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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

sschueller.github.io

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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole, the Bay Area in California does have comparable median household income. In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts. I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to…

> 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.

If only we didn't need redundancy...

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

#572
post #527
post #517

The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this. For context: 41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area. Some fun distance cont…

Extrapolating with this method, large cities should be as well equipped as Switzerland. Los Angeles has 10x the population density of Switzerland and around the same population density in urban area. Same for Washington dc, San Francisco... It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. Distance between cities may be large, but the order of magnitude is closer when comparing within cities.

[deleted]

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

#573

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…

Running speedtests to see that number go up. Mostly Hacker News though :D

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

#574

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…

> I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.

This is dog slow, you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that. Downloading a reasonably recent game would also take close to an entire day. Not everyone needs a full symmetric Gbps perhaps, but 100Mbps is kind of a baseline nowadays, and more is better for faster downloads.

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

#575
post #3

This article would be so much better without the generic AI-generated images everywhere.

Agreed but I didn't want to just take random images from the web that I don't have the rights too and I my artistic skills are not good enough.

You can search for Creative Commons images on Google. Though, honestly, a longform piece would've been much better than the glitchy face horror show that is that "fiber-laying in Germany" image, which is a composite of hundreds of thousands of random images from all sorts of places!

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

#576
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a possibility to create a wireless point-to-point link ?

Yes. You can actually buy pairs of antennas (basically an AP pair) that do just that. The only downside is that the signal quality varies based on weather.

If you want something more or less weather proof, you can get microwave P2P links that run in licensed bands and you don't get any signal interference from similar nearby antennas.

Both WiFi and Microwave equipment act just like bridges and you can connect them to a switch or router.

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

#577
post #560
post #517

The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this. For context: 41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area. Some fun distance cont…

This is the same American-branded copium we see during discussions of socialized healthcare, which every other first-world country on the planet seems to manage. China has 10G and 50G home fiber. Zurich is larger geographically than Manhattan, while having much lower population density.

I guarantee you 99% of China landmass does not have 50G. Most of the country is ultra poor rice paddy farmers. Get real.

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

#579
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

You're confusing XGS-PON with NG-PON2. NG-PON2 isn't really used anywhere AFIAK, the "real" upgrade path is 50G-PON (50G/50G shared). NG-PON2's tunable lasers are expensive so didn't get traction.

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

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly enough, most providers still run PON, but all their equipment, including splitters, is at the telco's end of the P2P connection. Apparently it is slightly cheaper to build out a PoP like that.

Probably just the equipment is far far cheaper now (customer ONTs and telco OLTs) than point to point is my guess?
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