's no less than 100mbit symmetric, but is
| almost always something like 300->600mbit. Steam can
| -obviously- saturate that. Amusingly, the Epic Games Store
| (EGS) client _cannot_. Why?
|
| Well, as far as I can tell, the problem is that -unlike the
| Steam client- the EGS client single-threads its downloads
| and does a _lot_ of CPU-heavy work as part of those
| downloads. Back when I was running Windows, EGS game
| downloads absolutely pegged _one_ of my 32 logical CPUs and
| left a _ton_ of download bandwidth unused. In contrast,
| Steam sets like eight or sixteen of my logical CPUs at
| roughly half utilization and absolutely saturates my
| download bandwidth. So, yeah... if you 're talking about
| downloads from video games stores it might be that whatever
| client your video game store uses sucks shit.
|
| OTOH, if you're talking about video game _servers_ where
| people play games they 've already installed with each
| other, unless those servers are squirting mods and other
| such custom resources at clients on initial connect, game
| servers usually need like hundreds of kbps _at most_. They
| 're also often provisioned to trickle those distributed-on-
| initial-connect custom resources in an often-misguided
| attempt to not disturb the gameplay of currently-connected
| clients.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I am talking about console downloads
| db48x wrote:
| Game downloads, whether on a console or a PC, come from a
| CDN. The difference is that Steam has a lot of capacity.
| They can have millions of players all downloading the
| same game on the same day at gigabit speeds. Console
| makers invariably cheap out and cannot reach the same
| level of service.
| simoncion wrote:
| Hell, it might be the case that console manufacturers are
| doing the same stupid shit that EGS is doing. Perhaps
| they wrote their download code back when 50mbit/s was a
| dreadfully fast download speed for the average USian to
| have and they haven't updated it since. (And why _would_
| they? What 's a consumer's alternative other than "Pay 1k
| or more for a gaming machine that can run games delivered
| through Steam" or "Don't play video games"?)
| zokier wrote:
| Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of
| USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick
| google.
| jmalicki wrote:
| While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole,
| the Bay Area in California does have comparable median
| household income.
|
| In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some
| places on new buildouts.
|
| I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between
| a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things
| like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training
| data to a GPU, etc.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet_
|
| Is that so crazy? If 10G was the default, you could just plop
| a cheap NAS at home and nobody would need to pay monthly
| subscriptions for cloud services.
| jmalicki wrote:
| For cloud services, I only need to match the bandwidth my
| cellphone has for my home NAS, so 1Gbps would be fine.
|
| 10Gbps is like.... my /home on my desktop could be served
| via NFS from somewhere else and it would probably be barely
| noticeable. That's just another level of crazy.
| cbg0 wrote:
| How is 1G insufficient for running a NAS over the internet?
| jmalicki wrote:
| 1Gbps is even slower than a SATA SSD that can saturate a
| 6Gbps SATA link.
|
| 10Gbps gets you speeds only a few times slower than a
| PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. Except you can run that over the
| Internet!
| cbg0 wrote:
| I'm aware of how fast an SSD is, but you're probably only
| accessing your home NAS from your phone or laptop which
| most likely won't have more than 1gbps, if that. If
| you're a power user you probably already have high speed
| networking inside your own home to max out a 10G link.
| jmalicki wrote:
| If I only have 1Gbps, I'm not going to be using a NAS for
| something like /home, or other things that need to be
| performant.
| nunez wrote:
| If only we didn't need redundancy...
| mft_ wrote:
| I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with
| friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's
| just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in
| myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but
| consistently and constantly don't.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I have a gentle rule, which is "if you can do it in one place,
| it is probably possible to do it in a second". The Swiss are
| not a separate species.
| mft_ wrote:
| So one would think.
|
| And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one
| after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a
| country could be. And then moving to Germany was like
| stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
|
| I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do
| specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of
| many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe
| Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct
| experience to adequately judge.)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I don't doubt there are differences.
|
| I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss
| aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be
| changed.
|
| I see Americans talk about how impossible universal
| healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't
| largely figured it out.
| whereistejas wrote:
| Nothing is insurmountable; however each one of us must
| play within the practical constraints of our local
| geographies (political, social, financial and physical).
| The parent comment probably means that Switzerland is in
| a positive on all axes unlike the rest of the world.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| It's politics. Boil most things down and the technical is
| inconsequential when compared to the politics.
|
| Look at the political system of Switzerland and you will
| see a radically different setup.
|
| And I think that's the horse. The rest is cart. Yes they
| are rich _but why?_ Yes they are relatively stable
| socially _but why?_ Decentralised Canton government
| structure + direct democracy (referendums all the time
| for things that matter). That, I think, is why all the
| rest.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Heh, you were walking right up to my viewpoint and then
| turned away. A parliamentary democracy with proportional
| representation has way more influence IMO, and you'll
| find another couple of relatively well-run countries that
| work like that.
| mft_ wrote:
| I think there's more to it than that.
|
| From a philosophical perspective, I love the
| cantonal/direct democracy model. But it's supported by a
| strong culture of awareness of current affairs, and
| involvement in the political process. (Of course, these
| two aspects are likely strongly synergistic.)
|
| _However_ , I'm not sure this unique political structure
| explains the trains running on time, the sensible choices
| made about the internet structure (per the article), the
| top-of-the-world healthcare system, the Swiss cheese
| science institute, or many other aspects of the broader
| country. It may partly explain the routinely excellent
| government bureaucracy (say that with a straight face
| anywhere else!), the convenient and reliable local public
| transport options, and the local police being well-
| resourced to the point of apparent boredom.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Awareness doesn't happen automatically either. During
| referendums ppl also get flyers explaining the subject,
| positive and negative things about it
|
| Ppl also recently voted for eid which should reduce
| bureaucratic hurdles
|
| Imo in many cases public transport problems in other
| areas are heavily related to corruption
| yowayb wrote:
| For me, this is the point of the article. People fought
| and the best decision was the result. And I suspect
| there's a fundamental cultural difference that makes the
| fight much less fair in America.
| strictnein wrote:
| Been an American my entire life. 45+ years. I've never
| heard a single person say that universal healthcare is
| "impossible".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-
| not...
|
| > President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it's "not
| possible" for the federal government to fund Medicare,
| Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be
| up to the states to "take care" of those programs while
| the federal government focuses on military spending.
| strictnein wrote:
| I guess I'm pretty confused on what your point is here?
|
| Universal Healthcare would be a new program in the US
| that would see a drastic tax increase, in that our
| healthcare spending currently going to insurance
| companies would instead go to a new federal agency. The
| amount of money companies and citizens spend on it may or
| may not also increase, but your quote has basically
| nothing to do with that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's sleight of hand. "Ooooh! A tax increase! Scary!"
|
| If I can pay $100 in tax to save $200 in premiums and
| copays, that's a win. The US is an extreme outlier in
| healthcare spend.
| strictnein wrote:
| It's like you're purposefully misreading what I'm saying.
| I wasn't saying it was scary. I was saying that Trump
| saying we can't afford current programs has nothing to do
| with universal healthcare. Universal healthcare would be
| funded through a large tax increase, the majority (or
| entirety) of which would be redirecting the money going
| to health insurance companies.
|
| Again, no one has said this is impossible, which is my
| original point. Even Trump's idiotic rambling, which was
| mainly about child care costs, said nothing about the
| impossibility of universal healthcare.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I'm an American and I've heard it often, usually with a
| bunch of strange excuses. We're too big, we're too
| diverse, there's too many states, and on. None of those
| actually make very much sense, but I've heard it all for
| why universal healthcare could never work in the US.
| bdangubic wrote:
| We must live on opposite sides of US cause I've never
| heard anyone say that it is possible (except few
| politicans who thought it may be a good way to win an
| election but also knew that it was not possible and gave
| up once they got elected)
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Culture can be changed.
|
| Over the course of a hundred or so years maybe. Culture
| is hard work.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Switzerland uses a system similar to the original plan
| for Obamacare, where individuals are mandated to buy
| insurance, so if Switzerland is what you mean by
| "universal healthcare" then it's not only not impossible,
| but the USA already has a more voluntary take on the
| exact same concept.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The ACA has been steadily kneecapped since its inception.
|
| And the "more voluntary" bit is pretty important. As is
| it costing about double.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The US system is more expensive partly because Americans
| throw a fit any time insurers try to constrain costs. The
| blowup over anesthetists is one example. Swiss insurers
| seem more able to tell doctors they're spending too much
| and to cut it out, without patients engaging in lobbying
| efforts to stop it. It's a cultural difference rather
| than an important difference in system design.
| eqvinox wrote:
| The healthcare system is actually one of the few things
| Switzerland isn't doing _that_ well. It 's somewhat
| "americanized", lots of "extra" insurances for random
| areas that will only accept you if you're healthy. Base
| insurance is regulated, has to accept all customers, and
| you're required to (pay for and) have it.
|
| The FR and UK systems are better IMHO.
|
| Just to be clear, the Swiss healthcare system is still
| _very good_. Just not perfect.
| exidy wrote:
| > I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so
| excellently
|
| Probably Singapore, which is sometimes described as the
| Switzerland of Asia anyway. 10 Gb symmetric fibre is
| broadly available at around SGD $50/month (about 35 EUR).
| aix1 wrote:
| This is not to say that it isn't well run, but I think it
| would be fair to mention that Singapore is one of the
| most densely populated countries on Earth (#3 overall; #1
| among countries with population >1 million.)
|
| Separately, I am not totally sure just how widely
| deployed FTTH is in Switzerland. Here in Zurich it's
| everywhere, but zooming in on some rural place on init7's
| map tells quite a different story (perhaps not
| surprisingly).
|
| https://ftth.init7.net
| fainpul wrote:
| Singapore seems very oppressive and medieval when it
| comes to punishment of crimes. I wouldn't want to live
| there.
| wan23 wrote:
| You wouldn't want to live there because it's too safe?
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny,
| homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse
| country.
|
| If my house were a country, I'd be in the top 0.1% of
| household internet speeds compared to other countries.
| Obviously everyone should be just like me!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny,
| homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse
| country.
|
| The US is a large collection of a whole bunch of rich (by
| global standards), tiny, fairly homogenous areas. We manage
| roads and schools at state, county, and local levels; we
| could do municipal broadband.
| hibikir wrote:
| The difficulties of American internet speeds have little to
| do with the total size of the country, but how far
| individual families are from each other. Spain is roughly
| the size of Texas, and Spain has a higher population, but
| you need a lot less fiber to each home, because metro areas
| are so much denser, and therefore it's so much easier to
| lay the fiber.
|
| As usual, blame the suburbs, which make all kinds of
| infrastructure quite a bit more expensive per capita.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| But the US has long lagged behind in even dense areas.
| It's more than just the distribution.
| cvwright wrote:
| Right. It's things like Baltimore (when I lived there)
| requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in
| poor areas first, before it could go into the rich
| neighborhoods.
|
| But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still
| "new". Only the richer areas cared and were willing to
| pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!)
| access would have made it _easier_ to fund the rollout in
| low income areas.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Huge swaths of our densest metro areas, in our largest
| cities, do not have any fiber option, just one cable
| provider.
| kube-system wrote:
| The NEC, which is the only area of the US that really has
| any density to speak of, does have pretty good fiber
| penetration.
|
| https://www.reviews.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Verizon-Fios-
| cov...
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| >homogenous country
|
| Tell me you know nothing about Switzerland without telling
| me you know nothing about Switzerland. Try asking a German
| Swiss what they think about a French Swiss or either about
| the Romansch.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I wonder if there is some sort of metric for classifying
| how similar cultures are to one another. Are e.g. German
| Swiss more dissimilar to French Swiss, than are Florida
| rednecks dissimilar to Compton gangsters?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| If you ever heard them talk about each other, you would
| definitely assume as much.
| khalic wrote:
| I'm not even talking about the languages, we have 20%
| immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has
| foreign roots.
|
| We also don't have weapons in every household, if we're
| talking myths
| denysvitali wrote:
| > We also don't have weapons in every household, if we're
| talking myths
|
| It all depends if you did your military service (which
| implies that you're swiss) and if you didn't decide to
| drop out of it or deemed as unfit. I don't think it's a
| myth really, it just happens to be that a lot of people
| don't do their military service and thus don't have to
| keep a weapon at home
| khalic wrote:
| You're right about the source of the weapons wrong about
| how many there are. An estimated one in five household
| has firearms, with a significant percentage not having
| ammunition at home at all.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I'm not even talking about the languages, we have 20%
| immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has
| foreign roots.
|
| Both LA and Miami speak Spanish, no? > We
| also don't have weapons in every household, if we're
| talking myths
|
| Only the Republicans have weapons in every household?
|
| I'm joking, I realise that you are Swiss, but until I
| looked at the username I wasn't sure which side of the
| comparison you were referring to. Goes to show that even
| the nations' stereotypes are not dissimilar!
| khalic wrote:
| HN layout got the best of me haha.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Rich is a key attribute here. Tiny, not really. The key is
| _dense_. That makes terrestrial connections cheaper. A
| country with the population of the US and the richness and
| density of Switzerland would be just as capable of building
| out high speed internet connections. It would have ~38x the
| population of Switzerland, cost ~38x more to wire, and have
| ~38x the resources with which to do it.
|
| Incidentally, the northeast of the US has a similar or
| greater population density as Switzerland and is pretty
| rich. That area, at least, should be as capable of this
| sort of thing. Doing it for, say, everybody in Alaska would
| be a bit tougher.
|
| I don't know what diversity has to do with anything here.
| As far as I've seen, people from all sorts of different
| places and cultures seem to like high speed internet about
| equally well.
