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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

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

#211

Post by kalleboo »

djoldman wrote: post #189
toofy wrote: post #175

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 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.

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.

Does New York have great home fiber infrastructure?

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

#212

Post by userbinator »

perching_aix wrote: post #113

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 w…

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.

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

#213

Post by shell0x »

aetherspawn wrote: post #126

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?

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.

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

#214

Post by array_key_first »

strictnein wrote: post #155
ceejayoz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Been an American my entire life. 45+ years. I've never heard a single person say that universal healthcare is "impossible".

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.

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

#216

Post by cvwright »

ceejayoz wrote: post #130
hibikir wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#217

Post by bdangubic »

strictnein wrote: post #155
ceejayoz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Been an American my entire life. 45+ years. I've never heard a single person say that universal healthcare is "impossible".

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)

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

#218

Post by kalleboo »

jmalicki wrote: post #100
zokier wrote: post #60

Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick google.

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…

> 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.

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

#219

Post by xbmcuser »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #192
HauntingPin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 abo…

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.

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

#220

Post by cogman10 »

kortilla wrote: post #138
bigbadfeline wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> 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.

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