Switzerland is smaller than West Virginia. Less than 1% of the US. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one.
Is West Virginia wired up?
Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
91–100 of 464 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#92The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
How do you explain the top comment at this time (about Spectrum in NYC)? It can't get denser than NYC. So I guess it's not the density that's the problem.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#93I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article. The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that. Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that. The essay elegantly articulates the why…
The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.
The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. US consumers don't want 25 gig.
But the article does point out that 1G plans are very widely available at low prices. US consumers would love that but it's not available anywhere near as widely as in Switzerland.
For certain definitions of 1G, it's probably available widely in the US at this point. It won't be symmetrical, but Comcast (and I would guess Spectrum) have 1G+ download speeds in lots of places.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#95I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.
I had an apartment once with both 300Mb cable and 1Gb fiber available. Cable was $40 and reliable with all the bandwidth I needed. The fiber sales reps would stop by a few times a year perplexed that I didn't want to pay through the nose for a bigger number. Moving away to a different location, I had to put up with a dodgy cable provider until cheap fiber was deployed and still don't need the extra bandwidth.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#96The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The higher the density, the more problematic to dig up the streets to bury the fibre lines. And US streets are much wider to dig the lines. I've seen city-level street works in the US and they are incredibly slow compared to national highway work, or street work in Europe. Like 10x slower. And getting the permissions? Impossible
You don’t need to dig up streets to install fiber underground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_boring
Well, that's "small" digging, but you still need maps and permissions.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#98Not 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.
The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.
The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.
And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.
Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.
US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.
It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#99The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 2…
> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state.
I used to have a car like that also.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#100[deleted]