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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

sschueller.github.io

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

#91

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Slop? I wrote this myself over the last 4 days. [edit] Since people really hate the AI images, I have removed all of the ones not relevant to the article. As soon as the github action is through it will be deployed.

Your article has so many bad premises it might have gone better with AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841

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

#92
post #61

I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but consistently and constantly don't.

It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity

Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US states.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some markets just inherently turn non-free very quickly when left unsupervised. Especially infrastructure markets.

Most markets inherently turn non-free when left unsupervised. That's the insight that folks like Keynes came to (as does any honest, informed observer with two or more functioning brain cells). That's why anti-trust and competition-preserving regulators and laws are essential. Without them, a very few powerful players form [0] cartels and/or tri/du/monopolies and enrich themselves vastly out of proportion with the va…

There won’t be anti-trust as long as elections can be bought and there’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.

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

#94
post #7

Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course). The US a…

> The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That’s the point, not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw coming.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> with the notable exception of people with lots of capital to wipe the competition out of the market then do a rug pull after the fact

They used to be called robber barons.

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

#97

Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free market

Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?

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

#98
post #37
post #7

Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course). The US a…

We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of their infra for free without the "share space" requirement (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by munici…

In the UK, they split the infra provider (Openreach) from the consumer company (BT). So it's no longer BT giving access to the other providers.

In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and they're on a level playing field with other providers.

That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression is there are no large differences between providers on the same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to packaging and customer service in the end.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Sometimes commenters all over the internet write like this because they just got incredibly jealous after reading the parent post. I've been thinking more and more about how most posts are jealous or depressed outtakes against the world, system, or other person. This fundamental human behavior won't change, and is as reflexive as a monopolistic company reacting to a press release, proving the parent correct despite their scathing response of the child.

It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.

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

#100
post #60

Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick google.

While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole, the Bay Area in California does have comparable median household income.

In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts.

I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to a GPU, etc.

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