| Aspos wrote:
| Infrastructure is laughable in northeast. And no, we do
| not have competition here in NJ. Yay "free market"
| toofy wrote:
| > There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny,
| homogenous country that you can't do in an enormous,
| diverse country.
|
| US states are little islands entirely capable of doing
| things like building infrastructure. There is no excuse for
| our states and their lack of movement, certainly not "the
| entire country is just tooooo big. whoa is us." nonsense.
| djoldman wrote:
| Yes, that's true for population.
|
| But all except 9 US states are larger in geographic area
| and only 5 have a higher population density.
|
| Those are pretty salient statistics when you're talking
| about infrastructure that links houses.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Does New York have great home fiber infrastructure?
| khalic wrote:
| Homogenous? Tell me you don't know anything about
| Switzerland without telling me...
| Moldoteck wrote:
| It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages,
| one of which is german with tons of loval dialects. It's so
| homogeneous that each canton has own sub regulations. It's
| so homogeneous that in it's biggest city, Zurich, 34% of
| people are foreigners and 45% born outside of Switzerland.
|
| But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova,
| poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by
| fibre, >90% of population has option to get 1GBit fiber
|
| There are always reasons why something can't be done, just
| like solving frequent school shooting problem in US
| Sesse__ wrote:
| > 34% of people are foreigners
|
| I remember moving there, hearing talks about how
| international Zurich was, and then realizing most of
| those foreigners were German. :-) It's diverse on paper
| (and probably to the Swiss), but it's not like it's a
| cosmopolitan melting pot.
| izacus wrote:
| They really aren't.
| micwag wrote:
| Most immigration happens between neighboring countries
| e.g. the biggest immigrant group in Los Angeles are
| Mexicans.
|
| If you exclude neighboring countries Zurich has a foreign
| born population share of 27% (compared to 18% of Los
| Angeles). If you only look at the last 10 years Zurich
| has foreign born non neighboring immigration of 10%
| (compared to 4% for Los Angeles).
|
| If you only look at intercontinental migration then Los
| Angeles wins with 14% (compared to 8% of Zurich).
|
| So yes Zurich is less cosmopolitan then LA, but most of
| it is just because the US has more diverse neighbors.
| tribaal wrote:
| Maybe you should visit Geneva then, or most of the "Arc
| Lemanique".
|
| It's way more diverse than Zurich. Well, if you mean
| "diverse" as "more brown people" as your comment seems to
| imply.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages
|
| Perhaps he's talking about a different kind of
| homogeneity (one that conventionally falls under the
| "racism" category)
|
| > Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is
| covered by fibre
|
| Do not arm him with arguments
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Americans are so used to racialized society that they
| tend to see "white" as a natural diversity/homogenity
| category, same with "Asian". And so they see "white
| Switzerland" as a homogeneous country.
|
| That is absurd for anyone who lives in the Old World.
| Some of the worst wars in history were fought amongst
| people whom you wouldn't be able to tell apart in a
| sauna.
|
| Heck, even Palestinians and Israeli Jews are physically
| very similar.
|
| "White", "brown" etc. aren't meaningful categories in the
| Old World, with a few exceptions like South Africa. Most
| of the Old World is intensely tribal.
| StrauXX wrote:
| Switzerland is one of the _least_ homogenous countries in
| Europe! Four languages, relatively weak federal government
| with strong local (canton) governments. Most state services
| are handled on a localized (canton) level.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| The US being different is no excuse - this is really just a
| shortsighted retelling of American Exceptionalism.
|
| Intelligent folks look at a system and figure out ways they
| can adapt it to their own situation. You can take systems
| they use for rural areas and figure out ways to do it on
| your own. The US is enormous, but most folks live in
| cities. States are tiny portions of the US, and some of
| those states would likely mirror Switzerland in diversity,
| density, and size.
|
| It wouldn't matter if the country had a population density
| similar to the US and was similar in many ways. It'd still
| need adaptation because of the differences in culture,
| laws, and so on.
| izacus wrote:
| Many US states are richer than Switzerland, what's their
| excuse?
| piva00 wrote:
| The enormous, diverse country excuse is a good thought-
| terminating cliche but doesn't really hold up when the
| population of such enormous, diverse country is well
| concentrated along the coasts, with very dense rich
| pockets.
|
| Sweden, for example, is tiny in population compared to the
| US but geographically its size covers from north Florida to
| NYC, with barely 10m people it's able to have great public
| transportation, fiber coverage to 80-85+% of buildings,
| cellphone coverage to 98% of the population even in remote
| locations.
|
| Being enormous like the US might leave a vast area of low
| density population centres but it doesn't excuse at all
| that the areas where the vast majority of people live are
| dense enough to have these services very well covered. That
| doesn't happen though so the issue isn't being an enormous,
| diverse country at all.
| ordu wrote:
| Lately I come to believe that success stories are not
| necessarily transferable. They can require some traits of the
| system that are not available. USA is made for corporations,
| so you just cant replicate internet access from Switzerland
| in USA. Corporations will fight you to death in courts and
| they will win. They are not going to lose their monopoly. To
| change that you need to change USA in a massive ways, I can't
| imagine how it can be done.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US
| states.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| What is this supposed to imply? us states are also a poor
| representation of humanity. This matters a great deal:
| switzerland is notoriously ethnically homogenous and unable
| to get along with anyone. Life on easy mode!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It implies that Switzerland is by no means so tiny their
| lessons learned can't apply to other multi-million human
| sized regions.
|
| Switzerland gets along with others just fine, to the
| point where Italy and France used to handle their air
| defense on the weekends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et
| hiopian_Airlines_Flight_702).
|
| > The Swiss Air Force did not respond because the
| incident occurred outside normal office hours; a Swiss
| Air Force spokesman stated: "Switzerland cannot intervene
| because its airbases are closed at night and on the
| weekend. It's a question of budget and staffing."
| Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its
| airspace outside of regular business hours; the French
| and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort
| suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have
| authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Try 500 mil and you'll see china is the only interesting
| sample.
|
| If the swiss were able to get along with others, they
| wouldn't have such a reputation as racist nazis
| ceejayoz wrote:
| China is, as the EU (450M), US (340M), and Switzerland
| are, broken into smaller subunits for local and regional
| government.
| ginko wrote:
| There's only two countries with over 500 million people
| and they're complete freak outliers.
| Liftyee wrote:
| "unable to get along with anyone" is an interesting claim
| given that the last armed conflict in Switzerland was in
| 1847 (Sonderbund War).
| Ray20 wrote:
| I mean, it's hard to start wars when you don't get along
| with anyone and can't find a single ally.
| khalic wrote:
| Ethnically homogeneous, you guys really just spew
| nonsense without doing _any_research? Swiss here, you're
| very, very wrong
| input_sh wrote:
| My god, Switzerland is literally the _least_ ethnically
| homogenous country on the continent (if we ignore tiny
| nations like Luxembourg, Lichtenstein and Malta), with a
| third of its population being foreign-born, which is
| percentage-wise double that of the US.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| you going for the cherry-picked-but-functionally-
| meaningless statistic of the week award?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm going for the "Switzerland isn't a little village of
| 50 people, we can learn lessons from them just fine"
| award.
|
| Every large country breaks things up into small chunks.
| No one says Vermont can't handle a school system just
| because it's small.
| mgfist wrote:
| It's got 9m people. The US has 30x the people and 250x the
| space. It's not comparable.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| So why do we struggle to get the infrastructure to work
| in dense urban areas still? Or even just "not Wyoming"?
|
| Switzerland and California have the same population
| density. Why can't CA build high speed rail?
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| Just for the information Switzerland neither does ;)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| CA's high speed rail isn't high speed by European
| standards and it looks on the way to cancelation or
| significant curtailment. We can't even manage what y'all
| would consider _slow_ rail.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| I don't know but Swiss isn't the only train system that
| works but also Spain, Italy, France. Poland has a growing
| better train system . The swiss system has it's
| advantages but it is also very expensive.
|
| It might also worth it to check them out
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I've ridden on several.
|
| "Others do it even better and cheaper" makes the US
| failure to build and maintain infrastructure like this
| even sadder.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| The advantage of swiss system is fast transfers. Hsr
| would likely break this system (no point in arriving
| faster if your connection gets longer by 10-15min
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| That's a very National focussed perspective and thus
| definitely a disadvantage of the Swiss train system ;)
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm Swiss and I disagree, and so do many experts. First
| of all, arriving earlier is always good, because many
| people who get off on that stop still arrive earlier.
| Also, people who connect to a different mode of transit,
| such as Trams or S-Bahns very likely can catch an earlier
| connection.
|
| In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would
| could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't
| actually matter anymore.
|
| So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.
|
| Join us in advocating for this vision:
| https://swissrailvolution.ch/#goals
| lmm wrote:
| Switzerland has a few sections of barely-high-speed rail
| such as the Lotschberg Base Tunnel.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Switzerland and California have the same population
| density. Why can't CA build high speed rail?
|
| Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and
| compare its land acquisition difficulties to what
| happened with the California project. I'll rankly
| speculate _that_ difference will be the meat of your
| answer.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Building infrastructure is a skill, a skill you have to
| constantly work on. If you do it enough and not once then
| you can learn to get good at it. There is a difference
| between a long term consistent execution of a
| infrastructure plan and a 'lets build high speed rail'.
|
| I don't think rules and regulation in California are
| actually worse then in Switzerland.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Plenty big enough to be an example to be examined and perhaps
| emulated though.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Well and a little bit of research, tells me it's far from
| universal across Switzerland. This article is so provable false
| in many of its premises it's worthless - see my other comment.
| bombcar wrote:
| Switzerland and Japan should be excluded in most discussions -
| what they can do has little bearing on "the real world" ;)
| dmix wrote:
| And Iceland.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Lets just exclude the best example, as everyone knows, we
| should never try to be the best. Being the best is dumb,
| liberal and possibly communist. Settling for 105th, that's
| freedom and democracy baby.
| harrall wrote:
| This article gets ahead of itself.
|
| The issue isn't the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in
| most places. A lot of places in America had their "network" infra
| built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to
| basically rebuild all of it.
|
| I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground
| utilities.
|
| We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched
| them string the fiber on the poles.
|
| It's still not shared, but it's fast because it's _new_. Shared
| would be preferred, but you need destroy + "new" first, and most
| people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be
| cheaper but most people don't think we need to rebuild anything.
| martinald wrote:
| I'ts almost certainly shared. 99% of FTTH is (X)G(S)-PON which
| shares the fibre over a few properties. Usually something like
| 32 max.
|
| The Swiss use point to point fibre (there are a few small
| pockets of this elsewhere). But in reality it is very hard to
| saturate. XGSPON has 10G/10G shared between the node. GPON has
| 2.4gbit down/1.2gbit up shared across the node.
|
| In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of
| scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for
| long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't
| really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
|
| And if it is a problem there is now 50G-PON which can run side
| by side, so you just add more bandwidth that way.
| bombcar wrote:
| Residential 2.5gb equipment is just starting to appear as a
| "default" and 10gb is still pretty rare, though accessible if
| you want it.
|
| I don't even have 25gb and I've a home lab!
| ido wrote:
| I had 600mbps down/200 up (I could have upgraded to 1GB)
| and I downgraded to 175 down/50 up (to switch to a more
| reliable provider) and didn't notice any difference (family
| of 4).
| manarth wrote:
| Same, I've wired the house for Cat6 and have a Cat6
| prosumer switch, so 25 wired devices pulling at 1Gbps?
|
| I clearly set my ambitions too low and should follow the
| Swiss model :-)
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Sweden doesn't use much PON either. If a countries fiber
| build out started before gpon was released or got popular you
| likely continue a lot with point to point. There's a small
| drawback, TDM/A for the uplink, introduces some jitter but
| guessing it's not as bad as cable.
| martinald wrote:
| Well a GPON frame is 0.125ms. So the best jitter is
| ~0.125ms, but even if the entire upstream segment was
| saturated you'd be looking at probably 1-2ms at absolute
| worse case. The OLT will not allow one user to hammer the
| upstream badly like you get with DOCSIS.
|
| So it's really a non issue (XGS-PON is even better as more
| data per frame means heavy upstream 'clears' the frames
| quicker), IME consumer routers add more jitter themselves
| even with ethernet on the LAN side (and WiFi is a lot
| worse).
