BTW, I am also disturbed by AI-generated images. The ones with the three workers laying cables look highly unrealistic and made me pause for a couple of minutes, wondering if they lay cables that way in Germany. The ones about how households are connected to CO look like you get multiple 720-fiber cables to the same household.
ETA from my ISP to actually get any of those lines into my apartment is still 2028.
So if one company is doing the east part of the town, and another company is doing the west, at some point they could leverage the infrastructure of each other.
I don't think so. German open access law says if you're in a "market dominating" position, you have to share access to what you have. I'm at least unaware of a law that allows forcing telcos to build more than they want. (And even if there were, it'd be balanced by them deciding to just not build at all.)
Worse, two companies are chasing each other, so you have the ground being opened, closed, and within half a year the other company does the same. Even worse, they let the fiber cables stick out of the ground until the house subscribes to them, so a lot of houses have 1 or 2 ugly orange cables sticking out of the ground for years near the front door.
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 towns, and 2G or nothing as soon as you’re a few km out of them.
There is a fibre trunk running down the main road, 1.5km from the village, but when we enquired France telecom quoted about €250,000 to extend the fibre up to us. We passed.
Edit: same kinda deal with free.fr. If I check availability by address, it fails, as while the commune exists, the village does not, never mind the roads within it. If I enter the land line number, it says it is a mobile number and refuses to proceed.
So: your figures say 90%, but I suspect that’s a theoretical number rather than a real one.
Maybe it’s 90% of the 60% of addresses which got included in the statistics.
Edit edit: Ah hah, yes. I’ve looked at arcep’s methodology. That 90% is inventoried premises (homes & businesses) which:
- could be connected to FTTH, theoretically.
- exist in the arcep database
- are within several km of a live fibre
My home would be counted as “connected” by their methodology, even though there’s a quarter million euro bill to pay to make it so, and several km of fibre to run.
So - the stat is self-aggrandising bullshit, sorry.
Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service distance of 16km. If you’re the first subscriber in that area, that €250k might be for opening up a whole new CO plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and your neighborhood.
As for the numbers, as it is open data, there are some sites like https://infofibre.fr/ where this is easier to see where we are. You can see that even rural regions have more than 90% of household coverage.
As for definitions, there are two cases for availability: immediate availability (infrastructure operator present up and you have at least one commercial operator after 3 months) or delayed availibility (the infrastructure operator has 6 months to make the address available after being asked by a commercial operator).
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 history count a lot.
In all fairness, we put an awful lot of effort into making the poor poorer as well.
It’s from 2023 but says 16 to 19 states.
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.
But yeah, it's not only easy it's very cheap. This is why you need a workers party so workers can effectively collaborate together to either primary the politician or convince them otherwise.
Oh and you can't just do this once either, it takes an entire life's worth of work and it never ends.
whatever the roll-out in switzerland is, it's heaps better than in germany and most other places.
[1] https://map.geo.admin.ch/#/map?lang=en¢er=2634455.81,119...
I now own (or rather the bank does) a small house in a more rural canton, and while it’s possible to apply for fiber, you have to pay a significant part of the cost yourself, last I checked it was more than 5K CHF. Not really worth it. I get 400 MBit/s over copper at home from Init7. When fiber is rolled out in the street, they will upgrade it for free.
Edit: added link to https://www.swisscom.ch/de/about/netz/anschluss/ftthondemand...
Has arguably the best infrastructure and system in the world and will still find issue with it. A real Swiss hardly knows the horror show that is the rest of the non-Switzerland world.
yeah, fiber rollout is slow outside of the cities. It’s still better than 95% of the developed world. All perspective.
Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, and the incumbents slowed their roll too.
It was a on-the-nose reminder that these companies can move fast when they think a real competitor might show up.
Some big cities have seen a surge of small providers too, which has been great for consumers.
That said, I dont buy the “natural monopoly” argument at all, especially trying to compare it to water supply.
City: just take a walk through manhattan and in a block or two look at the giant open-pit excavation with a 200-year-old morass of undocumented infrastructure under the street. This is before you even try to run fiber up to units in buildings which were built before electricity was standard. I am hardly saying it can't be done, simply that it is not as easy as density makes it seem.
State: the exact opposite problem -- just drive two hours north of NYC and (if you're not still in manhattan) you'll be in some fantastic areas of the state, but, the exact opposite problem exists.
Of note, I do think both of these problems are solvable and we should fundamentally solve them. Just anybody who thinks it's easy or cheap to do so is being myopic. If spent wisely, could be a very useful investment of our money, however.
It's such a bore.
Granted, Europeans (so me) can be arrogant about these things.
