Live data from Hacker News

Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

sschueller.github.io

361–370 of 726 posts

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

#361
post #326

My sister lives in Switzerland, in a remote place in the mountain from a small town. Even over wifi the bandwidth at her place is so fast it made my BitTorrent client crash repeatedly. The solution was to disconnect my system by deactivating the wifi, relaunch my BitTorrent software, set a rate limit to the download speed at 30MB/s, and then reactivate wifi.

30MB/s is not a lot. Which client was that? KTorrent can easily deal with more than three times that, which is what I get here in Poland on a plan that's not even the fastest one available.

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

#362
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

  > I’m not even talking about the languages, we have 20% immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has foreign roots.
Both LA and Miami speak Spanish, no?

  > We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths
Only the Republicans have weapons in every household?

I'm joking, I realise that you are Swiss, but until I looked at the username I wasn't sure which side of the comparison you were referring to. Goes to show that even the nations' stereotypes are not dissimilar!

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do we struggle to get the infrastructure to work in dense urban areas still? Or even just “not Wyoming”? Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?

> Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail? Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and compare its land acquisition difficulties to what happened with the California project. I'll rankly speculate that difference will be the meat of your answer.

Building infrastructure is a skill, a skill you have to constantly work on. If you do it enough and not once then you can learn to get good at it. There is a difference between a long term consistent execution of a infrastructure plan and a 'lets build high speed rail'.

I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.

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

#365
post #74

This article gets ahead of itself. The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it. I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities. We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on…

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…

Sweden doesn't use much PON either. If a countries fiber build out started before gpon was released or got popular you likely continue a lot with point to point. There's a small drawback, TDM/A for the uplink, introduces some jitter but guessing it's not as bad as cable.

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm Swiss and I disagree, and so do many experts. First of all, arriving earlier is always good, because many people who get off on that stop still arrive earlier. Also, people who connect to a different mode of transit, such as Trams or S-Bahns very likely can catch an earlier connection.

In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't actually matter anymore.

So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.

Join us in advocating for this vision: https://swissrailvolution.ch/#goals

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

#367
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So one would think. And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK. I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe J…

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.

Switzerland uses a system similar to the original plan for Obamacare, where individuals are mandated to buy insurance, so if Switzerland is what you mean by "universal healthcare" then it's not only not impossible, but the USA already has a more voluntary take on the exact same concept.

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

#368
post #276
post #185

Before I start with my real comment I'll point out that the AI slop images really detract from this article and the author should stop. To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing even better than that. Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be ahe…

Only the images? The entire article is pure AI slop. But no one even cares anymore... People seem to love this kind of empty text, or no one even reads anymore, or everyone here is a bot already... Who knows.

The article is not AI slop.

I spent 4 days on it and the video I made to go along with it with me speaking every word. The video has no AI, it is all stock video and audio footage which I pain stackenly stiched together in DaVinci Resolve.

I used AI to spell check and fix my ESL grammer in the article. Initially I also generated a number of unnecessary AI images which I removed again. I only left the ones that explain certain things like the p2p model.

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

#369
post #61

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.

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.

Lately I come to believe that success stories are not necessarily transferable. They can require some traits of the system that are not available. USA is made for corporations, so you just cant replicate internet access from Switzerland in USA. Corporations will fight you to death in courts and they will win. They are not going to lose their monopoly. To change that you need to change USA in a massive ways, I can't imagine how it can be done.

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

#370
post #202

Earlier 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…

That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.

What does giving money to Verizon have to do with municipal (i.e. operated by the municipality) broadband?
Post reply on HN