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Not great but much better than cable. I remember mmthe
| difference in smokeping as I switched from cable (very
| oversubscribed as well) to fiber.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yep, exactly! I live in Switzerland. The article is
| misleading. Switzerland doesn't have 25 Gbit consumer
| internet, quite obviously, as nowhere does. It has a state-
| owned telco that advertises 10 Gbit to ordinary consumers
| without making it obvious to the buyer that they won't be
| able to use anything above 1Gbit without exotic and expensive
| equipment they are near-guaranteed to not have (unless
| they're literally a high speed networking hobbyist).
|
| I noticed this years ago and thought it was an extremely
| sharp and therefore unSwiss practice, that in a more free
| market with better regulation and a more feral press would
| have already attracted a rap on the knuckles from the truth-
| in-advertising people. But Swisscom is government owned and
| has fingers in a thousand pies, so they're allowed to get
| away with it.
|
| Unfortunately because regular consumers just compare numbers
| and assume higher is always better, this practice has dragged
| fully private ISPs into offering it now too. So the entire
| market is just engaged in systemic consumer fraud by this
| point. God knows how many people are overpaying for bandwidth
| their machines literally can't use without realizing it.
|
| That said, the basic point Schuller is making is sound that
| the fiber cables themselves are more like roads than
| internet. They aren't a natural monopoly but the cost of
| overbuild is so high that it makes sense to treat it like
| one. It's just a pity that in the end this doesn't make a
| difference as big as the article seems to be advertising in
| its title.
| db48x wrote:
| XGSPON is actually 40Gbps down, 10Gbps up. The 40Gbps is
| actually four separate 10Gbps downlinks on different
| frequencies. Filters are used so that each customer only sees
| one of those downlinks. Just a little note.
|
| > In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99%
| of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate
| 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most
| users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi
| to start with).
|
| This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a
| canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other
| streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps
| is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split
| to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those
| customers have more than 12 televisions going at once...
|
| You're more likely to see congestion from many customers all
| hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the
| numbers are.
| martinald wrote:
| You're confusing XGS-PON with NG-PON2. NG-PON2 isn't really
| used anywhere AFIAK, the "real" upgrade path is 50G-PON
| (50G/50G shared). NG-PON2's tunable lasers are expensive so
| didn't get traction.
| recursivetree wrote:
| Interestingly enough, most providers still run PON, but all
| their equipment, including splitters, is at the telco's end
| of the P2P connection. Apparently it is slightly cheaper to
| build out a PoP like that.
| martinald wrote:
| Probably just the equipment is far far cheaper now
| (customer ONTs and telco OLTs) than point to point is my
| guess?
| eqvinox wrote:
| > A lot of places in America had their "network" infra built
| 50-100 years ago on copper
|
| That's no different to Switzerland so far...
|
| > and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
|
| ...but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the
| investment.
|
| > I happen to live in an area where there are still above
| ground utilities.
|
| If anything, that can make things cheaper. You don't _need_ to
| bury everything, and in some places (e.g. earthquake prone
| Japan) it 's really counterproductive. But even if it isn't,
| it's certainly more expensive.
|
| Sent from a 25G internet connection. My laptop only has 10G via
| TB though.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > ...but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the
| investment.
|
| West Virginia is 1.5x the size of the entire country of
| Switzerland. Let that sink in.
|
| Texas is 16x times bigger.
|
| The idea that it should be doable in a country that is 100x
| bigger, with 50 separate states, god knows how many
| individual counties because it could be done in vastly
| smaller one is where your problem is.
| sschueller wrote:
| Yet somehow the US did manage to get power to most
| places...
|
| The thing with fiber is that it can go so much longer than
| copper without any active components. It is also very
| future proof, you won't be pulling it out of the ground/off
| the pole for at least 50 years if not longer.
|
| If size is such an issue, how did you get power?
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > Yet somehow the US did manage to get power to most
| places...
|
| You're not conflating 2 different infrastructure
| processes and ignoring the one took decades, are you?
| This is like saying "The US has built a road
| infrastructure why can't it do all light rails?"
|
| The irony in your comment is that it government
| intervention, which is the opposite of a free market.
| eqvinox wrote:
| Who said free market? Swisscom is 51% government. A
| government-ish entity is IMHO the most efficient way to
| do this.
|
| You can't have 2 road networks, highway systems, or
| railway networks. You can have, but it is pointless to, 2
| water systems or 2 electric grids. Or fire brigades, or
| police. (criminal, not mall cops) Same applies for fibre
| in the ground. "Free market" doesn't work when you can't
| effectively compete.
| eqvinox wrote:
| I'm sorry, but your stance is completely fing ridiculous.
| First of all, nobody is saying you need to do the entire US
| in one go by one approach and one provider. Second, the US
| has about 30x the GDP of Switzerland. Third, have you
| looked at Swiss geography? They're pulling fiber up the
| alps to the damn huts. Fourth, they're burying pretty much
| _everything_ , as I said you don't really _have_ to do
| that. Fifth, 26 cantons can squabble almost as well as 50
| states can. Sixth, you 're somehow assuming Switzerland is
| the only country successfully doing this. Sure, not
| everyone is doing it to that level, but take a look at
| Brazil.
|
| If you're looking for reasons to fail, you will fail. The
| only thing your argument really excuses is that it will
| take longer. But the US doesn't have the political will to
| even start.
|
| (Same for Germany, to some degree, btw.)
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| 26 cantons with a functioning federal regulatory mandate
| isn't remotely comparable to 50 states where broadband
| regulation has been in a decade long battle over
| jurisdiction.
|
| > Third, have you looked at Swiss geography? They're
| pulling fiber up the alps to the damn huts.
|
| This is apples and oranges. The US is vastly more sparse.
| I think what is "f'ing ridiculous" is continuing to
| compare the 2 countries in ways they aren't comparable.
| eqvinox wrote:
| I made 4 other points.
|
| > 50 states where broadband regulation has been in a
| decade long battle over jurisdiction
|
| Thanks for making my point, all I'm arguing is that
| Switzerland had the political will while the US doesn't
| (yet?) You're essentially arguing the problem exists
| because the problem exists.
|
| It's a political problem, but a solvable one. Pretending
| that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| I don't have to refute all your points to prove it's
| impossible.
|
| > It's a political problem, but a solvable one.
| Pretending that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
|
| Pretending like you hvae any clue how the US works
| doesn't help either. There are over 3,000 different
| counties in the US all with different rules around right-
| away (which could be one of like 6 different
| jurisdictions). There are quite literally hundreds of
| ISPs in the US. And even if one did want to build in NYC
| for instance, it would be have to interact with dozens of
| jurisdictions that don't magically go away with a
| strengthened FCC.
|
| And again, you're totally ignoring the physical geography
| of the land. So how exactly does that work at a
| legislative level? Forcing ISP in which communities
| specifically? Then, it not only becomes a political, but
| fiscal issue as well.
|
| Which is why saying "it's a political problem" is grossly
| over-simplifying the situation.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This article is technically incorrect on so many levels I didn't
| even bother to finish it.
|
| 1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is
| nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are
| areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the
| phone company laying fiber
|
| 2. Everyone on the internet is using a "shared" connection. The
| difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream.
| If your ISP doesn't provision enough upstream capacity, the last
| mile doesn't matter.
|
| 3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
|
| 4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across
| Switzerland
|
| 5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it
| didn't slow down no matter what time of day.
|
| Please don't suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M
| ragall wrote:
| > But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying
| fiber.
|
| Yes there is: the cost.
|
| > Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
|
| It is in Switzerland. That's the whole point of this setup.
|
| > Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across
| Switzerland
|
| It is in the big cities. Elsewhere the same arrangement is
| true, but on a lower scale.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You know being shared at the last mile is exactly what you
| don't want?
|
| The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had
| access to 25Gbps - thst isn't true.
| ragall wrote:
| The last mile is owned by the local monopoly and can be
| switched over to any provider. In that sense it's
| shareable, but the physical medium is not shared. This is
| very good.
|
| > The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had
| access to 25Gbps
|
| Lack of reading comprehension skills.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Name one place in the article that clarifies "As
| mentioned, in Switzerland, you can get 25 Gigabit per
| second fiber internet to your home..." that it isn't
| available everywhere?
| ragall wrote:
| It needs no Clarification. Skills, dude.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| We already have this in Utah with Utopia with 53% coverage across
| the state (A state 5 times the size of Switzerland) so kind of
| weird the post is acting like Europe is special or something.
|
| And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps
| symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally
| purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the
| CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on
| both ends if you are super determined.
| sbrother wrote:
| Ooo, does everywhere in Sugarhouse have access to this now?
| We've been up in Park City relying on wireless point-to-point
| but are about to move back down to the valley and that is very
| exciting.
| perching_aix wrote:
| The author keeps repeating this idea of a "dedicated internet
| connection" (DIA), and it kind of just irks me. Not because the
| author is wrong in how they use it, but because the term itself I
| find misleading, and I hate to see it continue to poison the
| common discourse.
|
| A dedicated last-mile connection gives you a dedicated link to
| your ISP's edge network, not a dedicated path across the
| internet. You won't compete with your immediate neighbors on a
| shared access network anymore, sure, but you're still sharing the
| ISP core, peering links, and transit links with the rest of their
| customers.
|
| In practice this usually works well enough, because ISPs engineer
| their core and peering capacity with low over-subscription,
| especially for business and DIA customers. So you can often push
| near line rate anyway, but not because you have a truly reserved
| slice of the internet. A Switzerland-sized country would need
| like petabit-scale connectivity to provide actually dedicated 25G
| links (or even just 1G links) to everyone.
| userbinator wrote:
| Very true. The bottleneck isn't going to be the last mile
| nearly all the time. In any case, it's clear we're arguing with
| a ragebait article and a bunch of others who have basically no
| understanding of how the Internet (or networks in general)
| works.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Im genuinely curious what is a use-case for 25GB Internet in a
| typical Switzerland household?
| Anamon wrote:
| It's true that few servers even provide that kind of bandwidth.
| That's why I personally stick to 1 Gbps and save a few bucks.
| But I have friends who use the 25 Gbps e.g. for off-site
| backups (a NAS at the office for home backups, one at home for
| office backups). Stuff like game downloads or uploading large
| media are also sometimes mentioned. And you can really benefit
| from the parallel connections in P2P stuff.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| Very misleading article. There is only one provider init7 and
| coverage is definitely not good in rural areas. Here is an map :
| https://ftth.init7.net/
| Anamon wrote:
| Only one provider? What gave you that idea? Even TFA mentions
| four providers, and those are just the most popular, nation-
| wide ones. I live in Zurich and have a choice between 10
| providers (going by the list of the local infrastructure
| provider[1] -- I don't know if that list is even complete).
|
| Rural coverage is challenging, true. And Switzerland has some
| challenging terrain in places. But FTTH coverage is currently
| at around 60% of the population, and Swisscom's strategy is to
| reach 90% by 2035. That doesn't sound so bad, especially when
| comparing internationally.
|
| [1] https://www.ewz.ch/en/private-customers/fibre-optic/fibre-
| op...
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| I meant the only provider providing 25 gigs .
| grg0 wrote:
| Ho-lee smokes is that Speedtest screenshot even real? Have some
| mercy for those of us in third-world infrastructure (US).
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Australia copied the Swiss model and in a very short period of
| time we went from 2Mbps flaky copper to now you can upgrade most
| properties to 2Gbps fiber for around $300 one-off fee.
|
| I hear 10Gbps is coming soon. The only annoying thing is that
| ours, despite being terminated the Swiss way, isn't symmetrical,
| I think due to congestion on the sea cables?
| shell0x wrote:
| I highly doubt that. As a German who lived in Asia and now
| Australia, this is the most incompetent country. They can't get
| anything right. I live in the city of Sydney and can only get 1
| Gbps down and 200 mbps up for 109 AUD a month. I lived in 2017
| in Singapore and the internet was already better than that for
| 1/3 of the price.
|
| Australia seems to be pretty backwards in general though.
| suslik wrote:
| In Belgium you get 500/100 for 65 euro, which is even worse.
| cbg0 wrote:
| What a time to be alive to see people put "only" in front of
| "1gbps". We've come very far.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| You can upgrade that to 2Gbps if you pay the network upgrade
| fee (basically you pay for the NTD and house-side wiring),
| after that it costs around AUD 150 per month, which is kind
| of reasonable...
| FpUser wrote:
| Switzerland - self hosting paradise.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| So the author's proposed solution is more government control.
| Pass.
| adrian_b wrote:
| According to you, having public roads is an example of
| government control?
|
| The "author's proposed solution" is the equivalent for
| communication of what public roads are for transportation.
| some_furry wrote:
| Another thing that I think Europeans often fail to take into
| consideration is scale.
|
| USA: 9,147,590 km^2
|
| Switzerland: 41,295 km^2
|
| That's a factor of 221.5 to 1.
| martinald wrote:
| Yes but if you compare urban areas (where 80% of people live in
| both continents) in US and Europe it's not massively different
| (Europe maybe 2-4 more dense depending on the country/city).
|
| Obviously you're not going to lay fibre to the last 1% of
| population in the US (for the most part).
| slackfan wrote:
| As one of the last 1% of population with fiber, your take on
| population stats in the US is wildly off.
| longislandguido wrote:
| Because Switzerland is the size of Maryland. Imagine pouring all
| federal resources into one cramped state.
|
| I thought spamming your own blog was not allowed here.
| kube-system wrote:
| Switzerland and the US have almost identical government
| expenditure per capita. Maryland still doesn't have 25 Gbps
| home internet.
| strictnein wrote:
| That's kind of their point. A lot of those government
| expenditures go to things that citizens of Maryland may not
| want or benefit from.
| kube-system wrote:
| More federal spending goes to Maryland per capita than the
| US average per capita.
|
| This isn't an an issue of people in Maryland not getting
| money -- they get robust federal spending and have a robust
| state budget of their own. This is simply: Americans
| getting what they vote for, which is notoriously not public
| infrastructure.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Imagine pouring all federal resources into one cramped state.
|
| Bit silly to compare the size of countries but not scaling
| resources correspondingly.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere. Size of
| California, quite urban, but you'll still have fiber in the
| rural parts or even your cabin in the woods.
| sumedh wrote:
| Australia was able to do the same. It had the same US crony
| capitalism where private companies didnt approve the national
| broadband fibre network so had to use ADSL for 10 more years
| but finally a different govt party implemented the fibre
| network.
| exabrial wrote:
| What? There is no free market with wired internet. State,
| federal, and municipalities entrenched local monopolies through
| "tax breaks", subsidies, over regulation, piles of permits, and
| many more.
|
| The cable/fiber providers played all areas of government like a
| fiddle.
| strictnein wrote:
| The amount of people here who think any market failure in the
| US is due to it being a "free market" is kind of astounding.
| There are exactly zero "free markets" in the US.