If my house were a country, I'd be in the top 0.1% of household internet speeds compared to other countries. Obviously everyone should be just like me!
But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre, >90% of population has option to get 1GBit fiber
There are always reasons why something can't be done, just like solving frequent school shooting problem in US
Perhaps he's talking about a different kind of homogeneity (one that conventionally falls under the "racism" category)
> Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre
Do not arm him with arguments
That is absurd for anyone who lives in the Old World. Some of the worst wars in history were fought amongst people whom you wouldn't be able to tell apart in a sauna.
Heck, even Palestinians and Israeli Jews are physically very similar.
"White", "brown" etc. aren't meaningful categories in the Old World, with a few exceptions like South Africa. Most of the Old World is intensely tribal.
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.
If you exclude neighboring countries Zurich has a foreign born population share of 27% (compared to 18% of Los Angeles). If you only look at the last 10 years Zurich has foreign born non neighboring immigration of 10% (compared to 4% for Los Angeles).
If you only look at intercontinental migration then Los Angeles wins with 14% (compared to 8% of Zurich).
So yes Zurich is less cosmopolitan then LA, but most of it is just because the US has more diverse neighbors.
The US is a large collection of a whole bunch of rich (by global standards), tiny, fairly homogenous areas. We manage roads and schools at state, county, and local levels; we could do municipal broadband.
Intelligent folks look at a system and figure out ways they can adapt it to their own situation. You can take systems they use for rural areas and figure out ways to do it on your own. The US is enormous, but most folks live in cities. States are tiny portions of the US, and some of those states would likely mirror Switzerland in diversity, density, and size.
It wouldn't matter if the country had a population density similar to the US and was similar in many ways. It'd still need adaptation because of the differences in culture, laws, and so on.
As usual, blame the suburbs, which make all kinds of infrastructure quite a bit more expensive per capita.
But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.
https://www.reviews.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Verizon-Fios-cov...
US states are little islands entirely capable of doing things like building infrastructure. There is no excuse for our states and their lack of movement, certainly not “the entire country is just tooooo big. whoa is us.” nonsense.
Sweden, for example, is tiny in population compared to the US but geographically its size covers from north Florida to NYC, with barely 10m people it's able to have great public transportation, fiber coverage to 80-85+% of buildings, cellphone coverage to 98% of the population even in remote locations.
Being enormous like the US might leave a vast area of low density population centres but it doesn't excuse at all that the areas where the vast majority of people live are dense enough to have these services very well covered. That doesn't happen though so the issue isn't being an enormous, diverse country at all.
Tell me you know nothing about Switzerland without telling me you know nothing about Switzerland. Try asking a German Swiss what they think about a French Swiss or either about the Romansch.
We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths
It all depends if you did your military service (which implies that you're swiss) and if you didn't decide to drop out of it or deemed as unfit. I don't think it's a myth really, it just happens to be that a lot of people don't do their military service and thus don't have to keep a weapon at home
> I’m not even talking about the languages, we have 20% immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has foreign roots.
> We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths
I'm joking, I realise that you are Swiss, but until I looked at the username I wasn't sure which side of the comparison you were referring to. Goes to show that even the nations' stereotypes are not dissimilar!
Incidentally, the northeast of the US has a similar or greater population density as Switzerland and is pretty rich. That area, at least, should be as capable of this sort of thing. Doing it for, say, everybody in Alaska would be a bit tougher.
I don't know what diversity has to do with anything here. As far as I've seen, people from all sorts of different places and cultures seem to like high speed internet about equally well.
And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct experience to adequately judge.)
I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be changed.
I see Americans talk about how impossible universal healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't largely figured it out.
The FR and UK systems are better IMHO.
Just to be clear, the Swiss healthcare system is still very good. Just not perfect.
Look at the political system of Switzerland and you will see a radically different setup.
And I think that’s the horse. The rest is cart. Yes they are rich but why? Yes they are relatively stable socially but why? Decentralised Canton government structure + direct democracy (referendums all the time for things that matter). That, I think, is why all the rest.
From a philosophical perspective, I love the cantonal/direct democracy model. But it's supported by a strong culture of awareness of current affairs, and involvement in the political process. (Of course, these two aspects are likely strongly synergistic.)
However, I'm not sure this unique political structure explains the trains running on time, the sensible choices made about the internet structure (per the article), the top-of-the-world healthcare system, the Swiss cheese science institute, or many other aspects of the broader country. It may partly explain the routinely excellent government bureaucracy (say that with a straight face anywhere else!), the convenient and reliable local public transport options, and the local police being well-resourced to the point of apparent boredom.
