381–390 of 726 posts
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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.
What does giving money to Verizon have to do with municipal (i.e. operated by the municipality) broadband?
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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.
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I took the image to be showing how inefficient it was to run that much fiber three times instead of just once. It’s unlikely that they’d do it at the same time but it seems very difficult to show buried fiber and a backhoe ripping up the street.
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.
Worse, two companies are chasing each other, so you have the ground being opened, closed, and within half a year the other company does the same. Even worse, they let the fiber cables stick out of the ground until the house subscribes to them, so a lot of houses have 1 or 2 ugly orange cables sticking out of the ground for years near the front door.
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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…
> 34% of people are foreigners I remember moving there, hearing talks about how international Zurich was, and then realizing most of those foreigners were German. :-) It's diverse on paper (and probably to the Swiss), but it's not like it's a cosmopolitan melting pot.
If you exclude neighboring countries Zurich has a foreign born population share of 27% (compared to 18% of Los Angeles). If you only look at the last 10 years Zurich has foreign born non neighboring immigration of 10% (compared to 4% for Los Angeles).
If you only look at intercontinental migration then Los Angeles wins with 14% (compared to 8% of Zurich).
So yes Zurich is less cosmopolitan then LA, but most of it is just because the US has more diverse neighbors.
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Pulling or pushing Docker images, downloading LLM models, installing AAA games from Steam. There are so many use cases that you won't see if you're just doing email and web browsing with a little bit of video streaming. It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very helpful for this. > I don't understand the desire (fetish?) If you don't need it t…
It's Stockholm syndrome from what I can tell.
Why isn’t france your European example? Its larger and better served than switzerland
The comparison feels off because it treats Switzerland and the United States as interchangeable test cases for “free market vs. not,” when they operate under completely different constraints. Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, an…
There is absolutely no doubt that the system used in Switzerland is the right one and the system used in USA is the wrong one.
As TFA says, the optical fiber infrastructure that connects all individual customers is a case of natural monopoly and it must be built in a standard way and it must be shared by all who compete for communication services, exactly like the distribution of water or of electricity or like the public roads, which are the best analogy, and which must also be shared freely by anyone who provides transportation services.
My sister lives in Switzerland, in a remote place in the mountain from a small town. Even over wifi the bandwidth at her place is so fast it made my BitTorrent client crash repeatedly. The solution was to disconnect my system by deactivating the wifi, relaunch my BitTorrent software, set a rate limit to the download speed at 30MB/s, and then reactivate wifi.
30MB/s is not a lot. Which client was that? KTorrent can easily deal with more than three times that, which is what I get here in Poland on a plan that's not even the fastest one available.
So the author's proposed solution is more government control. Pass.
The "author's proposed solution" is the equivalent for communication of what public roads are for transportation.
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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.
I'm glad it works that way there. In the Netherlands, I've never seen a fiber duct laid in residential areas, it seems just plain fiber cables are buried. Worse, two companies are chasing each other, so you have the ground being opened, closed, and within half a year the other company does the same. Even worse, they let the fiber cables stick out of the ground until the house subscribes to them, so a lot of houses ha…