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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

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131–140 of 726 posts

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#132

Earlier 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…

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.

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)

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#133

Earlier 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!

>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.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#134

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

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.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

I am talking about console downloads

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#137

Earlier 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…

Huge swaths of our densest metro areas, in our largest cities, do not have any fiber option, just one cable provider.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 comp…

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).

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#139

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

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”.

Totally, tons of govt. regulation and interference is what defines a free market. /s

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#140
post #9

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 ei…

[flagged]

In other words, competition works, and lack of competition leaves you vulnerable.
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