Ppl also recently voted for eid which should reduce bureaucratic hurdles
Imo in many cases public transport problems in other areas are heavily related to corruption
And the “more voluntary” bit is pretty important. As is it costing about double.
Over the course of a hundred or so years maybe. Culture is hard work.
> President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.
Universal Healthcare would be a new program in the US that would see a drastic tax increase, in that our healthcare spending currently going to insurance companies would instead go to a new federal agency. The amount of money companies and citizens spend on it may or may not also increase, but your quote has basically nothing to do with that.
If I can pay $100 in tax to save $200 in premiums and copays, that’s a win. The US is an extreme outlier in healthcare spend.
Again, no one has said this is impossible, which is my original point. Even Trump's idiotic rambling, which was mainly about child care costs, said nothing about the impossibility of universal healthcare.
Probably Singapore, which is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Asia anyway. 10 Gb symmetric fibre is broadly available at around SGD $50/month (about 35 EUR).
Separately, I am not totally sure just how widely deployed FTTH is in Switzerland. Here in Zürich it's everywhere, but zooming in on some rural place on init7's map tells quite a different story (perhaps not surprisingly).
Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?
Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and compare its land acquisition difficulties to what happened with the California project. I'll rankly speculate that difference will be the meat of your answer.
I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.
It might also worth it to check them out
In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't actually matter anymore.
So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.
Join us in advocating for this vision: https://swissrailvolution.ch/#goals
Switzerland gets along with others just fine, to the point where Italy and France used to handle their air defense on the weekends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702).
> The Swiss Air Force did not respond because the incident occurred outside normal office hours; a Swiss Air Force spokesman stated: "Switzerland cannot intervene because its airbases are closed at night and on the weekend. It's a question of budget and staffing." Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
If the swiss were able to get along with others, they wouldn't have such a reputation as racist nazis
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 contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.
Los Angeles has 10x the population density of Switzerland and around the same population density in urban area. Same for Washington dc, San Francisco...
It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. Distance between cities may be large, but the order of magnitude is closer when comparing within cities.
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.
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.
This isn’t a labor issue it’s purely political. Some people get rich from the status quo and bribe politicians to prevent competition. America is increasingly corrupt, particularly since citizens united and accelerating under the current admin
Guess we should have invested more in education.
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.
I live in the SF Bay Area, and have Sonic internet. 10gbe for 60 bucks a month.
I ended up building my own router/firewall because it was cheaper than anything off the shelf that could deal with that sort of speed.
It is entirely possible to have these sorts of services in the states, when competition is allowed.
Considering the geography and all the per-capita math (and pain), I don't think we're doing too bad as a country any more.
What the CRTC did was force the big players who own all the infrastructure to allow resellers to resell their services, and have to pay no more than cost to the big guy.
Those "smaller players" have a marginal involvement in the entire network aspect. They usually host ISP emails and sometimes DNS. Some of them do provide better customer service than the upstream big guy. At least until they need upstream help to resolve your issue, then it takes forever.
The other type of small players, who install their own infrastructure in smaller municipalities, were not impacted by this change. Some provinces (SK, QC) do give generous grants to those small players to install fibers. But AFAIK there is no federal involvement specifically to help them.
The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles.
It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.
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 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
And if it is a problem there is now 50G-PON which can run side by side, so you just add more bandwidth that way.
> In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those customers have more than 12 televisions going at once…
You’re more likely to see congestion from many customers all hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the numbers are.
I don’t even have 25gb and I’ve a home lab!
I noticed this years ago and thought it was an extremely sharp and therefore unSwiss practice, that in a more free market with better regulation and a more feral press would have already attracted a rap on the knuckles from the truth-in-advertising people. But Swisscom is government owned and has fingers in a thousand pies, so they're allowed to get away with it.
Unfortunately because regular consumers just compare numbers and assume higher is always better, this practice has dragged fully private ISPs into offering it now too. So the entire market is just engaged in systemic consumer fraud by this point. God knows how many people are overpaying for bandwidth their machines literally can't use without realizing it.
That said, the basic point Schüller is making is sound that the fiber cables themselves are more like roads than internet. They aren't a natural monopoly but the cost of overbuild is so high that it makes sense to treat it like one. It's just a pity that in the end this doesn't make a difference as big as the article seems to be advertising in its title.
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).
That's no different to Switzerland so far…
> and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
…but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the investment.
> I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
If anything, that can make things cheaper. You don't need to bury everything, and in some places (e.g. earthquake prone Japan) it's really counterproductive. But even if it isn't, it's certainly more expensive.
Sent from a 25G internet connection. My laptop only has 10G via TB though.
West Virginia is 1.5x the size of the entire country of Switzerland. Let that sink in.
