The curious case of Romanian broadband

I grew up there, I remember dial up and wasting a lot of my mother's money on it. Then the state run ISP rolled out ADSL and it got way better. In the span of 2-3 years, I went from 64/64 kbit/s to 6/1 Mbps.

In another year, it was 24/1 Mbps, and yet another year or so they started rolling out fiber, with free upgrades for everyone as long as you renewed the contract. 30/30 Mbps, then 100/100 Mbps, now you can get 1000/1000 for $20 or 300/300 Mbps for $10. Upgrading to a higher speed is still free afaik, but your contract gets renewed for 3 years.

Interestingly, it used to be possible to get multiple connections at the same house (like, literally, multiple fiber cables). Not sure if that's still possible and what the limit was per individual/house, but I always wondered if one could get something ridiculous like 4000/4000 Mbps aggregate speed.

And yes, the upload speeds are true, although their own routers won't reach them.

But good news, you can use any router with an SFP transceiver.

I am not aware of anything like the private networks created in Romania by individuals. There are a few other ISPs that started early, and technically competed with Moldtelecom (the state run ISP) with their own cables, but they did not operate outside the capital for a very long time. Moldtelecom had a monopoly.

There used to be a lot of Internet cafes that everyone would use for LAN gaming and Internet browsing, it was fun.

This might be the best thing the government has done in the country since independence, I don't know what motivations they had, they didn't seem to be lobbied by anyone since there were no Internet startups with significant influence. They just sort of... did it.

If anyone knows more about the history of Internet in the Republic of Moldova, please comment.

Now there's talks of selling Moldtelecom to Huawei, which might be a bad idea. They already use Huawei equipment, just not sure what they would do if they buy the whole company.

> rich and comfortable

That's what baffles everyone. The American social contract seems to be "if 80% of the population can be 20-30% richer than the rest of the world, let's throw the 20% at the bottom under the rhetorical bus".

And I should point out that these days those 20% at the bottom are about 70 million (!) people. Plus I imagine that the poverty rate will only go up, not down, considering how US politics are looking.

That's more about proximity than about bandwidth. Whenever I'm SF, I'm surprised at how quickly everything loads, mainly because the datacenter is next to me rather than on the other side of the world.

A lot of stuff was built out post-WW2 when everything was still green fields. Now, several decades later, all of this infrastructure still (mostly) "works" so everyone is not enthusiastic about spending money to make it 'better'.

I'm guessing that during those same decades many/most Communist countries did not have awesome infrastructure, and so when they became more open, there was a lot of catching up to do. So in many ways you are in a country that is (relatively speaking) like the US was during the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways you 'skipped' a generation and so leap-frogged America a bit.

Also, it seems that Romania has a population bulge of people our 40 years of age:

* https://www.indexmundi.com/romania/age_structure.html

When those people hit their 60s, like the Baby Boomers in the US now are, then you may find economic growth to be more of a struggle (see Japan).

* https://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html

* https://www.indexmundi.com/japan/age_structure.html