| db48x wrote:
| I don't know if there are zero free markets, but there are an
| awful lot of thumbs on the scale.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Most states in America ban municipal fiber. They saw EPB
| (Chattanooga) and said, no, we must make sure that doesn't ever
| happen again. That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the
| rules are to make sure the richest people become richer.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I agree that's a scourge. But of course, it would be very
| disingenuous to call that a free market. It's _not_ free due to
| corporate interference, which is why the situation is so bad
| for consumers.
| tombert wrote:
| I think that's why they had 'free' in scare quotes.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| woah, I didn't know this. How many states have laws banning
| municipal fiber?
| jdeibele wrote:
| https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-
| roadbloc...
|
| It's from 2023 but says 16 to 19 states.
| m_mueller wrote:
| this is insane. I guess it's that easy for telcos to lobby
| the legislators for keeping up their rents?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _guess it 's that easy for telcos to lobby the
| legislators_
|
| 16 states having restrictions while two go explicitly
| pro-municipal broadband doesn't seem like a lobbyist's
| panacea. Skimming the list of states with restrictions,
| they look like red states trying to bridle their blue
| cities. Partisanship seems the more-parsimonious
| explanation.
| m_mueller wrote:
| ~100 million consumers (assuming average sized states are
| impacted) being essentially defrauded by a cartel of
| telcos - doesn't really matter what you wanna call it but
| I'd say it's a pretty major deal.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's a pretty major deal_
|
| Never disagreed.
| shimman wrote:
| You're assuming they are giving these people hundreds of
| thousands of dollars, they aren't. These are mostly state
| politicians that make between $50k-80k who rarely get a
| campaign donation above $10k. These corporations
| absolutely give them the bare minimum (seriously talking
| between $500 to $4k maybe), it's only federal Senators
| that typically make the big bucks since they have the
| ability to single handedly gum up the system to prevent
| legislation.
|
| But yeah, it's not only easy it's very cheap. This is why
| you need a workers party so workers can effectively
| collaborate together to either primary the politician or
| convince them otherwise.
|
| Oh and you can't just do this once either, it takes an
| entire life's worth of work and it never ends.
| m_mueller wrote:
| I'd say first of all you need to put a lid on it, call
| this kind of thing again what it is (bribery), and make
| it illegal. Secondly, if someone wants a public office:
| pay them well (they'll still have the revolving door
| afterwards anyways), but all their finances will need to
| be published on a quarterly basis. It's not exactly
| rocket science, this kind of thing is implemented in many
| jurisdictions.
| art0rz wrote:
| What happened on Chattanooga?
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| It was apparently very successful:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB
| abustamam wrote:
| Unfortunately too successful!
| driverdan wrote:
| Resident here, it's great. EPB is the power company and
| internet provider. They run fiber anywhere they run power.
| They also have good customer service, local knowledgeable
| phone support, and inexpensive support services like
| installing ethernet drops for $50 each.
| db48x wrote:
| Stop calling it a free market! These stupid rules keep it from
| being free.
| jjice wrote:
| I believe that was the parent's point in surrounding "free"
| in quotes.
| justin66 wrote:
| > That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the rules are to
| make sure the richest people become richer.
|
| In all fairness, we put an awful lot of effort into making the
| poor poorer as well.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| This statement is easily refuted by looking up statistics on
| poverty.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Except the definitions of poverty are defined to make it
| seems like it's not poverty. When you have a massive amount
| of the population that lives paycheck to paycheck, is one
| small medical emergency away from bankruptcy / can't pay
| their rent/mortgage. Will lose their job because of little
| to no protections. Very little social safety nets... most
| people are a lot closer to 'poverty' than looking at simple
| statistics.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| The definitions of poverty are used to measure relative
| wealth, not whether someone lives paycheck to paycheck.
| As income increases, paycheck to paycheck reports
| decrease, but at a certain point it then increases again.
| Living paycheck to paycheck is a poor measure, because
| you can buy a house that's too expensive for your income,
| or a car, eat out too much, or make a variety of other
| poor life choices. That's why the poverty index is good
| at measuring relative decreases in poverty because it
| ignores poor life choices.
| slibhb wrote:
| Living paycheck to paycheck is usually a choice: people
| earn a lot of money and spend it immediately. The fact
| that this leaves them vulnerable to misfortune doesn't
| mean they're poor.
| aaarrm wrote:
| While this can be true, this absolutely is not true for
| the majority of paycheck-to-paycheck people. You truly
| need to get your head out of your ass if you honestly
| believe this is what is causing people to be poor.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Do you know any of those people? Yes it's almost entirely
| a choice. Typically a combination of poor life choices in
| tandem with poor financial choices.
| halapro wrote:
| This is the most American shit ever. Pro-consumer regulations
| are rejected to the point that they start regulating against
| their own constituents.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| good cherry picking there
| btorretta wrote:
| why is it a lie? a natural monopoly doesn't bar other entrance,
| it's just naturally difficult, like space travel. also, unpopular
| comment but who cares? my Internet does everything I want it to
| and I'd wager that the price from the swiss government is highly
| subsidized. A market means a meeting of supply and demand, it's
| possible that currently the swiss speed is overboard for most
| users.
| ukd1 wrote:
| I get 10g symmetric in Austin for $150/m. I had Cox before, and
| it was $180ish for 1g down and ~50mb up. Things are improving!
| dmix wrote:
| You can get 8gb fibre for around $65/usd a month in Toronto.
| piperswe wrote:
| What provider has 10G? Highest I've seen is 5. Genuine question
| - I'll keep them in mind next time I move across town!
| nunez wrote:
| Because Google Fiber HQed there. Come to Houston, where you'll
| pay >$200/mo for 5Gbit if AT&T covers your area or MUCH LESS if
| Ezee is an option.
| dangus wrote:
| Before I start with my real comment I'll point out that the AI
| slop images really detract from this article and the author
| should stop.
|
| To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and
| is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around
| 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing
| even better than that.
|
| Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be
| ahead of most places, although they certainly pay for it. (Even
| that has gotten way, way better. I'm getting really nice MVNO
| service with unlimited data and even a decent unlimited tethering
| plan for less than $30/month)
|
| 25 Gigabit is nice but that's so expensive on the client device
| side to the point where it's basically unattainable for any
| consumer. Your average consumer primarily uses the Internet via
| WiFi devices that might max out at 300Mbps practical speeds or
| lower depending on when they purchased their devices and WiFi
| access point and their distance from it.
|
| Then you've got the problem of the speed on the other end. 25Gb
| fiber is great until you realize that the server you are
| downloading from is only going to give you 1/100th a lot of the
| times.
|
| I haven't even mentioned the fact that you're now adding CPU and
| SSD bottlenecks to the equation. I'm pretty sure 25Gb/s is higher
| than the maximum write speed on my SSD.
|
| I have gigabit fiber at home and the ability to buy faster speeds
| from my ISP but I find the idea totally pointless when that means
| I would have to buy $500 in networking equipment (if not more)
| and possibly rewire my home (currently sketchy Cat 5e that seems
| to be installed poorly and I'm lucky to have that). I even have
| the latest WiFi 7 from a highly reputable prosumer brand along
| with very new WiFi 7 and 6E 6Ghz client devices but the highest
| speed I see using those devices where I want to use them is
| around 600Mbps.
| Karuma wrote:
| Only the images? The entire article is pure AI slop. But no one
| even cares anymore... People seem to love this kind of empty
| text, or no one even reads anymore, or everyone here is a bot
| already... Who knows.
| sschueller wrote:
| The article is not AI slop.
|
| I spent 4 days on it and the video I made to go along with it
| with me speaking every word. The video has no AI, it is all
| stock video and audio footage which I pain stackenly stiched
| together in DaVinci Resolve.
|
| I used AI to spell check and fix my ESL grammer in the
| article. Initially I also generated a number of unnecessary
| AI images which I removed again. I only left the ones that
| explain certain things like the p2p model.
| IFC_LLC wrote:
| Good take, and most of the data in the article is quite correct.
| The problem is a total mix up of cause and effect. The US has had
| a decent communication network since way back. We had telegraph,
| telephone and telex. Bell and AT&T and all that stuff. We've
| invented and piloted modems, T1 and cable TV.
|
| Our infrastructure at times goes back 200 years old. We have
| rules and words in today's networking linguo that go back 70
| years old. You can't just go and tell that it would have been
| better this way. It absolutely would. And I'm happy for Swiss
| people who can have 25gpbs at a fraction of the cost. But you
| can't do that with an emerging tech that is trying to replace
| existing architecture.
|
| Swiss guys built all that after the tech was wide-spread in the
| world, and they have built it over a very outdated
| infrastructure. It was a breeze.
|
| US just unable to use this approach. We can't.
|
| Should we come up with a new one? Yes. Should we look at the
| Swiss solution and try to replicate it. Yes. Is it awesome? Yes.
| Would it work here? No.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| Ehm,
|
| Do you seriously think 70 years ago Swiss had no telephon net
| so they create a new one?
|
| Or is this argument that US is just too special to change?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Path dependence is a thing.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| While on surface scratch level this might be a good entry
| analysis it lacks deeper comparisons to other great networks
| nations Like Romania or South Korea. Is it cheaper there? What
| about coverage? Uptimes? Why is the service "better"? Why is it
| by the way a free market "lie"? ( For me a lie means a wrong
| information by purpose)
| shell0x wrote:
| Regardless if it's Switzerland, Germany or the USA. Everyone has
| better than we have in Australia. I can't wait to go back to Asia
| after citizenship to join the developed world again.
| dlenski wrote:
| I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home
| Internet connections at home.
|
| I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's
| fine.
|
| It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing
| calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email
| and web browsing, and everything other than downloading
| maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large
| anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids
| turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade;
| maybe we _won 't_ for that reason.
|
| What are people _doing_ with their higher-speed Internet
| connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!
| denkmoon wrote:
| I don't want to wait 6hrs to download a game patch that's 40gb
| or whatever because that's sadly the norm. With 1gbit I can do
| anything and it doesn't induce latency or cause connection
| quality issues with anything else because no one thing can come
| close to saturating it really, with a few exceptions (Steam
| being the main one). I can also seed at high speed to private
| trackers. It'd be an effort to max out a 25gbit connection at
| home that's for sure.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I have gigabit synchronous fiber at home thanks to a group of
| local tech folk who built out the network. The biggest change
| for me is that I rely more on my NAS at home over a Wireguard
| tunnel for things I would have used the cloud or a hosting
| service for before.
|
| Going to work? No worries about forgetting a USB stick or
| portable SSD. I can always just fire up Wireguard and grab it
| from home.
|
| Sharing Jellyfin access with family and friends has also been
| fun.
| gdubs wrote:
| Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of
| gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming
| movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS
| updates, etc, etc, etc.
| neonstatic wrote:
| An example from someone who has lived at a condo in Asia.
| Around 8 PM the internet becomes unusable. Everyone's back home
| and they want to watch their favorite series. If you need to
| work at that time, e.g. if you work US hours, you are screwed.
|
| P.S. I experienced this at different condos in different
| countries in South East Asia.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Are you sure that isn't wifi interference?
| eqvinox wrote:
| Most places in Asia, this is due to massive
| oversubscription. No relation at all to wireless spectrum.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| That's easy to claim, but there are a lot of places where
| everyone is surrounded by everyone else's wifi routers.
| If you have 9 routers that you share walls with and even
| more that can reach you, wifi starts to break down, but
| people will blame their service provider.
| eqvinox wrote:
| I've been there a bunch, my colleague has lived there. We
| work in the telco area. My own experiences I would
| question, his I don't.
|
| It's oversubscription.
|
| Can I provide citations or proof? No. That's extremely
| hard to do with oversubscription in general, no telco
| will admit their exact ratio without being forced to.
| Sometimes you can reverse engineer it from peering
| relationships, but that doesn't allow identifying
| bandwidth constraints on medium haul.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _It 's oversubscription._
|
| You said that already, but repeating something isn't
| evidence. Oversubscription would be something that
| happens with cable internet on a node by node basis, so
| to say the problem is one thing and only that doesn't
| make any sense. Not only that but people will sign up for
| hundred megabit to gigabit internet but they only really
| need to watch some streams that use 3mb each.
|
| You can actually figure out oversubscription if you ping
| nodes, especially over time.
|
| There are more factors like international bandwidth, lack
| of caching servers in smaller countries so bandwidth has
| to be international, cable signal levels etc.
|
| None of these come close to wifi contamination. If you
| have two neighbors trying to watch tv over wifi and
| you're trying to watch tv over wifi, you're sunk. Now
| take that to being surrounded by a dozen people, all
| watching tv over wifi and all watching videos on phones
| and tablets.
|
| Unless someone is in a house, more isolated from their
| neighbors it is going to be a much bigger problem for
| almost everyone.
|
| You can say 'oversubscription' because you're buddy said
| that, but even that can have some truth while still being
| a marginal issue next to the real problems. Even in
| places with great internet, people get a single wifi
| router, put all their computers and TVs on it, then blame
| their ISP.
| eqvinox wrote:
| You seem to be making arguments with significantly less
| of a connection to the actual scenario being discussed.
| And you're explaining oversubscription to 2 network
| engineers, one of them having presented at APRICOT and
| APNIC.
|
| I guess I should've focused less on oversubscription and
| made clear that we _know_ it 's not spectrum utilization.
| For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did,
| and it's not the problem.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did,
| and it 's not the problem._
|
| It has been a problem for basically everyone living in
| apartments that had network problems that I've seen. If
| you measure at the wrong time it's going to look fine.
| You have to be there when people are watching video over
| wifi.
|
| Again, just because people can't get their full
| bandwidth, it doesn't mean oversubscription is the actual
| bottleneck.