Texas is 16x times bigger.
The idea that it should be doable in a country that is 100x bigger, with 50 separate states, god knows how many individual counties because it could be done in vastly smaller one is where your problem is.
The thing with fiber is that it can go so much longer than copper without any active components. It is also very future proof, you won't be pulling it out of the ground/off the pole for at least 50 years if not longer.
If size is such an issue, how did you get power?
You're not conflating 2 different infrastructure processes and ignoring the one took decades, are you? This is like saying "The US has built a road infrastructure why can't it do all light rails?"
The irony in your comment is that it government intervention, which is the opposite of a free market.
You can't have 2 road networks, highway systems, or railway networks. You can have, but it is pointless to, 2 water systems or 2 electric grids. Or fire brigades, or police. (criminal, not mall cops) Same applies for fibre in the ground. "Free market" doesn't work when you can't effectively compete.
If you're looking for reasons to fail, you will fail. The only thing your argument really excuses is that it will take longer. But the US doesn't have the political will to even start.
(Same for Germany, to some degree, btw.)
> Third, have you looked at Swiss geography? They're pulling fiber up the alps to the damn huts.
This is apples and oranges. The US is vastly more sparse. I think what is "f'ing ridiculous" is continuing to compare the 2 countries in ways they aren't comparable.
> 50 states where broadband regulation has been in a decade long battle over jurisdiction
Thanks for making my point, all I'm arguing is that Switzerland had the political will while the US doesn't (yet?) You're essentially arguing the problem exists because the problem exists.
It's a political problem, but a solvable one. Pretending that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
> It's a political problem, but a solvable one. Pretending that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
Pretending like you hvae any clue how the US works doesn't help either. There are over 3,000 different counties in the US all with different rules around right-away (which could be one of like 6 different jurisdictions). There are quite literally hundreds of ISPs in the US. And even if one did want to build in NYC for instance, it would be have to interact with dozens of jurisdictions that don't magically go away with a strengthened FCC.
And again, you're totally ignoring the physical geography of the land. So how exactly does that work at a legislative level? Forcing ISP in which communities specifically? Then, it not only becomes a political, but fiscal issue as well.
Which is why saying "it's a political problem" is grossly over-simplifying the situation.
Despite presence of some very big names (Jio, Airtel), there still is healthy local competition, and the former haven't been able to play any monopoly-related games yet, since it's quite easy to switch. The past few years have been a significant upgrade compared to what I've observed happening in the US. Providers might even start offering 10+ Gbit for consumers in the future, but I doubt there's a market for it right now.
Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous populations.
At that scale, you’re not comparing “policy choices,” you’re comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in Switzerland don’t fail in the U.S. because they’re bad, they fail because they don’t scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-autonomous states.
So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market dynamics isn’t really isolating “free markets” as a variable, it’s bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion, then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair dunk and very much "punching down".
There is absolutely no doubt that the system used in Switzerland is the right one and the system used in USA is the wrong one.
As TFA says, the optical fiber infrastructure that connects all individual customers is a case of natural monopoly and it must be built in a standard way and it must be shared by all who compete for communication services, exactly like the distribution of water or of electricity or like the public roads, which are the best analogy, and which must also be shared freely by anyone who provides transportation services.
Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere and are much more like some of your states.
It's okay, you don't have to argue with the point being made or anything.
Basically no state gets close, urban or otherwise. People here keep talking about size, rural, many states, whatever. The problem is really regulatory capture and monopolies, many states ban local municipalities from putting fiber down.
[0] ...often legally protected...
Want a free market? Stop messing with it.
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 is to make their product cheaper to produce by adulterating it with inferior ingredients, but mislead customers about the fact of the quality loss, the reason for the quality loss, or both.
The natural stable state of a profit-seeking business is the establishment of a monopoly or cartel. You get the most profit when there is neither a need to compete on price nor a need to expend resources on improving one's product.
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...
Anyways, the problem with monopoly pricing is that it’s unsustainable despite whatever agreements are made, as companies will defect and/or new companies enter. In other words, it’s competition itself which prevents monopolies from lasting very long, and that competition comes partially from having a low barrier to entry. There is a reason why the most expensive industries tend to be the most regulated.
A lot of ISPs need permitting that they will never get in order to enter a new market/location.
Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!
If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.
It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the sense that governance is a form of economic technology. Which is what leaves it open to people saying it can be done better.
The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a question of fitness to the current context.
And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work.
I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen.
[1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to be free.
Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.
Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.
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.
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.
Also, if you call regulations “technologies” (which I don't disagree with) then “free market” means technology-free.
