331–340 of 726 posts
Progress is good, and physical connections are well worth the investment due to how long the stuff will last. But I honestly think VDSL2 and cable are still good enough for most people. The typical family and youth are probably on 5G as much as wifi these days.
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…
I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco. Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but consistently and constantly don't.
It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity
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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.
In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.
But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either
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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.
ETA from my ISP to actually get any of those lines into my apartment is still 2028.
This is about urban Switzerland. Way out in the country, we still have crap copper up on poles, which maxes out at 25 Mbits. But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.
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This is provably not true. You can look at computers (besides Apple), cell phones (besides Apple), TVs, any commodity item, etc
Now do banking, retail, real estate, insurance, healthcare, software, or any business where Asian governments are not actively subsidizing a race to the bottom competition and you'll see it how it works.
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Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone line…
They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband. Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago! Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else. In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree. But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of ri…