| neonstatic wrote:
| Not a network engineer by any measure - but I think if it
| was wifi contamination, it wouldn't get worse in the
| evenings. The routers are on 24/7. Thoughts?
| rubiquity wrote:
| The optionality of consuming services from places other than
| internet titans for one would be nice.
| defrost wrote:
| Working from home on raw and cooked SKA data and visualisations
| being remote served by supercomputing centres, team co-editing
| of multiple raw RED cinema camera channels.
|
| Essentially any job that involves massive fat data streams that
| ends up having a real time collabrative hybrid remote team.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Pulling or pushing Docker images, downloading LLM models,
| installing AAA games from Steam. There are so many use cases
| that you won't see if you're just doing email and web browsing
| with a little bit of video streaming.
|
| It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site
| backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very
| helpful for this.
|
| > I don't understand the desire (fetish?)
|
| If you don't need it then you should be happy with what you've
| got, but calling other people's uses a "fetish" is unnecessary.
| And weird.
| ronsor wrote:
| It's Stockholm syndrome from what I can tell.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| Why?
| carefree-bob wrote:
| I agree that calling it a fetish is weird, but I also have a
| hard time believing ordinary people are pulling and pushing
| docker images all the time.
|
| The reality is that the reason these high speed internet
| political initiatives fail is that for most people internet
| access is a solved problem, and there isn't the critical mass
| of people to push through legislation.
|
| Which is not to say that for a minority, it's not a solved
| problem, but the desires of those in a minority situation
| don't get prioritized in the democratic process.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Gigabit is incredible if you are a dev
| chasd00 wrote:
| > installing AAA games from Steam.
|
| it's weird how insanely large games are now, like 100's of
| gigabytes. I can't remember which game my son was playing,
| maybe DCS or some other milsim but it was around 300gb
| download. That's roughly 64-65 dvds.
| Kodiack wrote:
| I use my home connection for VPN access remotely. I back up
| snapshots of data every day. I like to be able to download
| games and Linux ISOs practically on demand. I work from home
| and often enough faster speeds can avoid several minutes of
| additional waiting in a day.
|
| This connection is shared as well. My partner relies heavily on
| cloud syncing. We both like to stream 4K HDR video. I like
| being able to get devices updated and ready to use with minimal
| time spent waiting for downloads.
|
| I also live in NZ, where multi-gigabit fibre connections are
| often cheaper than what Americans have to pay for a fraction of
| the bandwidth. It's not a notable financial burden or anything,
| and it's not like we have data caps to worry about. It's very
| much a situation where the use cases naturally find themselves
| once the option is there.
|
| Also, 25/10 Mbps is painfully slow for a shared home connection
| in the modern day. There's videos on YouTube that can push a
| higher bitrate than that. The absolute slowest plan that my ISP
| even offers is 100/20 Mbps for about $35 USD per month, while
| the most common/baseline plan for most households in NZ is
| 500/100 Mbps after the fibre carriers continued to increase
| speeds at the lowest tiers.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Past 200Mbps down I typically see very little real benefit.
|
| That said, I do find myself downloading packages and watching
| 4K video all day long. 25Mbps is noticeably slower the majority
| of the time. You can get by, of course, the same way you can
| compile an Xcode project on a 2019 Intel Mac (I still think
| MacOS 26 supports Intel?) but it's a significantly nicer
| experience on more recent M series machines.
|
| Who likes to sit around waiting on downloads/compilation?
|
| Now I'm realizing you said 25Mbps up, 10Mbps down. Wow,
| assuming this isn't a mistake, 10Mbps is slow enough to make
| even normal web browsing start to chug IME.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| - Downloading local LLM models
|
| - Downloading games, movies etc.
|
| - Updating software.
|
| - Doing remote data backups or restoring from them.
|
| - Browsing the internet. Fiber still makes a noticeable
| difference especially in badly optimized websites.
| tibbon wrote:
| Maybe I've just got deep scars from the 90's, where I'd wait
| 15-25 minutes sometimes to download a single mp3.
|
| I have a FIOS connection here at home, and it seems entirely
| sufficient. Even AAA steam games, I hit 'download' and go
| grab a snack in the kitchen and it's done. My server does
| incremental backups to s3 every night, but its not like i'm
| sitting there watching it.
|
| I download a new large model maybe once every other week. It
| takes a few seconds, maybe minutes. I don't really notice
| either way? 25x faster doesn't seem like it would make any
| difference.
| ksec wrote:
| >I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's
| fine.
|
| Do you mean the other way around, 25Mbps Down and 10 Mbps up?
|
| It is nice to have, especially when it doesn't cost much. That
| is why I am perfectly OK with PON rather than dedicated fibre.
| You only need the 1 or 10Gbps speed for may be a 10 min window
| per month.
|
| I do think 25Mbps on a house hold bases is quite low. On a
| 5Mbps Video file I want the first 10 second buffer, 50Mbps done
| instantly. While I am loading multiple page in the background.
| Multiply that with a few more user in family. It is perfectly
| useable a you said, if you dont mind waiting.
|
| Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the
| point we see law of diminishing returns.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 640k ought to be enough for anybody?
| candeira wrote:
| I've been consulting a long time, and my home is my office.
|
| Besides the uses other people have suggested, here are some
| uses I would have for a fast symmetrical connection:
|
| - Backing up data to my home/office NAS while away.
|
| - Remoting to my workstation desktop from any location, for any
| reason.
|
| - Using my home as a Tailscale exit node for clients for whom
| it's already a hassle to allowlist my home office's IP, so I
| can work from anywhere.
|
| - Switching my nixos configuration using the caches in my home
| office where my custom derivations are built.
|
| I have 90Mbps down and 20Mbps up. All of the above is workable
| but it would be great, amazing if it were faster.
|
| The remote places I would do this from:
|
| - the doctors' waiting room because we have teenagers
|
| - the bleachers of the pool for the diving lessons because we
| have teenagers
|
| - the in-laws spare bedroom where we're visiting for an
| extended time during school holidays but not work holidays
| because we have teenagers.
|
| Some of us have different needs, under choices that we make
| that are optimal for other aspects of our life but not for
| having a slower asymmetric connection at home.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| The total bandwidth up/down is only part of the story.
|
| I was on a cell modem until very recently. Just the latency
| difference between gigabit fiber and anything else is
| noticeable for me. When a website loads a ton of stuff in a
| single page, some of that is serialized and requests are back
| to back instead of parallelized. The longer the serial chain,
| the higher you multiply your round trip time. This is
| especially so with auth providers that take you away and back
| to a site (or similar for online purchases via external sites
| (eg: PayPal etc.)) All of that time adds up.
|
| So, my home connection is now down to 11.9 ms to google.com, my
| wifi adds another 5ms. I did "start timeline recording" and hit
| the google homepage. It just took 900ms to load the front page
| in Safari. On a good day with my cell hotspot, my latency is 35
| at idle and goes way up (sometimes in seconds) when pushing
| bandwidth.
|
| Video calls with 1000ms and higher latency are ... difficult.
| Especially when everyone else is in the sub 100ms range.
| Banditoz wrote:
| Yep, latency's also big if you play competitive multiplayer
| games. With DOCSIS you get ~11ms +- 3ms added to every packet
| no matter what because it's shoehorned existing cable
| infrastructure. Fiber is much better in this regard.
|
| Ping to my public IP's gateway address: 30
| packets transmitted, 30 received, 0% packet loss, time
| 29031ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.449/1.915/2.212/0.166
| ms
| db48x wrote:
| > What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet
| connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!
|
| Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can
| afford.
|
| But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix
| bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects
| (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the
| whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI
| system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a
| year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was
| the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries
| and 20-30 minutes to recompile them myself.
|
| But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough.
|
| An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a
| year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating
| photo-realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move
| around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for
| artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now
| streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I'm sure that
| a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower
| it significantly, but it'll always be more expensive than mere
| 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most
| streaming services use about 15-25Mbps for a 4K television
| stream.
| nunez wrote:
| Running speedtests to see that number go up. Mostly Hacker News
| though :D
| drnick1 wrote:
| > I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's
| fine.
|
| This is dog slow, you can't even stream Youtube at 4K
| resolution with that. Downloading a reasonably recent game
| would also take close to an entire day. Not everyone needs a
| full symmetric Gbps perhaps, but 100Mbps is kind of a baseline
| nowadays, and more is better for faster downloads.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| The comparison feels off because it treats Switzerland and the
| United States as interchangeable test cases for "free market vs.
| not," when they operate under completely different constraints.
|
| Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local
| governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a
| continental-scale federation with massive regional variation,
| different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous
| populations.
|
| At that scale, you're not comparing "policy choices," you're
| comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in
| Switzerland don't fail in the U.S. because they're bad, they fail
| because they don't scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-
| autonomous states.
|
| So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market
| dynamics isn't really isolating "free markets" as a variable,
| it's bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion,
| then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland
| is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair
| dunk and very much "punching down".
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Many states prohibit municipalities to do fiber. Regulatory
| capture and monopolies are your problem.
|
| Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere and are
| much more like some of your states.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| How much bigger is the US than Switzerland? Its like 200x the
| size of it. Do you think that it's size and division of 50
| distinct states might make that task a bit tougher?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Was talking about Sweden. But it's ok, I know Americans
| find geography challenging.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| My bad, I originally said Sweden, but then edited to say
| Switzerland after seeing the title and doubted myself.
|
| It's okay, you don't have to argue with the point being
| made or anything.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| I made the point elsewhere. Sweden is larger than
| California yet has only 10m population. Fiber is not just
| common in urban areas, you have it in small villages and
| even cabins in the woods.
|
| Basically no state gets close, urban or otherwise. People
| here keep talking about size, rural, many states,
| whatever. The problem is really regulatory capture and
| monopolies, many states ban local municipalities from
| putting fiber down.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While you are right about the differences between USA and
| Switzerland, I do not see any relationship between those and
| the problem discussed here.
|
| There is absolutely no doubt that the system used in
| Switzerland is the right one and the system used in USA is the
| wrong one.
|
| As TFA says, the optical fiber infrastructure that connects all
| individual customers is a case of natural monopoly and it must
| be built in a standard way and it must be shared by all who
| compete for communication services, exactly like the
| distribution of water or of electricity or like the public
| roads, which are the best analogy, and which must also be
| shared freely by anyone who provides transportation services.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think there's quite a little bit missing here. As an example,
| Switzerland's road/rail lines and US road:rail lines are both
| treated in this way and the outcomes are different. So I think
| the dominant effect isn't in this form of building.
|
| In addition, requiring fiber to each new home would expand
| housing costs in the US substantially because many are not
| located close by to existing fiber networks.
|
| I'm not familiar with Swiss government policy but their
| government construction efforts are frequently far more
| successful for lower costs than ours. I cannot say whether
| Switzerland does it differently but usually in the US if there is
| surplus to be captured it is captured. As an example, if the
| Swiss system were to be implemented with US tools it would look
| like a government project would here: private companies would be
| invited to build the fiber to each home, and eventually one would
| win the contract and if the economic benefit would be $1b, they
| would charge $0.99b to construct it. M
|
| If the government itself attempts to build it, it is constrained
| by its pension obligations and its desire to remain solvent to
| not actually have employees on staff. It therefore will use
| contractors in order to do things and we're back in situation 1.
|
| Governments originally formed for this kind of shared task and to
| enforce no free riding on it. But whatever factors drive US
| politics, US government purposes are to extract maximally from
| economically productive classes and redirect it to politically
| productive classes - through the use of selective government
| contracts and populist giveaways.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This article is hard to take seriously when it presents 25 Gbps
| internet like it's available _everywhere_ in Switzerland. Even
| the page you click on has an "Up to" and requires you to enter
| your address to check availability.
|
| That's on top of the usual problems with comparing small European
| countries to all of America. Switzerland's entire population is
| barely larger than the population of New York City. There are
| several metro areas in the US with more people than Switzerland.
|
| Switzerland is also very, very small. It's lands mass is equal to
| about 0.5% of the United States. We only have a handful of states
| smaller than Switzerland.
|
| There are valid geopolitical discussions to be had, but it's hard
| to read these articles that single out tiny little European
| countries and compare them to the sprawling United States and
| ignore the elephant in the room.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| How many Switzerlands is USA again
| ksec wrote:
| Even in Wireless / Mobile Carrier they have company like American
| Tower / China Tower that shares infrastructure cost. So none of
| this is _new_ , I always thought the reason it is not done is
| because of company interest and politics. Internet should be
| treated just like Electricity and Water.
|
| There are other things we could do without completely changing
| the dynamics or policy. We could mandate all home leasing and
| selling to have Internet Speed labeled. Giving consumer the
| knowledge and choice. And all future new home to have at least
| 1Gbps Internet and upgradable to 10Gbps or higher as standard.
| The market will sort itself out. And give government some space
| and room to further negotiate terms with companies.
|
| Now the technical question, why no sharing? why point to point?
| why 4 fibre and not 2 or 8? And the no sharing is a little bit of
| gimmick, because at the end of the day everything is shared. The
| backbone has 100Gbps and you cant have 10 labours all using
| 25Gbps. I also dont think P2P make sense in a metropolitan city
| like Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong, especially in high rise, ultra
| high density buildings with limited space. When 50G-PON barely
| meet demands we are looking at 100G or 200G-PON. Individual fibre
| is simple not feasible in those settings.
| limagnolia wrote:
| 1) Switzerland is tiny compared to the US. 2) FTTH is only
| available to about 60% of the population right now. It is not
| clear what percentage of those homes have access to 25 Gbit
| service.