Also, I'm not sure a free market is technology-free per se. What you're talking about is specifically ancap-like, but most free market frameworks involve a state actor that should (among other things) not allow for itself to be weaponized against other market participants.
Like the paradox of tolerance, you can't tolerate a free market for bribing your way to benefit from the state's monopoly on violence. I don't think the existence of this paradox destroys the value of free markets or tolerance.
In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.
As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.
My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.
Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.
If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.
Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.
And I have the 600M plan since it’s less than half the cost of 1G but still plenty fast for my needs. Where do you even find 10G??
The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house while the water and electricity were gone.
I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments. You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these materials.
With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30 days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the disruption is worth it.
I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now. Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.
Torrent software (the clients and the libraries) feel a little out-of-sync with prevailing torrent sizes and bandwidth availability.
And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on both ends if you are super determined.
And, having worked with the US providers all I can tell you is this: greed, and lots of it. And if they're the only option in an area, they will charge you a literal arm and a leg.
Just a small example: in a mall, there was a single provider Paid ~ 300USD for 5Mbps in 2024. Once we were able to upgrade the equipment and get a cell router, we got to pay about $50/mo for ~ 50-60Mbps. Mall provider not happy.
Maybe this shows that Switzerland has a sane political system?
Why can't NationX have quality public transit? Corruption. Why can't NationX have quality political parties or politicians? Corruption. Why can't NationX have a quality education and produce people capable of understanding and supporting their own political system? Corruption.
Like, why is the assumption that countries should be homogenous? Since when did geography, culture, industrial structure, natural-resource availability and national wealth become irrelevant?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
Rural coverage is challenging, true. And Switzerland has some challenging terrain in places. But FTTH coverage is currently at around 60% of the population, and Swisscom's strategy is to reach 90% by 2035. That doesn't sound so bad, especially when comparing internationally.
[1] https://www.ewz.ch/en/private-customers/fibre-optic/fibre-op...
So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.
It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.
The "US is large" argument is non-sense. 40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
* https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demog...
And two-thirds of the population lives with-in 100 miles of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
The US population is fairly concentrated.
And even if it wasn't, looking at history, the US managed to bring electrical cables to just about every household in the country, and later telephone cables. If those two things could be done in the 1900s, why can't fibre be done in the 2000s?
We had to pass acts of congress to pay for last mile electrical infrastructure for those who were truly out in the boonies and poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
We paid a shitload of money to various ISPs to do exactly the same thing for internet, multiple times, and then just let them.... not.
They managed for water and wastewater, which are a lot more complex than fiber.
Why? Other countries with similar population densities have done it. A bigger country should have an advantage due to economies of scale.
Even though, I agree with you it's possible, in my city the internet only got better when a monopoly was broken, and a state company decide to work in a new infrastructure, all FTTH, now I pay less than 100BRL for 300/150Mbps with that price 10 years ago it was only possible ADSL connections (25Mbps).
Now every major provider do have FTTH infra with great prices.
Most of the cost of an ISP is the so-called "last mile". Depending on your locale this is usually either stringing up cables on existing telephone poles or digging trenches, typically in the setback area between the road and the sidewalk that you might maintain but you don't technically own (or the municipality maintains an easement on, it varies).
Once you go from the premises to a central POP, the costs basically go to zero (per install). Backhaul bandwidth for a residential ISP is incredibly cheap, even free with peering arrangements.
The point is that geography really doesn't matter. Wiring up a 10,000 homes in Phoenix, Zurich, Shanghai or Sydney is basically the same (normalized for labor costs). The US is very spread out due to geography. It doesn't matter. The links between towns are a small fraction of the cost and often covered by existing rights-of-way anyway (eg railroads). You compare that to a highly urbanized and concentrated population like Australia where urban density is very similar to many American towns and cities and you're dealing with a very similar cost structure.
Think about it this way: if geography was the issue and not, say, artificial barriers to prevent competition (including from municipal broadband), why would the ISP lobby spend so much moeny to make municipal broadband illegal (as they do in many states)? Or why would they formalize a monopoly into a contract with an "exclusivity" deal (ie franchise agreement)?
I thought spamming your own blog was not allowed here.
Bit silly to compare the size of countries but not scaling resources correspondingly.
This isn't an an issue of people in Maryland not getting money -- they get robust federal spending and have a robust state budget of their own. This is simply: Americans getting what they vote for, which is notoriously not public infrastructure.
Then the courts decided, meh, we just don't like it. We are going to tell the FCC otherwise. It all went away. The incumbent local carriers have now had monopoly power over huge swarths of the infrastructure. No access to dark fiber. https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Associat...
Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling. But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah, well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down congress's law because "innovation" sounds better. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition. These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything they want! Bah!!
