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Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

stefan.schueller.net

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

#451

Post by dirtikiti »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #117
dirtikiti wrote: post #98

Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference. I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially. When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed. Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe…

> Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference. I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc. Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Euro…

What part about that is puzzling?

A population 30-40x the size, split out over 50 states, with different laws and regulations, different political governance, different geographical and economic considerations...

Why wasn't Switzerland compared to the rest of Europe?

Comparing the whole of Europe to the whole of the US is a closer comparison.

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

#452

Post by danaris »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #443
danaris wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre. For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead? Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it. At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirel…

You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Corporations can't feel greed, greed is an emotion. Publicly traded corporations are automatons. It's the same reason they don't experience shame. If you think a company could easily do something better than they're doing it right now then start a company and show them how it's done. If that's prohibitively difficult, e.g. because the incumbents have captured the regulators, t…

No, I'm using a convenient shorthand.

The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels.

They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

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

#454

Post by sharts »

Aurornis wrote: post #161

This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title. Some important points that they leave out: - 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations. - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much hard…

Average is the wrong metric.

US may be larger but also wealthier, more powerful. All the heavy hitting innovation is there.

Broadband isn’t hard. Decision makers simply don’t care.

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

#455

Post by userbinator »

Hikikomori wrote: post #408
userbinator wrote: post #149

* Up to 25Gbps... All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors. Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. "dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at f…

>Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!? They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first…

to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated

You basically just showed how stupid the "but it's dEdIcAtEd!!11" argument is.

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

#456

Post by rmunn »

esseph wrote: post #236
GolfPopper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there . The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.

Now thing about all the single houses on multiple sq mile plots and the fact that a $40-$100 subscription is never going to pay back the millions it took to get to each of those homes. There are tons of those. I've lived in several states like that.

That's the most important thing, really. The geography — that America extends the width of a continent — is secondary. BUT the geography is, in part, what allows all those single houses on large plots of land. Because American suburbs can sprawl out without meaningfully cutting into the amount of available farmland in the country, which isn't the case in most smaller countries (where suburban sprawl, at least to the same proportional extent that it happens in the US, would have a meaningful impact on available farmland). Hence why America's average population density, total population divided by total country area, is so much lower than other countries. We have megacities where the population is highly concentrated — New York City's population density is over 11,000 people per square kilometer, comparable to Geneva's 12,000 people/km². But America's overall population density is one of the lowest in the world. (Not the lowest: both Canada's and Australia's are lower, for example, in both cases due to having so much land that nearly nobody lives on, either tundra or desert).

But those suburbs that sprawl all over the place? That's a WHOLE lot of capital investment, far more than other countries (on average) to hook each home up because you have to lay down so much more fiber. Hence why fiber rollout has been relatively slow: I remember in 2006 reading about fiber going in in certain cities, and looking up whether it was available in the suburb where I live, and the computer lookup system giving a very polite "LOL, no, not for years" (not that they said "not for years" but I could read between the lines). But now it's available. Not anywhere close to 25 Gbps, though.

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

#457

Post by Hikikomori »

userbinator wrote: post #455
Hikikomori wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!? They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first…

to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated You basically just showed how stupid the "but it's dEdIcAtEd!!11" argument is.

It doesn't mean anything more in any networking context...

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

#458

Post by arthurofbabylon »

lava_pidgeon wrote: post #450
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the analysis could be expanded – why don't you give your try at an essay? If you write it, I'll read it. How much should the essay be expanded? Surely we don't want a 1:1 scale model of reality. We probably should not factor in the conductivity of water and compare against the cost of 1 liter of milk; although if I wanted to attack the integrity of the essay I might lament those factors' absence. Snark aside…

I can judge an analysis even if I am not aiming to write another one. Sorry this debate is getting weird and boring. Have a nice day.

Correction: you can judge an analysis poorly and incorrectly.

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

#459

Post by AnthonyMouse »

danaris wrote: post #452
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Corporations can't feel greed, greed is an emotion. Publicly traded corporations are automatons. It's the same reason they don't experience shame. If you think a company could easily do something better than they're doing it right now then start a company and show them how it's done. If that's prohibitively difficult, e.g. because the incumbents have captured the regulators, t…

No, I'm using a convenient shorthand. The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels. They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

> They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

The thing you're intended to show them (or make sure someone else can show them) is that they lose business to someone else when they don't satisfy the customer, which doesn't make the stock price go up faster.

You can't make them want something else, you have to make doing the thing you want the best way for them to get the thing they want.

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

#460

Post by quickthrowman »

jltsiren wrote: post #105
quickthrowman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to dig up streets to install fiber underground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_boring

You often do, if the street has been there for a while. The exact location of underground infrastructure was rarely documented in the past. While the city should have a general idea of what lies under the street, you usually have to dig the street up to determine where you can install new infrastructure safely.

OK, you are clearly not a construction professional but you are confidently wrong so you must be a programmer.

Yes, telecom companies will lay new backbone fiber during a total road reconstruction because someone else is ripping up the pavement. Gas companies do the same thing along with water utilities. Streets where I live are completely redone every 60 years, it’s mill and overlay between those total reconstructions which does not allow access to the subsurface.

When this is not happening and fiber installs need to happen, they dig two pits and directional bore.

I see fiber companies directional boring everywhere on the suburbs to build out their network without ripping up entire roads.

> exact location of underground infrastructure was rarely documented in the past. While the city should have a general idea of what lies under the street, you usually have to dig the street up to determine where you can install new infrastructure safely.

Fiber does not run under the street in most residential areas, it’s laid in the utility ROW near the edge of the road/sidewalk so a handhole can be installed on the customer’s property to run a service drop to their demarc. I’ve seen fiber laid for residential networks in multiple jurisdictions in my area and that’s how it’s done.

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