|
| While I think the model of having the government own the Fiber
| lines and selling access to providers has a lot of potential, it
| would be very expensive to build this out to even 60% of the US.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Swiss here. Just a minor clarification on the article: fibre is
| not available everywhere in Switzerland. Actually the rollout has
| been quite slow, and chances are that if you live in a rural or
| suburban area (like me) or in an older building then you might
| not have fibre, and are limited to (fairly decent) copper.
| nextstep wrote:
| Can confirm this guy is Swiss
|
| Has arguably the best infrastructure and system in the world
| and will still find issue with it. A real Swiss hardly knows
| the horror show that is the rest of the non-Switzerland world.
|
| yeah, fiber rollout is slow outside of the cities. It's still
| better than 95% of the developed world. All perspective.
| panick21_ wrote:
| People endlessly complain that the SBB is 'always' late.
| kuboble wrote:
| Like if you have a semi-important meeting in Zurich at 9am
| It's perfectly fine to take a train which arrives in Zurich
| at 8:53.
|
| And in an unlikely scenario that the train is late,
| everyone will agree that it's a valid circumstance.
| kshacker wrote:
| Assuming zero time to walk into office (just saying), one
| day they will start scheduling meetings at 8:53 because
| we all do get here at 8:53.
| projektfu wrote:
| Better to arrive (a couple minutes) late than to leave one
| minute early.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| We also have great chocolate.
| malthaus wrote:
| i'm swiss and also own property in central berlin. while i was
| having insanely fast internet in all the places i lived in
| switzerland since the year 2000 (first cable, then fiber),
| german telekom has still not been able to connect my flat to
| fiber, even though the street facing building side is and i'm
| stuck with semi fast but fully overpriced dsl, which on top is
| spotty because someone decided to install cheap copper - while
| cable internet is not an option because 2 cable providers fight
| over who owns the access to the building.
|
| whatever the roll-out in switzerland is, it's heaps better than
| in germany and most other places.
| fainpul wrote:
| Indeed rural areas are not as well covered [1], but in cities
| it doesn't matter if you live in an old building. As long as
| your street has fiber (most do by now), when you switch to a
| fiber connection from your ISP, contractors will connect it to
| your house (even if you only rent an appartment) and install an
| optical outlet in your appartment, all for free.
|
| [1]
| https://map.geo.admin.ch/#/map?lang=en¢er=2634455.81,119...
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Yeah I used to live in Zurich before moving into the boonies.
| We were the first party in the house of 8 to want fiber,
| filled out a form, ISP contacted house owner and everything
| was up and running in a manner of days.
|
| I now own (or rather the bank does) a small house in a more
| rural canton, and while it's possible to apply for fiber, you
| have to pay a significant part of the cost yourself, last I
| checked it was more than 5K CHF. Not really worth it. I get
| 400 MBit/s over copper at home from Init7. When fiber is
| rolled out in the street, they will upgrade it for free.
|
| Edit: added link to https://www.swisscom.ch/de/about/netz/ans
| chluss/ftthondemand...
| lclc wrote:
| It's definitely because of the free markets. Only because Init7,
| the provider who actually provides the 25 Gbit/s, is constantly
| fighting Swisscom, the government-owned provider.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I would argue that the Scandinavian countries are a much better
| example to use than Switzerland. In contrast to Switzerland
| Sweden leads the world in fibre access build out (while being
| geographically much larger). While I haven't seen 25 G internet
| 10G is relatively common and 1G is the default (at around 40-50
| euro per month). The model has is quite similar to Switzerland
| though, open access fibre infrastructure with competition over
| providing the data, either using equipment of the main provider
| or using their own equipment.
| brabel wrote:
| I live in Sweden, and I don't see a fiber plan available from
| Telia, the biggest provider, faster than 1Gb!?
| https://www.telia.se/bredband/fiber
|
| And I have the 600M plan since it's less than half the cost of
| 1G but still plenty fast for my needs. Where do you even find
| 10G??
| vbernat wrote:
| France has 90% FTTH coverage in 2025, with 60% of households over
| 1 Gbps. One of the incumbents, Free (my employer), deployed P2P
| fibers in very dense areas but is switching to P2MP for economic
| reasons (and because this was not a competitive advantage). It's
| unclear to me if Switzerland plans to achieve this coverage with
| P2P. What looks great in Switzerland is not that each household
| has four dedicated fibers to the CO, but that Swisscom has
| responsibility for these fibers. In France, we have competition
| between operators for both services and infrastructure. In very
| dense areas, each building can have its own infrastructure
| operator (with an obligation to share); in less dense areas, this
| is by district (with an obligation to share); and in rural areas,
| this is a subsidized network (with an obligation to share). The
| downside is that there are "mutualisation points" where each ISP
| can go to plug or unplug subscribers, and they become a mess (htt
| ps://img.lemde.fr/2020/06/04/300/0/900/600/1440/960/60/0/...).
|
| BTW, I am also disturbed by AI-generated images. The ones with
| the three workers laying cables look highly unrealistic and made
| me pause for a couple of minutes, wondering if they lay cables
| that way in Germany. The ones about how households are connected
| to CO look like you get multiple 720-fiber cables to the same
| household.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I took the image to be showing how inefficient it was to run
| that much fiber three times instead of just once. It's unlikely
| that they'd do it at the same time but it seems very difficult
| to show buried fiber and a backhoe ripping up the street.
| vbernat wrote:
| In reality, this does not happen that way. If a path already
| exists, you can pay to use the same duct (unless it's full)
| to install your own fibers. At least, it works this way in
| France.
| lachiflippi wrote:
| It absolutely does happen that way in Germany. We had Fiber
| Company A rip up the entire city a year ago, and Fiber
| Company B ripped up the streets again just a few weeks ago.
|
| ETA from my ISP to actually get any of those lines into my
| apartment is still 2028.
| throw0101d wrote:
| This is a coordination problem: the municipality can
| mandate that _every_ company has to install a larger
| conduit so that (say) 3-6 (?) other fibres can be run.
|
| So if one company is doing the east part of the town, and
| another company is doing the west, at some point they
| could leverage the infrastructure of each other.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > [...] the municipality can mandate [...]
|
| I don't think so. German open access law says if you're
| in a "market dominating" position, you have to share
| access to what you have. I'm at least unaware of a law
| that allows forcing telcos to build more than they want.
| (And even if there were, it'd be balanced by them
| deciding to just not build at all.)
| dtech wrote:
| I'm glad it works that way there. In the Netherlands, I've
| never seen a fiber duct laid in residential areas, it seems
| just plain fiber cables are buried.
|
| Worse, two companies are chasing each other, so you have
| the ground being opened, closed, and within half a year the
| other company does the same. Even worse, they let the fiber
| cables stick out of the ground until the house subscribes
| to them, so a lot of houses have 1 or 2 ugly orange cables
| sticking out of the ground for years near the front door.
| m_mueller wrote:
| at least in the Netherlands you got these nice street
| bricks, so it's not always a waste of concrete and
| patched streets.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq1kV6V_jvI
| cnd78A wrote:
| Which companies usually create these ducts? Is it a
| business to install ducts and sell (rent?) the right to use
| it?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I'm curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my
| experience in France couldn't be further from fibre - have had
| a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to
| starlink, as there _still_ isn't even DSL available there.
| Fibre... don't make me laugh.
|
| It's not like we're super rural, either - small village, about
| 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn't much better
| - it's 5g in the towns, and 2G or nothing as soon as you're a
| few km out of them.
|
| There _is_ a fibre trunk running down the main road, 1.5km from
| the village, but when we enquired France telecom quoted about
| EUR250,000 to extend the fibre up to us. We passed.
|
| Edit: same kinda deal with free.fr. If I check availability by
| address, it fails, as while the commune exists, the village
| does not, never mind the roads within it. If I enter the land
| line number, it says it is a mobile number and refuses to
| proceed.
|
| So: your figures say 90%, but I suspect that's a theoretical
| number rather than a real one.
|
| Maybe it's 90% of the 60% of addresses which got included in
| the statistics.
|
| Edit edit: Ah hah, yes. I've looked at arcep's methodology.
| That 90% is inventoried premises (homes & businesses) which:
|
| - _could_ be connected to FTTH, theoretically.
|
| - exist in the arcep database
|
| - are within several km of a live fibre
|
| My home would be counted as "connected" by their methodology,
| even though there's a quarter million euro bill to pay to make
| it so, and several km of fibre to run.
|
| So - the stat is self-aggrandising bullshit, sorry.
| vbernat wrote:
| Did you check on https://cartefibre.arcep.fr/? If your
| address is there, you will know the status of your address
| and notably the infrastructure operator, which has the
| obligation to cover your zone before 2030. If your address is
| not there (and the zone is empty, otherwise, this is up to
| your municipality to fix the missing address), it means there
| is no infrastructure operator yet. This is up to your local
| government to make a deal with an infrastructure operator to
| cover this zone.
|
| As for the numbers, as it is open data, there are some sites
| like https://infofibre.fr/ where this is easier to see where
| we are. You can see that even rural regions have more than
| 90% of household coverage.
|
| As for definitions, there are two cases for availability:
| immediate availability (infrastructure operator present up
| and you have at least one commercial operator after 3 months)
| or delayed availibility (the infrastructure operator has 6
| months to make the address available after being asked by a
| commercial operator).
| db48x wrote:
| Plus, the fiber trunk that runs near your house is not
| necessarily relevant. What matters are the _endpoints_ of
| that trunk line. They're not just going to dig it up and
| splice your house into the middle of that fiber bundle. (This
| is a critical difference between fiber and water/sewer
| services!)
|
| Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or
| near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then
| smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards
| potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with
| PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single
| fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split
| using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is
| 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service
| distance of 16km. If you're the first subscriber in that
| area, that EUR250k might be for opening up a whole new CO
| plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and
| your neighborhood.
| folbec wrote:
| It is heavily dependent on the history of your area.
|
| I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial
| cable very early because the "departement" built a public
| network and eventually leased it to private companies.
|
| I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became
| available in my street.
|
| The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell
| towers less than 1km from my place).
|
| So geography and history count a lot.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| 12km away from Lyon is urban for all practical purposes.
| (It's literally the 3rd most populated city proper in the
| country.)
| nunez wrote:
| Zoom in to see the real terror. Exited the article after seeing
| that.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| It's absolutely true that ISPs in the US are horrifically anti-
| competitive, and also that they should be treated as utility
| carriers, like electricity companies, not as "optional" services.
|
| But that said, it took more than forty years to electrify the
| entire United States[0]. "The internet", as we think of it,
| hasn't even existed for 35 years yet. (Yes, I know there were
| networks before that that the current system arose from, but
| that's hair-splitting. I don't think the kind of Internet the
| average person might even consider using existed before,
| generously, ~1995-1996.) Yet, 95% of US adults use the Internet,
| implying a penetration at least as high[1].
|
| The median Internet speed in the US is around 250mbps down and is
| in the top 10 in the world[3].
|
| The problem is that access and speeds are not evenly distributed,
| not that we can't get 22gbps symmetric down/up. We don't need to
| give people in cities faster Internet; truly, you do not need
| that speed to do day-to-day tasks. You don't even need the 1gbps
| down/150mbps up that I have. What we need to do is make sure
| people in rural areas can access at least the median speed.
|
| That said, I think we could give it another 15-20 years and see
| where our country with around 36 times the population and 238
| times the landmass is at in terms of speeds.
|
| [0] https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/how-the-history-
| of... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-
| sheet/internet-bro... [2] https://tachus.com/internet-speeds-usa-
| vs-the-rest-of-the-wo...
| oyebenny wrote:
| I'm jealous.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| There should be more of shared infrastructure / government / law
| patterns, something like wikipedia but for running countries.
|
| People all over the world seem to be fighting same little battles
| and falling into same traps all the time.
|
| There are many known gems that present structure in ecosystems
| with correct incentives that do work, they should be
| known/discoverable and they should be consulted when making
| decisions.
| qq66 wrote:
| What is the benefit of 25Gbps home internet?
| Podrod wrote:
| You literally cannot think of a single benefit for having fast
| Internet?
| qq66 wrote:
| I can think of a benefit of having 1Gbps. I can't think of
| anything that a home user would benefit from 25Gbps that is
| something a government should actually care about (watching
| 10 different 8K Netflix streams at the same time is not a
| human rights issue)
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods)
| and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had
| 3 competing FTTH providers when I left. I don't think the story
| is what it used to be anymore. I don't know of a single suburban
| development in the state that doesn't have fiber today.
|
| The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of
| the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including
| riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local
| power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house
| while the water and electricity were gone.
|
| I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is
| a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments.
| You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery
| for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one
| wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the
| "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a
| while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth
| enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these
| materials.
|
| With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining
| problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far
| sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You
| put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've
| seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30
| days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it
| installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the
| disruption is worth it.
|
| I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose
| their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in
| my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely
| unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now.
| Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.
| nunez wrote:
| There are plenty of rural/exurban/suburban cities where Xfinity
| "10G" DOCSIS coax, HughesNet/DirecTV or Starlink are your only
| realistic options.
| cowmix wrote:
| My favorite example is here in the Phoenix metro area. We had DSL
| and cable internet pretty early compared to the rest of the
| country (mid/late 90s), but then things stagnated.
|
| Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here
| and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies
| (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the
| place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, and
| the incumbents slowed their roll too.
|
| It was a on-the-nose reminder that these companies _can_ move
| fast when they think a real competitor might show up.
| senorrib wrote:
| Weirdly, I live in a somewhat rural part of Brazil, and all
| providers are small players. They're all offering 1Gi FTTH and
| are now competing on price. Meanwhile, the closest metro area
| still suffers with cable internet topping at 600M and low
| availability.
|
| Some big cities have seen a surge of small providers too, which
| has been great for consumers.
|
| That said, I dont buy the "natural monopoly" argument at all,
| especially trying to compare it to water supply.
| projektfu wrote:
| My wife is from Rio Grande do Norte and I'm always impressed
| that most of it has 1GB fiber, but roads are generally in
| poor repair and cell service is lacking outside of cities.
|
| The ISPs are not always good at maintaining that raw
| capacity, though.
| klamann wrote:
| But here's the crucial part. This article didn't start as LLM
| slop. It didn't happen because the author actually didn't have
| anything meaningful to say. It happened because the author chose
| to "spell check [the article] with AI".
