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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

#601

Post by aaarrm »

slibhb wrote: post #587
eatsyourtacos wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While this can be true, this absolutely is not true for the majority of paycheck-to-paycheck people. You truly need to get your head out of your ass if you honestly believe this is what is causing people to be poor.

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

#602

Post by m_mueller »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #454
m_mueller wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is insane. I guess it's that easy for telcos to lobby the legislators for keeping up their rents?

> guess it's that easy for telcos to lobby the legislators 16 states having restrictions while two go explicitly pro-municipal broadband doesn’t seem like a lobbyist’s panacea. Skimming the list of states with restrictions, they look like red states trying to bridle their blue cities. Partisanship seems the more-parsimonious explanation.

~100 million consumers (assuming average sized states are impacted) being essentially defrauded by a cartel of telcos - doesn't really matter what you wanna call it but I'd say it's a pretty major deal.

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

#603

Post by simoncion »

db48x wrote: post #448
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about console downloads

Game downloads, whether on a console or a PC, come from a CDN. The difference is that Steam has a lot of capacity. They can have millions of players all downloading the same game on the same day at gigabit speeds. Console makers invariably cheap out and cannot reach the same level of service.

Hell, it might be the case that console manufacturers are doing the same stupid shit that EGS is doing. Perhaps they wrote their download code back when 50mbit/s was a dreadfully fast download speed for the average USian to have and they haven't updated it since. (And why would they? What's a consumer's alternative other than "Pay 1k or more for a gaming machine that can run games delivered through Steam" or "Don't play video games"?)

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

#604

Post by maxglute »

pb7 wrote: post #577
sjm wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same American-branded copium we see during discussions of socialized healthcare, which every other first-world country on the planet seems to manage. China has 10G and 50G home fiber. Zurich is larger geographically than Manhattan, while having much lower population density.

I guarantee you 99% of China landmass does not have 50G. Most of the country is ultra poor rice paddy farmers. Get real.

Not all landmass because most of Tibet/Xinjiang empty, but ~100% wireless coverage east of Heihe–Tengchong line where ~95% of population are. Including Tibet/Xinjiang remote areas, ~95%+ of administered population areas down to village level where poor farmers have access to 5g AND fiber hookup option by now.

Building infra and networking gear is cheap in society that knows how to build and carriers are required to install in administered villages even if it's not profitable. Fiber adoption rate actually higher among rice farmers because they get subsidies, 1Gbps gigabyte fiber for cost of 200 Mbps in city and because bunch of villages got hooked up in last 10 years - they skipped straight to fiber which was bundled with road/power buildout.

Meanwhile US so dysfunctional / can't brute force rural fiber, need to literally invent SpaceX to plug gap. Which TBH is good copium.

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

#605

Post by [deleted] »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #361
p4bl0 wrote: post #326

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.

[deleted]

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

#606

Post by 0x3f »

littlestymaar wrote: post #599
0x3f wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I really understand. What do you mean by "never gonna work"? Because markets obviously do largely work, despite the fact that people are not perfectly rational and there are other inefficiencies at the edges. They have their degenerate cases, of course, but I don't think anyone would say markets "don't work" in general. Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the s…

With enough regulations, subsidies, strategic planning and government interventions when things turn bad, mixed economies do the job pretty well, that's right. And when the regulation is lacking the outcome is as well. And even these economies are structured around monopolistic and oligopolistic actors. They are as related to “free market” as northern European countries welfare state is related to Communism.

Right, those are the current technologies we have to make markets work in a particular way. They don't preclude other technologies which work with freer markets.

Like there's a whole zoo of healthcare provision approaches, for example. Single payer can work fine (ala Norway), but so can Bismarck (ala Switzerland). The latter is a technological architecture that _enables_ similar or better outcomes, while being closer to a fully market-based approach.

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

#607

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #338
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is provably not true. You can look at computers (besides Apple), cell phones (besides Apple), TVs, any commodity item, etc

Interestingly enough, all the examples you cited are being produced by Asian brands, where the various governments have specific policies designed to make companies actually engage in such a competition in order to take over the world markets. Now do banking, retail, real estate, insurance, healthcare, software, or any business where Asian governments are not actively subsidizing a race to the bottom competition and…

Software is easy - look at the App Store. Every piece of software and even the console market is moving away from pay once to shady pay to win mechanics.

Google and Facebook make most of their money by giving things away and selling to advertising.

The biggest retail stores squeeze their suppliers and compete on prices, healthcare everywhere else except the asinine system in the US is government backed.

The fast food places compete on price and “fast casual” that costs slightly more are dying

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

#608

Post by therealpygon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #520
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or not if you want the threat to work a next time.

> not if you want the threat to work a next time You don’t care if it works next time. It worked this time. If it doesn’t work next time, build it next time.

Cool, but isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already? These companies have been threatened, sued, and incentivized in numerous ways over many years, which has yet to be successful, and yet it seems like you are suggesting “just one more time” will be the impetus for change…this time…you swear…probably?

Note: I don’t disagree or agree, rather, I’m pointing out how flawed the logic is that just one more time will be what it takes.

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

#609

Post by autoexec »

ttul wrote: post #9

In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for ei…

> Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.

Sometimes it works in ways you don't expect though https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-ins...

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

#610

Post by Zopieux »

phkahler wrote: post #494

Switzerland is 1/6 the size of Michigan and has 90 percent as many people as Michigan (9M vs 10M). With a higher population density I'd expect better rollout of things like internet service. And that's just ONE average size US state - there are 50, some of which are larger with even fewer people. It's not really a fair comparison regardless of which business or political factors are in play.

I was wondering why there wasn't yet a comment dismissing any change or progress in the US citing its land size, forgetting that the US has hundreds of large, dense cities where this "argument" does no hold.

Never change!

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