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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

#281

Post by khalic »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #119
ceejayoz wrote: post #63

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? Tell me you don’t know anything about Switzerland without telling me…

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

#282

Post by khalic »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #101
ceejayoz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US states.

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!

Ethnically homogeneous, you guys really just spew nonsense without doing _any_research? Swiss here, you’re very, very wrong

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

#283

Post by nnevod »

WalterBright wrote: post #269
kulahan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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%.

>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.

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

#284

Post by vbernat »

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 (https://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.

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

#285

Post by ragall »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #274
ragall wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#286

Post by ivraatiems »

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...

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

#287

Post by ido »

bombcar wrote: post #181
martinald wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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).

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

#289

Post by dotancohen »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #133
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #119

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!

>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.

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?
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