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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

#301

Post by Moldoteck »

lava_pidgeon wrote: post #206
ceejayoz wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CA’s high speed rail isn’t high speed by European standards and it looks on the way to cancelation or significant curtailment. We can’t even manage what y’all would consider slow rail.

I don't know but Swiss isn't the only train system that works but also Spain, Italy, France. Poland has a growing better train system . The swiss system has it's advantages but it is also very expensive. It might also worth it to check them out

The advantage of swiss system is fast transfers. Hsr would likely break this system (no point in arriving faster if your connection gets longer by 10-15min

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

#302

Post by mirekrusin »

There should be more of shared infrastructure / government / law patterns, something like wikipedia but for running countries.

People all over the world seem to be fighting same little battles and falling into same traps all the time.

There are many known gems that present structure in ecosystems with correct incentives that do work, they should be known/discoverable and they should be consulted when making decisions.

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

#303

Post by khalic »

dotancohen wrote: post #289
bugglebeetle wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I’m not even talking about the languages, we have 20% immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has foreign roots.

We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths

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

#305

Post by WalterBright »

nnevod wrote: post #283
WalterBright wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Standard Oil made more money by lowering the price. They had margin to do that by being very good at lowering costs.

> race to (quality) bottom

When people aren't willing to pay for quality, there's no point in increasing the costs for more quality.

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

#306

Post by danaris »

kortilla wrote: post #262
cogman10 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Property rights are regulation. You’re just vehemently agreeing with me. Markets filled with laws that make entry difficult are subject to monopolies.

If property rights are regulation, then so is anything that allows you to ignore them.

Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.

Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.

Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.

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

#307

Post by bob1029 »

I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods) and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had 3 competing FTTH providers when I left. I don't think the story is what it used to be anymore. I don't know of a single suburban development in the state that doesn't have fiber today.

The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house while the water and electricity were gone.

I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments. You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these materials.

With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30 days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the disruption is worth it.

I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now. Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.

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

#308

Post by cowmix »

My favorite example is here in the Phoenix metro area. We had DSL and cable internet pretty early compared to the rest of the country (mid/late 90s), but then things stagnated.

Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, and the incumbents slowed their roll too.

It was a on-the-nose reminder that these companies can move fast when they think a real competitor might show up.

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

#309

Post by Sesse__ »

Moldoteck wrote: post #296
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!

It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages, one of which is german with tons of loval dialects. It's so homogeneous that each canton has own sub regulations. It's so homogeneous that in it's biggest city, Zurich, 34% of people are foreigners and 45% born outside of Switzerland. But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre, >90% o…

> 34% of people are foreigners

I remember moving there, hearing talks about how international Zurich was, and then realizing most of those foreigners were German. :-) It's diverse on paper (and probably to the Swiss), but it's not like it's a cosmopolitan melting pot.

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