411–420 of 726 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you do know a way: Buy a spool of fiber and lay one from your house to the nearby block. Make it public knowledge that you're doing this and sharing internet with your neighbours (even if you're not). The incumbent will quickly upgrade your area.
ROW?
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 th…
I’m curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my experience in France couldn’t be further from fibre - have had a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to starlink, as there still isn’t even DSL available there. Fibre… don’t make me laugh. It’s not like we’re super rural, either - small village, about 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn’t much better - it’s 5g in the to…
As for the numbers, as it is open data, there are some sites like https://infofibre.fr/ where this is easier to see where we are. You can see that even rural regions have more than 90% of household coverage.
As for definitions, there are two cases for availability: immediate availability (infrastructure operator present up and you have at least one commercial operator after 3 months) or delayed availibility (the infrastructure operator has 6 months to make the address available after being asked by a commercial operator).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you do know a way: Buy a spool of fiber and lay one from your house to the nearby block. Make it public knowledge that you're doing this and sharing internet with your neighbours (even if you're not). The incumbent will quickly upgrade your area.
A few years ago I learned that the only thing keeping me on 20/2 ADLS was a few 100 meters of already built but empty cable channel. I easily could buy that much fibre, borrow a fibre splicer and cable puller, patch it up to a relative in one of the already wired buildings and share their gigabit link with my entire apartment building. Half of my building was on the ISP that owned the empty channel, so moving to a co…
Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The key is knowing which laws you can break, how much you can break them, and what's likely to happen if you're caught. When an illegal good thing is caught, the response is usually to slap on the wrist and legalise it.
A lot of current ISPs did start out illegally too.
Don't splice into other people's fibers though. That's a much worse crime of property damage.
Im genuinely curious what is a use-case for 25GB Internet in a typical Switzerland household?
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 th…
I’m curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my experience in France couldn’t be further from fibre - have had a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to starlink, as there still isn’t even DSL available there. Fibre… don’t make me laugh. It’s not like we’re super rural, either - small village, about 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn’t much better - it’s 5g in the to…
Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service distance of 16km. If you’re the first subscriber in that area, that €250k might be for opening up a whole new CO plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and your neighborhood.
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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.
> If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves. There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%. So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly pri…
And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.
Most states in America ban municipal fiber. They saw EPB (Chattanooga) and said, no, we must make sure that doesn't ever happen again. That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the rules are to make sure the richest people become richer.
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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.
It absolutely does happen that way in Germany. We had Fiber Company A rip up the entire city a year ago, and Fiber Company B ripped up the streets again just a few weeks ago. ETA from my ISP to actually get any of those lines into my apartment is still 2028.
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.