I think it was a other case,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4
We were bamboozled on a massive scale.
Actually $1k might not even do it all, but I could probably get the switches and router for just under $1k and leave the WiFi at 1G.
I suspect my 1G costs a bit more than yours though
Of course, my internet is only 1g/1g unless I want to pay to upgrade the munifiber's equipment, and they use good telecom grade equipment, so I don't.
The problem in the USA is that we protect an incumbent's profits at all costs. Natural monopolies end up serving the monopoly instead of the community. For example, in Atlanta, natural gas is delivered by Atlanta Gas Light, priced on some theoretical capacity number for the most gas you'll ever need at one time (DDDC). We then pay marketers to supply the gas. AGL gets paid whether or not we use gas, and the marketer gets paid both a monthly fee and a rate per therm. It's the most expensive gas I've had in this country.
Things change, and 25Gbps is massive future proofing for the next 50 years probably.
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.
Is that so crazy? If 10G was the default, you could just plop a cheap NAS at home and nobody would need to pay monthly subscriptions for cloud services.
10Gbps gets you speeds only a few times slower than a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. Except you can run that over the Internet!
10Gbps is like.... my /home on my desktop could be served via NFS from somewhere else and it would probably be barely noticeable. That's just another level of crazy.
If you think about it, other than the "neutral, open" part, it's a return to the traditional phone model, where every home gets a dedicated point-to-point copper pair (or sometimes two pairs), which terminates in a hub (the telco central building) nearby, instead of being shared between several homes (though I've heard that, in the distant past, phone lines were also sometimes shared between households).
There's nothing inherently "wrong" with a P2MP topology for public infrastructure.
Does 25Gbps matter? I mean, it's not like your online services are going to be "faster", right?
Is Netflix or any other web endpoint that normal people use going to be noticeably better because a household has 25Gbps rather than 1Gbps?
Doesn't this only matter for many simultaneous users of heavy web traffic?
I wonder if this speed was available everywhere, would more people self-host?
While I think the model of having the government own the Fiber lines and selling access to providers has a lot of potential, it would be very expensive to build this out to even 60% of the US.
But that said, it took more than forty years to electrify the entire United States[0]. "The internet", as we think of it, hasn't even existed for 35 years yet. (Yes, I know there were networks before that that the current system arose from, but that's hair-splitting. I don't think the kind of Internet the average person might even consider using existed before, generously, ~1995-1996.) Yet, 95% of US adults use the Internet, implying a penetration at least as high[1].
The median Internet speed in the US is around 250mbps down and is in the top 10 in the world[3].
The problem is that access and speeds are not evenly distributed, not that we can't get 22gbps symmetric down/up. We don't need to give people in cities faster Internet; truly, you do not need that speed to do day-to-day tasks. You don't even need the 1gbps down/150mbps up that I have. What we need to do is make sure people in rural areas can access at least the median speed.
That said, I think we could give it another 15-20 years and see where our country with around 36 times the population and 238 times the landmass is at in terms of speeds.
[0] https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/how-the-history-of... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... [2] https://tachus.com/internet-speeds-usa-vs-the-rest-of-the-wo...
I hear 10Gbps is coming soon. The only annoying thing is that ours, despite being terminated the Swiss way, isn’t symmetrical, I think due to congestion on the sea cables?
Australia seems to be pretty backwards in general though.
Bet they don't have that in Switzerland.
Progress is good, and physical connections are well worth the investment due to how long the stuff will last. But I honestly think VDSL2 and cable are still good enough for most people. The typical family and youth are probably on 5G as much as wifi these days.
I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.
It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade; maybe we won't for that reason.
What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!
It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very helpful for this.
> I don't understand the desire (fetish?)
If you don't need it then you should be happy with what you've got, but calling other people's uses a "fetish" is unnecessary. And weird.
The reality is that the reason these high speed internet political initiatives fail is that for most people internet access is a solved problem, and there isn't the critical mass of people to push through legislation.
Which is not to say that for a minority, it's not a solved problem, but the desires of those in a minority situation don't get prioritized in the democratic process.
it's weird how insanely large games are now, like 100's of gigabytes. I can't remember which game my son was playing, maybe DCS or some other milsim but it was around 300gb download. That's roughly 64-65 dvds.
I was on a cell modem until very recently. Just the latency difference between gigabit fiber and anything else is noticeable for me. When a website loads a ton of stuff in a single page, some of that is serialized and requests are back to back instead of parallelized. The longer the serial chain, the higher you multiply your round trip time. This is especially so with auth providers that take you away and back to a site (or similar for online purchases via external sites (eg: PayPal etc.)) All of that time adds up.
