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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

#421

Post by db48x »

martinald wrote: post #151
harrall wrote: 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…

XGSPON is actually 40Gbps down, 10Gbps up. The 40Gbps is actually four separate 10Gbps downlinks on different frequencies. Filters are used so that each customer only sees one of those downlinks. Just a little note.

> In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).

This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those customers have more than 12 televisions going at once…

You’re more likely to see congestion from many customers all hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the numbers are.

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

#422

Post by toofy »

VorpalWay wrote: post #417
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs. 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, b…

why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece.

if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.

(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)

think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.

some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?

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

#423

Post by db48x »

schubidubiduba wrote: post #55
chrismcb wrote: post #29

Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free market

Some markets just inherently turn non-free very quickly when left unsupervised. Especially infrastructure markets.

That may or may not be true, but in this case many cities signed exclusivity agreements with cable companies in the 60s and 70s when cable was becoming popular. Back then it was not technically feasible to have multiple cable companies sharing the same cable; the same set of analog channels had to be broadcast to every subscriber. Multiple subscribers, often hundreds of them in apartments, were attached to the same run of coaxial cable in a daisy chain or using splitters. Those agreements carried over to internet service once the cable companies started offering it. It made sense 50 years ago, but today it means that we haven’t actually had much of a free market. Now the FTTH is cheap and readily available, that is starting to reverse simple because the monopoly agreements only apply to _cable_ networks, not to fiber networks.

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

#424

Post by VorpalWay »

toofy wrote: post #422
VorpalWay wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs. 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, b…

why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece. if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in?…

Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.

Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.

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

#425

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

HauntingPin wrote: post #46
joe_the_user wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems incorrect to call this competition. I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.

It's clearly competition. The incumbent company saw a potential competitor and acted upon it. That's literally what happens when there's competition. It doesn't matter that the competitor didn't actually exist if the incumbent behaved as if it did exist. I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit that competition is good and necessary.

If they ever find out they've been duped, they'll certainly go out of their way to make something worse down the line at the expense of the people.

These are the kind of short-sighted tactics that competition and capitalism breeds that belongs in luxury markets, not utilities or essentials.

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

#426

Post by brabel »

cycomanic wrote: post #277

I would argue that the Scandinavian countries are a much better example to use than Switzerland. In contrast to Switzerland Sweden leads the world in fibre access build out (while being geographically much larger). While I haven't seen 25 G internet 10G is relatively common and 1G is the default (at around 40-50 euro per month). The model has is quite similar to Switzerland though, open access fibre infrastructure wi…

I live in Sweden, and I don’t see a fiber plan available from Telia, the biggest provider, faster than 1Gb!? https://www.telia.se/bredband/fiber

And I have the 600M plan since it’s less than half the cost of 1G but still plenty fast for my needs. Where do you even find 10G??

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

#427

Post by ragall »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #408
ragall wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last mile is owned by the local monopoly and can be switched over to any provider. In that sense it's shareable, but the physical medium is not shared. This is very good. > The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps Lack of reading comprehension skills.

Name one place in the article that clarifies “As mentioned, in Switzerland, you can get 25 Gigabit per second fiber internet to your home…” that it isn’t available everywhere?

It needs no Clarification. Skills, dude.

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

#428

Post by Ray20 »

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…

> It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages

Perhaps he's talking about a different kind of homogeneity (one that conventionally falls under the "racism" category)

> Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre

Do not arm him with arguments

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

#429

Post by franga2000 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #413
franga2000 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People are too afraid of breaking the law. Look at every multi billion dollar company - all of them got where they are by breaking the law. How's it going to look in front of a jury when the government says "this man illegally brought cheap and fast internet to a neighbourhood?" The companies don't even have narratives that nice. Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The key is knowing which laws you can…

You can break the law if you have money. That's it.

You won't be in front of a jury for "setting up fast internet". You'll get caught climbing into a manhole with electrician tools and charged with terrorism. The jury will be fed a story of how you had expensive specialized equipment on you, so this was a well-funded professional attempt at sabotaging critical infrastructure. You'll have a shitty public defender who will only realise that fiber in this case is about internet not clothing because he first read the file in the taxi to the courthouse. You'll take a plea deal because you can't afford a trial.

The system doesn't work how you think it does, at least not for the people on the ground.

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

#430

Post by littlestymaar »

0x3f wrote: post #97
littlestymaar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?

The thing is none of the “pure forms” are realistic outside of books.

If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.

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