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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

#561

Post by MarioMan »

franga2000 wrote: post #540
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities only give these easements to a tiny number of players. It's a textbook government granted monopoly.

To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building. That's more construction, more space use and more material costs. Ideally, we'd have one run going to every building, which the ISPs could share. Instead of 5x the fibre to every building, we'd get 5x the buildings with fibre. To put it another way, the building of infrastructure should be a mono…

> I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building

It’s funny that you’d mention this. My apartment fiber has four lines going into my unit, all under AT&T service, apparently for redundancy. I only use one.

https://imgur.com/a/Ss19AKk

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

#562

Post by carefree-bob »

kulahan wrote: post #394
carefree-bob wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math doesn't support this. There is great confusion about this point. Imagine, for example, that there are people that want to buy one unit of a product made by a monopoly that is a greedy corporation trying to maximize profits. And to keep things simple, make everything discreet in dollars. 10 people are willing to pay $2 5 people are willing to pay $3 1 person is willing to pay $4 and no one is able or willing…

Except it doesn’t scale at all like this. There are companies selling sandwiches on private jets for $150/ea. Some people sell a candle for $5 at Target while others sell them for $45 at a farmer’s market. If you’re making websites for a living, it’s common advice to raise your prices to keep away people who aren’t very serious or who will balk at every expense. There are countless companies working with excellent pr…

None of those are monopolies, unless you consider someone selling a sandwich on a particular plane as a monopoly and the people on the plane are your market, in which case it is exactly this situation, and why that sandwich doesn't cost $100.

So instead of trying to think of complications, you need to first understand the argument, and then you can see it everywhere once you understand it.

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

#563

Post by tristor »

This is true, but not in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga through EPB has had 25Gbit residential fiber service since 2022. EPB is the most successful municipal fiber program in the US, and has resulted directly in the creation of other municipal fiber programs in other parts of the US, as well as telco lobbying causing 16 states to enact laws banning it, because it was so successful it made Comcast and AT&T scared.

I have 5gbit symmetric fiber at my house in Texas, and it is only available here because Google Fiber entered the city offer 1gbit symmetric fiber for 60% less than you could get a 300mbit cable link or 75mbit DSL link. Suddenly everyone was building out fiber infrastructure, and I now pay less for 5gbit symmetric fiber than I did for a brief while for gigabit cable (DOCSIS 3.1) which was 1gb/50mb.

The primary piece about this that's relevant is the difference in deployment architecture. P2MP is much cheaper for providers to deploy, but it does lock you in, and more to the point it means even your symmetric links aren't guaranteed to get full throughput at all times because they oversubscribe the backhauls. Still, in most major US cities that now have fiber service, you will rarely see any performance drops. I can confirm that I get close to 5gbits bidirectionally during peak hours, which is a testament to the fact that it was completely possible to have done this a decade ago and it just required some actual competition for AT&T to get off its ass and do it. Unfortunately I don't have Google Fiber at my address because they're now offering 8gbit symmetric in the city.

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

#564

Post by eqvinox »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #558
eqvinox wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most places in Asia, this is due to massive oversubscription. No relation at all to wireless spectrum.

That's easy to claim, but there are a lot of places where everyone is surrounded by everyone else's wifi routers. If you have 9 routers that you share walls with and even more that can reach you, wifi starts to break down, but people will blame their service provider.

I've been there a bunch, my colleague has lived there. We work in the telco area. My own experiences I would question, his I don't.

It's oversubscription.

Can I provide citations or proof? No. That's extremely hard to do with oversubscription in general, no telco will admit their exact ratio without being forced to. Sometimes you can reverse engineer it from peering relationships, but that doesn't allow identifying bandwidth constraints on medium haul.

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

#565

Post by nunez »

vbernat wrote: post #284

France has 90% FTTH coverage in 2025, with 60% of households over 1 Gbps. One of the incumbents, Free (my employer), deployed P2P fibers in very dense areas but is switching to P2MP for economic reasons (and because this was not a competitive advantage). It's unclear to me if Switzerland plans to achieve this coverage with P2P. What looks great in Switzerland is not that each household has four dedicated fibers to th…

Zoom in to see the real terror. Exited the article after seeing that.

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

#566

Post by db48x »

buildbot wrote: post #554
db48x wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I actually meant their multi gig service in general/this page - I know ziply quite well! The 10G seems like a price/sanity sweet spot, 50G is really massive overkill, as tempting as it would be…

Ah :)

50Gbps is so very shiny…

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

#567

Post by illusive4080 »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #552
illusive4080 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement is easily refuted by looking up statistics on poverty.

Except the definitions of poverty are defined to make it seems like it's not poverty. When you have a massive amount of the population that lives paycheck to paycheck, is one small medical emergency away from bankruptcy / can't pay their rent/mortgage. Will lose their job because of little to no protections. Very little social safety nets... most people are a lot closer to 'poverty' than looking at simple statistics.

The definitions of poverty are used to measure relative wealth, not whether someone lives paycheck to paycheck. As income increases, paycheck to paycheck reports decrease, but at a certain point it then increases again. Living paycheck to paycheck is a poor measure, because you can buy a house that’s too expensive for your income, or a car, eat out too much, or make a variety of other poor life choices. That’s why the poverty index is good at measuring relative decreases in poverty because it ignores poor life choices.

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

#568

Post by nunez »

bob1029 wrote: post #307

I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods) and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had 3 competing FTTH providers when I left. I don't think the story is what it used to be anymore. I don't know of a single suburban development in the state that doesn't have fiber today. The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for…

There are plenty of rural/exurban/suburban cities where Xfinity "10G" DOCSIS coax, HughesNet/DirecTV or Starlink are your only realistic options.

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

#569

Post by nunez »

firesteelrain wrote: post #458

I have 500 Mbps internet (fiber optic) with 40+ devices on it. I don’t see myself needing even 1 Gbps nor even close to 25 Gbps. At my enterprise, we have 900 simultaneous users to include thousands of CICD jobs, and we don’t even come close to 25 Gbps.

I'm going to disagree. I have 5Gbit FTTH and it is SO NICE to have large files download almost as quickly as pulling from an old hard drive. Used to have 1Gbit before.

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

#570

Post by nunez »

ukd1 wrote: post #178

I get 10g symmetric in Austin for $150/m. I had Cox before, and it was $180ish for 1g down and ~50mb up. Things are improving!

Because Google Fiber HQed there. Come to Houston, where you'll pay >$200/mo for 5Gbit if AT&T covers your area or MUCH LESS if Ezee is an option.
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