So, my home connection is now down to 11.9 ms to google.com, my wifi adds another 5ms. I did "start timeline recording" and hit the google homepage. It just took 900ms to load the front page in Safari. On a good day with my cell hotspot, my latency is 35 at idle and goes way up (sometimes in seconds) when pushing bandwidth.
Video calls with 1000ms and higher latency are ... difficult. Especially when everyone else is in the sub 100ms range.
Ping to my public IP's gateway address:
30 packets transmitted, 30 received, 0% packet loss, time 29031ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.449/1.915/2.212/0.166 msBesides the uses other people have suggested, here are some uses I would have for a fast symmetrical connection:
- Backing up data to my home/office NAS while away.
- Remoting to my workstation desktop from any location, for any reason.
- Using my home as a Tailscale exit node for clients for whom it's already a hassle to allowlist my home office's IP, so I can work from anywhere.
- Switching my nixos configuration using the caches in my home office where my custom derivations are built.
I have 90Mbps down and 20Mbps up. All of the above is workable but it would be great, amazing if it were faster.
The remote places I would do this from:
- the doctors' waiting room because we have teenagers
- the bleachers of the pool for the diving lessons because we have teenagers
- the in-laws spare bedroom where we're visiting for an extended time during school holidays but not work holidays because we have teenagers.
Some of us have different needs, under choices that we make that are optimal for other aspects of our life but not for having a slower asymmetric connection at home.
This connection is shared as well. My partner relies heavily on cloud syncing. We both like to stream 4K HDR video. I like being able to get devices updated and ready to use with minimal time spent waiting for downloads.
I also live in NZ, where multi-gigabit fibre connections are often cheaper than what Americans have to pay for a fraction of the bandwidth. It’s not a notable financial burden or anything, and it’s not like we have data caps to worry about. It’s very much a situation where the use cases naturally find themselves once the option is there.
Also, 25/10 Mbps is painfully slow for a shared home connection in the modern day. There’s videos on YouTube that can push a higher bitrate than that. The absolute slowest plan that my ISP even offers is 100/20 Mbps for about $35 USD per month, while the most common/baseline plan for most households in NZ is 500/100 Mbps after the fibre carriers continued to increase speeds at the lowest tiers.
Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.
But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries and 20–30 minutes to recompile them myself.
But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough.
An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating photo–realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I’m sure that a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower it significantly, but it’ll always be more expensive than mere 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.
Going to work? No worries about forgetting a USB stick or portable SSD. I can always just fire up Wireguard and grab it from home.
Sharing Jellyfin access with family and friends has also been fun.
Essentially any job that involves massive fat data streams that ends up having a real time collabrative hybrid remote team.
This is dog slow, you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that. Downloading a reasonably recent game would also take close to an entire day. Not everyone needs a full symmetric Gbps perhaps, but 100Mbps is kind of a baseline nowadays, and more is better for faster downloads.
Do you mean the other way around, 25Mbps Down and 10 Mbps up?
It is nice to have, especially when it doesn't cost much. That is why I am perfectly OK with PON rather than dedicated fibre. You only need the 1 or 10Gbps speed for may be a 10 min window per month.
I do think 25Mbps on a house hold bases is quite low. On a 5Mbps Video file I want the first 10 second buffer, 50Mbps done instantly. While I am loading multiple page in the background. Multiply that with a few more user in family. It is perfectly useable a you said, if you dont mind waiting.
Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the point we see law of diminishing returns.
- Downloading games, movies etc.
- Updating software.
- Doing remote data backups or restoring from them.
- Browsing the internet. Fiber still makes a noticeable difference especially in badly optimized websites.
I have a FIOS connection here at home, and it seems entirely sufficient. Even AAA steam games, I hit 'download' and go grab a snack in the kitchen and it's done. My server does incremental backups to s3 every night, but its not like i'm sitting there watching it.
I download a new large model maybe once every other week. It takes a few seconds, maybe minutes. I don't really notice either way? 25x faster doesn't seem like it would make any difference.
That said, I do find myself downloading packages and watching 4K video all day long. 25Mbps is noticeably slower the majority of the time. You can get by, of course, the same way you can compile an Xcode project on a 2019 Intel Mac (I still think MacOS 26 supports Intel?) but it's a significantly nicer experience on more recent M series machines.
Who likes to sit around waiting on downloads/compilation?
Now I'm realizing you said 25Mbps up, 10Mbps down. Wow, assuming this isn't a mistake, 10Mbps is slow enough to make even normal web browsing start to chug IME.
P.S. I experienced this at different condos in different countries in South East Asia.
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.
