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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

#581

Post by SubmarineClub »

fennecbutt wrote: post #549
d_sem wrote: 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…

Yeah but like 10x the population, 10x the GDP, etc. You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end during wild West times but modern infrastructure can't be built to the same scale even with mechanisation? Lmao sounds like the UK. It does make sense tho, the world is now filled with middlemen and getting any job done costs 10x because of parasites.

> You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end during wild West times

At a time when labor was dirt cheap and safety regulations were non-existent.

The railroads specifically used Chinese laborers who were treated, and paid, like shit.

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

#583

Post by drnick1 »

rettichschnidi wrote: post #337
jeffrallen wrote: post #35

This is about urban Switzerland. Way out in the country, we still have crap copper up on poles, which maxes out at 25 Mbits. But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.

Swisscom has to do better, as regulated by the government. One can get 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month: https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/landline-subscription...

> 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month

This is a terrible value, and good luck uploading anything at 8Mbps...

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

#584

Post by kshacker »

kuboble wrote: post #375
panick21_ wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People endlessly complain that the SBB is 'always' late.

Like if you have a semi-important meeting in Zurich at 9am It's perfectly fine to take a train which arrives in Zurich at 8:53. And in an unlikely scenario that the train is late, everyone will agree that it's a valid circumstance.

Assuming zero time to walk into office (just saying), one day they will start scheduling meetings at 8:53 because we all do get here at 8:53.

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

#585

Post by im3w1l »

beAbU wrote: post #518
firesteelrain wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is I don’t even come close to the bandwidth limits. My latency is excellent. I had coax based internet and it was going down a lot. I switched to fiber about 5-6 years ago. Never went down once

Yes, and my point is 10 years from now when you are streaming your 16k Netflix movie while saving all you 8k cctv camera footage to the cloud you might have a different opinion about gigabit internet.

Money has a time value. It's better to build things just before you need them than decades prior.

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

#586

Post by martinald »

Hikikomori wrote: post #365
martinald wrote: post #151

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…

Sweden doesn't use much PON either. If a countries fiber build out started before gpon was released or got popular you likely continue a lot with point to point. There's a small drawback, TDM/A for the uplink, introduces some jitter but guessing it's not as bad as cable.

Well a GPON frame is 0.125ms. So the best jitter is ~0.125ms, but even if the entire upstream segment was saturated you'd be looking at probably 1-2ms at absolute worse case. The OLT will not allow one user to hammer the upstream badly like you get with DOCSIS.

So it's really a non issue (XGS-PON is even better as more data per frame means heavy upstream 'clears' the frames quicker), IME consumer routers add more jitter themselves even with ethernet on the LAN side (and WiFi is a lot worse).

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

#587

Post by slibhb »

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.

Living paycheck to paycheck is usually a choice: people earn a lot of money and spend it immediately. The fact that this leaves them vulnerable to misfortune doesn't mean they're poor.

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

#588

Post by throw-the-towel »

folbec wrote: post #535
madaxe_again wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my experience in France couldn’t be further from fibre - have had a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to starlink, as there still isn’t even DSL available there. Fibre… don’t make me laugh. It’s not like we’re super rural, either - small village, about 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn’t much better - it’s 5g in the to…

It is heavily dependent on the history of your area. I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial cable very early because the "département" built a public network and eventually leased it to private companies. I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became available in my street. The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell towers less than 1km from my place). So geography and histor…

12km away from Lyon is urban for all practical purposes. (It's literally the 3rd most populated city proper in the country.)

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

#589

Post by tribaal »

Sesse__ wrote: post #309
Moldoteck wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you should visit Geneva then, or most of the "Arc Lemanique".

It's way more diverse than Zurich. Well, if you mean "diverse" as "more brown people" as your comment seems to imply.

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

#590

Post by simoncion »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #203
simoncion wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No they don’t. Yes, they do. Price competition and R&D are expensive activities. Businesses seek to maximize profit, as they're not charities or governmental entities. Neutralizing competition (whether by eliminating it or colluding with it) and entering into private agreements with suppliers and vendors to box out any potential upstarts increases profit. Another fine way for a monopoly or cartel to increase profit…

That isn’t really true though, monopolies are not sustainable. Pretty much the only way to create a long lived monopoly is to collude with the government (also a monopoly btw).

> ...monopolies are not sustainable.

You might be surprised to learn that the private sector can enter into durable agreements much like the public sector does. It's how things like mon/oligopolies and cartels form and persist.

Anyway. I'd suggest you go read your histories, but you're either unlikely to, or don't have enough supporting information to understand what they're telling you. If you're young enough [0] to be alive thirty to sixty years from now, and you're living in a place -like the US- that's steadily dismantling its consumer protection regulations, then do pay attention to how things have changed between now and near to the end of your life. Take especial care to track down the root causes of the differences, rather than just uncritically swallowing whatever explanations you're handed.

[0] ...and lucky enough...

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