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does
| the internet provider actually provide?
| alex_young wrote:
| The equipment on both sides of the 'tube'. Oh, and the backhaul
| to said equipment.
| globular-toast wrote:
| They provide layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model[0] and usually
| other related services like DNS, DHCP, email etc.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
| db48x wrote:
| They give you an IP address, maybe ipv6 or a static ipv4
| address if you pay more. They compete on quality of service,
| network policies, backhaul capacity, price, necessary services
| like DNS, extras like email or bundled Netflix subscriptions,
| etc, etc.
|
| Some of these qualities are more legible than others.
| db48x wrote:
| Actually, Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps symmetrical service in the
| Northwest of the US: <https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig>.
|
| The free market is not a lie, it's just that a lot of our
| politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree
| to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model
| and has been growing aggressively. It's not perfect, but it's
| good.
| buildbot wrote:
| oooooo how did I miss this before
| db48x wrote:
| Probably just because there are so many ISPs in the USA that
| keeping track of all of them is impossible. I only know about
| it because I'm a customer (but not sadly of their 50Gbps
| service; maybe one day).
| buildbot wrote:
| I actually meant their multi gig service in general/this
| page - I know ziply quite well!
|
| The 10G seems like a price/sanity sweet spot, 50G is really
| massive overkill, as tempting as it would be...
| db48x wrote:
| Ah :)
|
| 50Gbps is so very shiny...
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's because Europe can't innovate right?
| brailsafe wrote:
| It's nice to hear about examples where the incombent duopoly
| telcos finally get off their ass as soon as there's the threat of
| someone else coming in and installing fiber. Sadly, in my
| hometown, the competition must not be so intense, since Bell and
| Shaw/Rogers literally just lie about having it, by renaming their
| service to "Fibe" Internet or literally "Shaw Fibre+ Gig
| Internet" when Bell's coverage area amounts to only brand new
| builds or neighborhoods, and Shaw (now Rogers) doesn't have a
| real fiber network at all, it's just marginally faster download
| ceilings with 15mbps uploads.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| My sister lives in Switzerland, in a remote place in the mountain
| from a small town. Even over wifi the bandwidth at her place is
| so fast it made my BitTorrent client _crash_ repeatedly. The
| solution was to disconnect my system by deactivating the wifi,
| relaunch my BitTorrent software, set a rate limit to the download
| speed at 30MB /s, and then reactivate wifi.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| 30MB/s is not a lot. Which client was that? KTorrent can easily
| deal with more than three times that, which is what I get here
| in Poland on a plan that's not even the fastest one available.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| It was KTorrent! But to be fair I just arbitrarily thought
| that 30MB/s would be more than enough speed (at my place in
| France that's probably the fastest my internet connection is
| capable of), tried that, it worked, in a few seconds the file
| was there, and that was it. I didn't try to see how fast I
| could go before a crash, maybe if I would have set it to
| 100MB/s it would have still been ok.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Seems like it would be good to move some of the stuff it
| does to a dedicated thread as I've noticed the UI freezing
| for some time when downloading a lot of data fast (but I
| believe it's more about my slow SSD than Internet speed).
| No crashes though!
| manarth wrote:
| I've had various pains with QBittorrent (nox) which seem to
| vary based on the version of the client and the version of
| libtorrent used. Out-of-memory and resume issues, but varying
| according to the torrent size, number of simultaneous
| downloads, and version/configuration specifics.
|
| Torrent software (the clients and the libraries) feel a little
| out-of-sync with prevailing torrent sizes and bandwidth
| availability.
| kev009 wrote:
| I'm on a 100mbit fixed wireless connection after moving out of
| the city where I used to have a GPON connection. The only thing I
| really miss is the extremely low latency of GPON plus being in a
| datacenter city.
|
| Progress is good, and physical connections are well worth the
| investment due to how long the stuff will last. But I honestly
| think VDSL2 and cable are still good enough for most people. The
| typical family and youth are probably on 5G as much as wifi these
| days.
| ssivark wrote:
| Is the cost of laying fiber (via a public utility) to each
| household counted as part of the monthly internet bill, or is
| that funded separately? (eg. as part of property taxes)
| oriettaxx wrote:
| italy, a house in the so called 'rich' nord est, where 'Lega'
| party has been ruling for decades:
|
| * no fiber in the neightbour I am * internet on mobile: 10M when
| lucky * all houses have no city water pipe
|
| I'm glad they started to collect blak water (a month ago)
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Currently in Palermo old town. Got fiber and get 200+ mbit over
| wifi. Even 5g when I go out.
| fainpul wrote:
| Good article which would be even better without the AI slop
| images.
| agateau wrote:
| I wonder if the spare fiber connections could be use to mesh
| houses together, in a kind-of decentralized way?
| yard2010 wrote:
| > This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate
| without oversight. They don't compete on price or quality. They
| extract rent.
|
| Sounds like racketeering with extra steps..
| panick21_ wrote:
| As a Swiss person with access to 25Gbit, its honestly just to
| hard to get a actual router that can do 25Gbit, I opted for
| 10Gbit, just so I could use a normal router.
| VimEscapeArtist wrote:
| AI-generated graphics make my eyes bleed
| sometimes_all wrote:
| In Mumbai, a fiber plan with 300 Mbps symmetrical is around USD
| 20 with tax. A 1 Gbps is about 50 USD with tax. Also includes a
| landline number, Netflix (plan depends on which fiber plan you
| use, the 1 Gb ones have Premium) and a bunch of other local
| subscriptions (some of which include HBO shows). Have never had a
| single hitch, and I can switch providers if I want as long as
| they have infra in the city.
|
| Despite presence of some very big names (Jio, Airtel), there
| still is healthy local competition, and the former haven't been
| able to play any monopoly-related games yet, since it's quite
| easy to switch. The past few years have been a significant
| upgrade compared to what I've observed happening in the US.
| Providers might even start offering 10+ Gbit for consumers in the
| future, but I doubt there's a market for it right now.
| scirob wrote:
| I can confirm init7 and the whole setup in CH is indeed working
| well
| palata wrote:
| The only reason I can see to not treat natural monopolies as
| government-owned monopolies is political: those in power benefit
| from privatising those.
|
| Maybe this shows that Switzerland has a sane political system?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Why doesn't X have Y? When talking about nations, that is
| typically corruption.
|
| Why can't NationX have quality public transit? Corruption. Why
| can't NationX have quality political parties or politicians?
| Corruption. Why can't NationX have a quality education and
| produce people capable of understanding and supporting their
| own political system? Corruption.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This is a thought-terminating cliche [1]. Not an actual
| explanation.
|
| Like, why is the assumption that countries should be
| homogenous? Since when did geography, culture, industrial
| structure, natural-resource availability and national wealth
| become irrelevant?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-
| terminating_clich%C3%A...
| bsenftner wrote:
| Maybe thought terminating but it is discussion instigating,
| and if stated in a public conversation by anyone of
| authority and power, it's a nuclear bomb going off. This is
| the unstated conversation that needs to occur in public,
| and not by me or you or anyone less than a ruler of a major
| country, and not that idiot Trump.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it is discussion instigating_
|
| Not really. "Corruption" as the answer to why America
| doesn't have 25 Gbit internet is (a) mostly wrong and (b)
| useless in terms of developing next steps.
|
| > _the unstated conversation that needs to occur in
| public_
|
| Everyone is constantly talking about corruption.
| Pretending it's "unstated" is wrong. The conversation
| usually doesn't go anywhere because saying corruption
| with zero evidence is essentially useless for generating
| next steps. Maybe you're right. Maybe it leads to a wild-
| goose chase. Either way, insufficient to actually do
| anything with.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I have 500 Mbps internet (fiber optic) with 40+ devices on it. I
| don't see myself needing even 1 Gbps nor even close to 25 Gbps.
| At my enterprise, we have 900 simultaneous users to include
| thousands of CICD jobs, and we don't even come close to 25 Gbps.
| beAbU wrote:
| People were saying the same thing about 10Mbps 15 years ago.
|
| Things change, and 25Gbps is massive future proofing for the
| next 50 years probably.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| My point is I don't even come close to the bandwidth limits.
| My latency is excellent. I had coax based internet and it was
| going down a lot. I switched to fiber about 5-6 years ago.
| Never went down once
| beAbU wrote:
| Yes, and my point is 10 years from now when you are
| streaming your 16k Netflix movie while saving all you 8k
| cctv camera footage to the cloud you might have a different
| opinion about gigabit internet.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Money has a time value. It's better to build things just
| before you need them than decades prior.
| himata4113 wrote:
| It's more of a "wow how could I have tolerated 500mbps" once
| you experience 1gbps and 10gbps.
| xxs wrote:
| realistically the only part at half a gb/s I'd care is
| latency. Latency is a lot more important than the throughput.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Bill Gates: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
| nunez wrote:
| I'm going to disagree. I have 5Gbit FTTH and it is SO NICE to
| have large files download almost as quickly as pulling from an
| old hard drive. Used to have 1Gbit before.
| haunter wrote:
| I live in a small town (~10k) in Hungary and we have 4Gbit fiber
| here
| halapro wrote:
| This is one of the benefits of living in Europe, which is
| relatively densely populated compared to places like the US.
| sumedh wrote:
| Does New York, LA etc have 25 Gbit internet?
| halapro wrote:
| Density doesn't cause faster internet but it certainly
| facilitates it. The US has far too much lobbying to favor
| consumers.
| sumedh wrote:
| Now you are moving the goalpost.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| > This is marketed as competition. But it's not. It's a cartel.
| Each company gets its own protected territory, and consumers get
| no choice.
|
| Starlink has me extra excited for exactly this: region agnostic
| competition.
|
| Get rekt, telecom incumbents
| cesarb wrote:
| > Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-
| Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways. [...] That dedicated fiber
| terminates in a neutral, open hub.
|
| If you think about it, other than the "neutral, open" part, it's
| a return to the traditional phone model, where every home gets a
| dedicated point-to-point copper pair (or sometimes two pairs),
| which terminates in a hub (the telco central building) nearby,
| instead of being shared between several homes (though I've heard
| that, in the distant past, phone lines were also sometimes shared
| between households).
| ascotan wrote:
| The real reason for the "cartels" in the US is because of the
| cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because the
| United States is so large there are only a few companies that can
| create the infrastructure required to service large area areas
| with fiber.
|
| So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in
| necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large
| patchwork across the country. This means that network companies
| have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.
|
| It's not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate
| a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in
| the United States. In fact, the free market was the only
| realistic possible to deliver this.
| everyone wrote:
| "It's not realistic or feasible to have the US government
| generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every
| household in the United States. In fact, the free market was
| the only realistic possible to deliver this."
|
| Why? Other countries with similar population densities have
| done it. A bigger country should have an advantage due to
| economies of scale.
| Xunjin wrote:
| I think he means it's not economic viable to the companies,
| however as you can see the Swiss model was defined by
| politics.
|
| Even though, I agree with you it's possible, in my city the
| internet only got better when a monopoly was broken, and a
| state company decide to work in a new infrastructure, all
| FTTH, now I pay less than 100BRL for 300/150Mbps with that
| price 10 years ago it was only possible ADSL connections
| (25Mbps).
|
| Now every major provider do have FTTH infra with great
| prices.
| ranman wrote:
| Which countries? Density matters but raw volume matters too.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is just pure nonsense. The only reason for "cartels" is
| regulatory capture.
|
| Most of the cost of an ISP is the so-called "last mile".
| Depending on your locale this is usually either stringing up
| cables on existing telephone poles or digging trenches,
| typically in the setback area between the road and the sidewalk
| that you might maintain but you don't technically own (or the
| municipality maintains an easement on, it varies).
|
| Once you go from the premises to a central POP, the costs
| basically go to zero (per install). Backhaul bandwidth for a
| residential ISP is incredibly cheap, even free with peering
| arrangements.
|
| The point is that geography really doesn't matter. Wiring up a
| 10,000 homes in Phoenix, Zurich, Shanghai or Sydney is
| basically the same (normalized for labor costs). The US is very
| spread out due to geography. It doesn't matter. The links
| between towns are a small fraction of the cost and often
| covered by existing rights-of-way anyway (eg railroads). You
| compare that to a highly urbanized and concentrated population
| like Australia where urban density is very similar to many
| American towns and cities and you're dealing with a very
| similar cost structure.
|
| Think about it this way: if geography was the issue and not,
| say, artificial barriers to prevent competition (including from
| municipal broadband), why would the ISP lobby spend so much
| moeny to make municipal broadband illegal (as they do in many
| states)? Or why would they formalize a monopoly into a contract
| with an "exclusivity" deal (ie franchise agreement)?
