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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

#441

Post by db48x »

dlenski wrote: post #223

I 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…

> What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.

But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries and 20–30 minutes to recompile them myself.

But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough.

An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating photo–realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I’m sure that a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower it significantly, but it’ll always be more expensive than mere 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

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

#442

Post by db48x »

buildbot wrote: post #345
db48x wrote: post #320

Actually, 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.

oooooo how did I miss this before

Probably just because there are so many ISPs in the USA that keeping track of all of them is impossible. I only know about it because I’m a customer (but not sadly of their 50Gbps service; maybe one day).

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

#443

Post by alsetmusic »

fragmede wrote: post #329
toofy wrote: 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.

That's the opposite of what was proposed above. Stop paying them altogether and replace them in the places where they aren't competing. I think that was the message.

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

#444

Post by alsetmusic »

mikkupikku wrote: post #402
deaux wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Municipalities don't know anything about the job and few have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story where they personally stepped in and saw their local government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey that's great, but how is some random municipality without an elder tech god living with them supposed to get "municipal" internet without co…

I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their infrastructure.

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

#445

Post by db48x »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #311

Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does the internet provider actually provide?

They give you an IP address, maybe ipv6 or a static ipv4 address if you pay more. They compete on quality of service, network policies, backhaul capacity, price, necessary services like DNS, extras like email or bundled Netflix subscriptions, etc, etc.

Some of these qualities are more legible than others.

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

#446

Post by jmalicki »

cbg0 wrote: post #330
kalleboo wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet Is that so crazy? If 10G was the default, you could just plop a cheap NAS at home and nobody would need to pay monthly subscriptions for cloud services.

How is 1G insufficient for running a NAS over the internet?

1Gbps is even slower than a SATA SSD that can saturate a 6Gbps SATA link.

10Gbps gets you speeds only a few times slower than a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. Except you can run that over the Internet!

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

#447

Post by JumpCrisscross »

toofy wrote: post #202
ttul wrote: post #9

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…

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…

> 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

Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?

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

#448

Post by db48x »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #135
simoncion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll assume by "game servers" you mean "video game binary and asset distribution servers that support game stores like Steam and Epic and others". When I paid Comcast for 1.5Gbit/s down, Steam would saturate that downlink with most games. I now pay for service that's no less than 100mbit symmetric, but is almost always something like 300->600mbit. Steam can -obviously- saturate that. Amusingly, the Epic Games Store (…

I am talking about console downloads

Game downloads, whether on a console or a PC, come from a CDN. The difference is that Steam has a lot of capacity. They can have millions of players all downloading the same game on the same day at gigabit speeds. Console makers invariably cheap out and cannot reach the same level of service.

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

#449

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bsenftner wrote: post #438
palata wrote: post #435

The only reason I can see to not treat natural monopolies as government-owned monopolies is political: those in power benefit from privatising those. Maybe this shows that Switzerland has a sane political system?

Why doesn't X have Y? When talking about nations, that is typically corruption. Why can't NationX have quality public transit? Corruption. Why can't NationX have quality political parties or politicians? Corruption. Why can't NationX have a quality education and produce people capable of understanding and supporting their own political system? Corruption.

This is a thought-terminating cliché [1]. Not an actual explanation.

Like, why is the assumption that countries should be homogenous? Since when did geography, culture, industrial structure, natural-resource availability and national wealth become irrelevant?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

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

#450

Post by AshamedCaptain »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #447
toofy wrote: 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…

> 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 Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?

In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once?
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