Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does the internet provider actually provide?
Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
311–320 of 726 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#312In 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…
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
[flagged]
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#313In 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…
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.
If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper.
With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#314France 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 th…
I took the image to be showing how inefficient it was to run that much fiber three times instead of just once. It’s unlikely that they’d do it at the same time but it seems very difficult to show buried fiber and a backhoe ripping up the street.
In reality, this does not happen that way. If a path already exists, you can pay to use the same duct (unless it's full) to install your own fibers. At least, it works this way in France.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#315I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home. I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fin…
The total bandwidth up/down is only part of the story. I was on a cell modem until very recently. Just the latency difference between gigabit fiber and anything else is noticeable for me. When a website loads a ton of stuff in a single page, some of that is serialized and requests are back to back instead of parallelized. The longer the serial chain, the higher you multiply your round trip time. This is especially so…
Yep, latency's also big if you play competitive multiplayer games. With DOCSIS you get ~11ms +- 3ms added to every packet no matter what because it's shoehorned existing cable infrastructure. Fiber is much better in this regard.
Ping to my public IP's gateway address:
30 packets transmitted, 30 received, 0% packet loss, time 29031ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.449/1.915/2.212/0.166 msRe: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves. If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper. With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
This line of thinking comes up so often, but ignores second order effects. I don't need schools because I have no children, but I will certainly depend on well educated children entering the workforce.
Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#317Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course). The US a…
The UK could have had it decades ago, but the Thatcher government didn't allow it. Instead the UK gave permission to a couple of companies to dig up the streets and lay infrastructure in places of their choice. Those companies later merged into one shitty company called Virgin Media. The places they targeted were easy, dense neighbourhoods. BT, on the other hand, was required to provide everyone in the country with a phone line, no matter how remote. Today Virgin Media offers asymmetric gigabit and it's still the only choice for many because real fibre rollout is happening at a glacial pace. They also get people to sign 18 month contracts which aren't terminated if you move house. In some places, like mine, existing conduit means some ISPs are allowed to run their own fibre and these are some of the best connections available today. But most ISPs still get you to sign 18 month or longer contracts. The shitty ones, like Virgin Media won't even terminate your contract if you move to place they don't supply.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#318Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does the internet provider actually provide?
The equipment on both sides of the ‘tube’. Oh, and the backhaul to said equipment.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free markets tend toward monopoly which restricts individual people’s opportunities for action. In this example, there was a cable monopoly mentioned. The only way to coerce it (not even to defeat it in some way) was through baseless deception, not free market competitive action. The monopoly remained.
> Free markets tend toward monopoly Not true and oversimplification. Some markets tend toward monopolies, but you rarely will get one unless enforced/protected by a state. If you navigate through history, you will find almost exclusively monopolies on salt extraction, coal mining oligopolies (with the help of worker unions), silk... Curiously, the Standard Oil was accused of being a monopoly, and the proof was they w…
You're right on most of these, but wrong on telephony. That actually was a natural monopoly.
It's exactly how OP describes it. It's unproductive for multiple companies to maintain disconnected, parallel telephone infrastructures. The most productive use of resources is to lay more wires to more houses, not to lay more wires to places which have already been wired up for telephone service by somebody else. That creates a monopoly, and the government should step in.
With modern tech, you can mandate local-loop unbundling and fix some of this, but that wasn't possible with 1970s (and earlier) phone infrastructure.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#320Actually, Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps symmetrical service in the Northwest of the US: https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig>.
The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.