Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity
Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US states.
you going for the cherry-picked-but-functionally-meaningless statistic of the week award?
Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
121–130 of 726 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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!
> 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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 va…
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.
Yep. But everyone's realized this ship has sailed in the US right? Regulatory capture is complete.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US states.
you going for the cherry-picked-but-functionally-meaningless statistic of the week award?
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 Son…
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#126Australia 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?
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And even at 1Gbps when I had it, the game servers couldn’t keep up.
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> 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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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!
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.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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 infrastr…
But the US has long lagged behind in even dense areas. It's more than just the distribution.