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _The real reason for the "cartels" in the US is because of
| the cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because
| the United States is so large there are only a few companies
| that can create the infrastructure required to service large
| area areas with fiber._
|
| The "US is large" argument is non-sense. 40% of the US
| population lives in a coastal county:
|
| * https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-
| demog...
|
| And two-thirds of the population lives with-in 100 miles of the
| border:
|
| * https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-
| bord...
|
| The US population is fairly concentrated.
|
| And even if it wasn't, looking at history, the US managed to
| bring electrical cables to just about every household in the
| country, and later telephone cables. If those two things could
| be done in the 1900s, why can't fibre be done in the 2000s?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > the US managed to bring electrical cables to just about
| every household in the country
|
| We had to pass acts of congress to pay for last mile
| electrical infrastructure for those who were truly out in the
| boonies and poor.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
|
| We paid a shitload of money to various ISPs to do exactly the
| same thing for internet, multiple times, and then just let
| them.... not.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > It's not realistic or feasible to have the US government
| generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every
| household in the United States. In fact, the free market was
| the only realistic possible to deliver this.
|
| They managed for water and wastewater, which are a lot more
| complex than fiber.
| rGoi5jelkjzdgfo wrote:
| Electric is probably a better example, >20% of the US is on
| septic systems for their wastewater.
| slackfan wrote:
| Because America built the backbone for our connected systems 50+
| years ago, and also because the US of A is 238 times larger than
| Switzerland.
|
| /thread
| phkahler wrote:
| Switzerland is 1/6 the size of Michigan and has 90 percent as
| many people as Michigan (9M vs 10M). With a higher population
| density I'd expect better rollout of things like internet
| service. And that's just ONE average size US state - there are
| 50, some of which are larger with even fewer people. It's not
| really a fair comparison regardless of which business or
| political factors are in play.
| scraptor wrote:
| So what's your excuse for why New York has equally bad
| internet?
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| City or state?
|
| City: just take a walk through manhattan and in a block or
| two look at the giant open-pit excavation with a 200-year-old
| morass of undocumented infrastructure under the street. This
| is before you even try to run fiber up to units in buildings
| which were built before electricity was standard. I am hardly
| saying it can't be done, simply that it is not as easy as
| density makes it seem.
|
| State: the exact opposite problem -- just drive two hours
| north of NYC and (if you're not still in manhattan) you'll be
| in some fantastic areas of the state, but, the exact opposite
| problem exists.
|
| Of note, I do think both of these problems are solvable and
| we should fundamentally solve them. Just anybody who thinks
| it's easy or cheap to do so is being myopic. If spent wisely,
| could be a very useful investment of our money, however.
| Zopieux wrote:
| I was wondering why there wasn't yet a comment dismissing any
| change or progress in the US citing its land size, forgetting
| that the US has hundreds of large, dense cities where this
| "argument" does no hold.
|
| Never change!
| vel0city wrote:
| > forgetting that the US has hundreds of large, dense cities
|
| Those large US cities really aren't anywhere near as dense
| though once you're comparing the actual MSA (US) or FUA (EU).
| The population densities of those actual whole areas are
| nowhere near the same.
|
| For comparison relevant to this article, only 25% of the
| Swiss population live in single family detached houses. About
| 60% of US households live in single-family detached housing.
|
| https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/construction.
| ..
|
| Zurich and Milwaukee both have ~1.5M people in their
| Functional Urban Area/Metropolitan Statistical Area. One has
| a density of ~750/km^2 and the other is ~418. Guess which is
| which. Or compare Lausanne to Modesto CA. Both have ~550k
| populations. One 637/km^2, one is 144/km^2.
|
| Such big and dense cities we have here in the US!
|
| Either way though, I do think its often less to do with
| population densities and more about political will of the
| local populace and regulatory capture.
|
| I have family that lives in a pretty newly developed area in
| the middle of an already well-developed area with tons of
| homes having fiber-to-the-home. The local cable company
| managed to convince the builder to let only them install coax
| services to these homes. Now it will cost the fiber company a
| lot more if they want to eventually go into that
| neighborhood, so they haven't bothered.
|
| You see the same thing with pole attachment rights in our
| cities. Incumbents shut down competition and prevent those
| who push for change.
| DonnyV wrote:
| This is a nice story and how it played out is great for
| Switzerland. But the ways listed on how to fix it, wouldn't work
| in the US. See companies in the US have already worked around
| what worked for Switzerland.
|
| The different levels of governments in the US are corrupt.
| Sometimes from town all the way up to Federal. Actually its
| definitely completly corrupt at the Federal level. A politician
| or Judge has already been bought to make sure a case like the
| Swisscom lost. Would never happen here.
|
| So before we have any progress in really any industry in the US.
| We need to desperately clean house with our politicians, attorney
| generals and judges.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Well, whenever my city has to vote on extending the
| Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, coincidently Xfinity/Comcast is giving
| $5 off pizza coupons at my local pizza place.
|
| Bet they don't have that in Switzerland.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Simple question that doesn't seem to be addressed by "speed
| tests".
|
| Does 25Gbps matter? I mean, it's not like your online services
| are going to be "faster", right?
|
| Is Netflix or any other web endpoint that normal people use going
| to be noticeably better because a household has 25Gbps rather
| than 1Gbps?
|
| Doesn't this only matter for many simultaneous users of heavy web
| traffic?
| abustamam wrote:
| In most cases probably not. But the question isn't "who needs
| 25gbps" it's "why are we only limited to 1gbps if we're lucky
| in the US?"
| servo_sausage wrote:
| In terms of what one person consumes, it would be rare to make
| full use of it.
|
| I wonder if this speed was available everywhere, would more
| people self-host?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| What can a homeowner (not a homelaber) do with 25 GB Internet
| that cannot be done with 1 GB Internet?
| oytis wrote:
| Because Switzerland is a tiny country that holds wealth extracted
| from whole wolrd's economies and that's just not replicatable
| even by the US?
| projektfu wrote:
| A couple of nitpicks (or nut-picks). AT&T is usually in
| competition with the local cable monopoly and runs FTTH where
| they run fiber. Google Fiber is installing as well, on the German
| model.
|
| The problem in the USA is that we protect an incumbent's profits
| at all costs. Natural monopolies end up serving the monopoly
| instead of the community. For example, in Atlanta, natural gas is
| delivered by Atlanta Gas Light, priced on some theoretical
| capacity number for the most gas you'll ever need at one time
| (DDDC). We then pay marketers to supply the gas. AGL gets paid
| whether or not we use gas, and the marketer gets paid both a
| monthly fee and a rate per therm. It's the most expensive gas
| I've had in this country.
| d_sem wrote:
| The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing
| these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability
| of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article
| doesn't convincingly address this.
|
| For context:
|
| 41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's
| most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is
| .064% of the national area.
|
| Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is
| comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to
| Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington
| DC.
| Sayrus wrote:
| Extrapolating with this method, large cities should be as well
| equipped as Switzerland.
|
| Los Angeles has 10x the population density of Switzerland and
| around the same population density in urban area. Same for
| Washington dc, San Francisco...
|
| It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. Distance between
| cities may be large, but the order of magnitude is closer when
| comparing within cities.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. Whenever anyone trots out the "Bbbbut the USA is too
| large and sparsely populated to have X!" excuse, ask them why
| New Jersey doesn't have X.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I believe you mean 0.64%
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Yeah but like 10x the population, 10x the GDP, etc.
|
| You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end
| during wild West times but modern infrastructure can't be built
| to the same scale even with mechanisation?
|
| Lmao sounds like the UK. It does make sense tho, the world is
| now filled with middlemen and getting any job done costs 10x
| because of parasites.
| SubmarineClub wrote:
| > You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end
| during wild West times
|
| At a time when labor was dirt cheap and safety regulations
| were non-existent.
|
| The railroads specifically used Chinese laborers who were
| treated, and paid, like shit.
| danny_codes wrote:
| And also a time when people were laying down ties with
| their hands and a hammer.
|
| This isn't a labor issue it's purely political. Some people
| get rich from the status quo and bribe politicians to
| prevent competition. America is increasingly corrupt,
| particularly since citizens united and accelerating under
| the current admin
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Sure, and we basically force users to choose one or two
| providers. Some of these are compelled to serve rural customers
| as well.
|
| I live in the SF Bay Area, and have Sonic internet. 10gbe for
| 60 bucks a month.
|
| I ended up building my own router/firewall because it was
| cheaper than anything off the shelf that could deal with that
| sort of speed.
|
| It is entirely possible to have these sorts of services in the
| states, when competition is allowed.
| sjm wrote:
| This is the same American-branded copium we see during
| discussions of socialized healthcare, which every other first-
| world country on the planet seems to manage. China has 10G and
| 50G home fiber. Zurich is larger geographically than Manhattan,
| while having much lower population density.
| pb7 wrote:
| I guarantee you 99% of China landmass does not have 50G. Most
| of the country is ultra poor rice paddy farmers. Get real.
| sjm wrote:
| Fine, 99% of China "landmass" does not have 50G. 100% of
| the US does not have 10G. The fact that in NYC, the richest
| city in the history of cities, most buildings still only
| have access to cable from a single provider is absolutely
| ridiculous. Urban centers is what is worth comparison here,
| and the US falls massively behind.
| vel0city wrote:
| > 100% of the US does not have 10G.
|
| Very untrue. There are several providers in the US which
| offer 10Gbit services. Many more offer 2-5Gbit services
| pretty broadly. I've got friends in Kansas City with
| 40Gbit residential service. Sonic also offers 10Gbit in
| California.
| maxglute wrote:
| Not all landmass because most of Tibet/Xinjiang empty, but
| ~100% wireless coverage east of Heihe-Tengchong line where
| ~95% of population are. Including Tibet/Xinjiang remote
| areas, ~95%+ of administered population areas down to
| village level where poor farmers have access to 5g AND
| fiber hookup option by now.
|
| Building infra and networking gear is cheap in society that
| knows how to build and carriers are required to install in
| administered villages even if it's not profitable. Fiber
| adoption rate actually higher among rice farmers because
| they get subsidies, 1Gbps gigabyte fiber for cost of 200
| Mbps in city and because bunch of villages got hooked up in
| last 10 years - they skipped straight to fiber which was
| bundled with road/power buildout.
|
| Meanwhile US so dysfunctional / can't brute force rural
| fiber, need to literally invent SpaceX to plug gap. Which
| TBH is good copium.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Why have fiber for a $1 when you can have space fiber for
| $1000!
| joquarky wrote:
| Unfortunately, problems like socialized healthcare are just
| far too complicated for contemporary America to solve. We
| used to be able to tackle big problems, but unless you're
| looking for ways to dodge taxes or rip people off, we're just
| not equipped for complex problem solving anymore.
|
| Guess we should have invested more in education.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I live in a country where you can get 10Gbps fiber for ~ 10EUR.
| And one 1Gbps for the same money if they don't have coverage for
| the 10G.
|
| And, having worked with the US providers all I can tell you is
| this: greed, and lots of it. And if they're the only option in an
| area, they will charge you a literal arm and a leg.
|
| Just a small example: in a mall, there was a single provider Paid
| ~ 300USD for 5Mbps in 2024. Once we were able to upgrade the
| equipment and get a cell router, we got to pay about $50/mo for ~
| 50-60Mbps. Mall provider not happy.
| geekraver wrote:
| Because it's a functional society that has a government that
| works for the citizenry and not a small cadre of wealthy
| sponsors?
| mrits wrote:
| It's a tiny rich country. We should be comparing it to New York
| City not the US
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| You can run several mutually exclusive frequencies on a single
| strand of single mode fiber in multi-gigabit speeds. The biggest
| drawback is that the module price can get quite high.
|
| There's nothing inherently "wrong" with a P2MP topology for
| public infrastructure.
| ArchieScrivener wrote:
| Uh, maybe because Switzerland is the size of a Poptart?
| tristor wrote:
| This is true, but not in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
| Chattanooga through EPB has had 25Gbit residential fiber service
| since 2022. EPB is the most successful municipal fiber program in
| the US, and has resulted directly in the creation of other
| municipal fiber programs in other parts of the US, as well as
| telco lobbying causing 16 states to enact laws banning it,
| because it was so successful it made Comcast and AT&T scared.
|
| I have 5gbit symmetric fiber at my house in Texas, and it is only
| available here because Google Fiber entered the city offer 1gbit
| symmetric fiber for 60% less than you could get a 300mbit cable
| link or 75mbit DSL link. Suddenly everyone was building out fiber
| infrastructure, and I now pay less for 5gbit symmetric fiber than
| I did for a brief while for gigabit cable (DOCSIS 3.1) which was
| 1gb/50mb.
|
| The primary piece about this that's relevant is the difference in
| deployment architecture. P2MP is much cheaper for providers to
| deploy, but it does lock you in, and more to the point it means
| even your symmetric links aren't guaranteed to get full
| throughput at all times because they oversubscribe the backhauls.
| Still, in most major US cities that now have fiber service, you
| will rarely see any performance drops. I can confirm that I get
| close to 5gbits bidirectionally during peak hours, which is a
| testament to the fact that it was completely possible to have
| done this a decade ago and it just required some actual
| competition for AT&T to get off its ass and do it. Unfortunately
| I don't have Google Fiber at my address because they're now
| offering 8gbit symmetric in the city.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I think the federal government should stop giving money to ISPs.
| They do nothing and just waste the budget. And, we should also
| use approach where ISP can use same fiber connection.
| im3w1l wrote:
| As someone living in neither country 50mbit is good enough for me
| and I have several times that already. I wouldn't wanna pay more
| on my bill for a rollout of newer tech when I'm perfectly happy
| with what I have.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| These threads are always the same. "No way the we [the US] can
| have $nice_thing because density, size, heterogeneity". Applies
| to internet, trains, functioning democracy, a lack school
| shootings, and all things decent. It's all bollocks of course.
| Nobody is asking for a dense railway network across a desert or
| fast internet for every last cabin in Alaska.
|
| It's such a bore.
|
| Granted, Europeans (so me) can be arrogant about these things.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The argument loses even more weight if you look to China's
| infrastructure over their massive country.
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