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.
Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
61–70 of 726 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#62What 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 engin…
How many times has this argument been made?
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#63I 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.
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#64What 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 engin…
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#65In 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 ei…
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#66I 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.
It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 line…
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…
> 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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#68What 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 engin…
How many times has this argument been made?
I heard that argument when I got 28.8k modem back in the day when that was quite uncommon.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#69I 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.
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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#70tl;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…
> 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.