You said that already, but repeating something isn't evidence. Oversubscription would be something that happens with cable internet on a node by node basis, so to say the problem is one thing and only that doesn't make any sense. Not only that but people will sign up for hundred megabit to gigabit internet but they only really need to watch some streams that use 3mb each.
You can actually figure out oversubscription if you ping nodes, especially over time.
There are more factors like international bandwidth, lack of caching servers in smaller countries so bandwidth has to be international, cable signal levels etc.
None of these come close to wifi contamination. If you have two neighbors trying to watch tv over wifi and you're trying to watch tv over wifi, you're sunk. Now take that to being surrounded by a dozen people, all watching tv over wifi and all watching videos on phones and tablets.
Unless someone is in a house, more isolated from their neighbors it is going to be a much bigger problem for almost everyone.
You can say 'oversubscription' because you're buddy said that, but even that can have some truth while still being a marginal issue next to the real problems. Even in places with great internet, people get a single wifi router, put all their computers and TVs on it, then blame their ISP.
I guess I should've focused less on oversubscription and made clear that we know it's not spectrum utilization. For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did, and it's not the problem.
It has been a problem for basically everyone living in apartments that had network problems that I've seen. If you measure at the wrong time it's going to look fine. You have to be there when people are watching video over wifi.
Again, just because people can't get their full bandwidth, it doesn't mean oversubscription is the actual bottleneck.
Starlink has me extra excited for exactly this: region agnostic competition.
Get rekt, telecom incumbents
People all over the world seem to be fighting same little battles and falling into same traps all the time.
There are many known gems that present structure in ecosystems with correct incentives that do work, they should be known/discoverable and they should be consulted when making decisions.
The cable/fiber providers played all areas of government like a fiddle.
Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?
Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?
So the way the system works is each house has 4 physical fibers into it, that go into a central office without being aggregated up. Inside the central office any ISP can offer any speed vs price option they want, because they just patch you in at layer 1.
So of course, most people wouldn't necessarily need to get 26Gbit. But if you want to offer it as an ISP you can, and it's up to customers to decide if it's worth the price.
One obvious use case would be folks that work with high resolution video. Uncompressed 8K is about 8TiB per hour of footage. Compressed raw like RED cinema et all are more like 1TiB per hour at the high quality settings.
25Gbit vs 1Gbit for moving 1TiB is 5 minutes vs 2 hours.
A quick google says the 25Gbit service from Init7 is $80 bucks a month.
Sounds like an astoundingly good deal vs what's available in the US to me.
An average AAA game is 100-200GB today. That is not by accident, The best residential internet of 1Gbps dedicated it is still 30 minutes of download, for the average buyer it is still few hours easily.
A 2TB today game is a 5 hour download on 1 Gbps connection and days for median buyer. Game developers can not think of a 2TB game if storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth all do not support it.
Hypothetically If I could ship a 200TB game I would probably pre-render most of the graphics at much higher resolutions/frame-rates than compute it poorly on the GPU on the fly.
More fundamentally, we would lean towards less compute on client and more computed assets driven approach for applications. A good example of that in tech world in the last decade is how we have switched to using docker/container layers from just distributing source files or built packages. the typical docker images in the corporate world exceed 1GB, the source files being actually shipped are probably less than 10Mb of that. We are trading size for better control, Pre built packages instead of source was the same trade-off in 90s.
Depending on what is more scarce you optimize for it. Single threaded and even multi-threaded compute growth has been slowing down. Consumer internet bandwidth has no such physics limit that processors do so it is not a bad idea to optimize for pre-computed assets delivery rather than rely on client side compute.
When I paid Comcast for 1.5Gbit/s down, Steam would saturate that downlink with most games. I now pay for service that's no less than 100mbit symmetric, but is almost always something like 300->600mbit. Steam can -obviously- saturate that. Amusingly, the Epic Games Store (EGS) client cannot. Why?
Well, as far as I can tell, the problem is that -unlike the Steam client- the EGS client single-threads its downloads and does a lot of CPU-heavy work as part of those downloads. Back when I was running Windows, EGS game downloads absolutely pegged one of my 32 logical CPUs and left a ton of download bandwidth unused. In contrast, Steam sets like eight or sixteen of my logical CPUs at roughly half utilization and absolutely saturates my download bandwidth. So, yeah... if you're talking about downloads from video games stores it might be that whatever client your video game store uses sucks shit.
OTOH, if you're talking about video game servers where people play games they've already installed with each other, unless those servers are squirting mods and other such custom resources at clients on initial connect, game servers usually need like hundreds of kbps at most. They're also often provisioned to trickle those distributed-on-initial-connect custom resources in an often-misguided attempt to not disturb the gameplay of currently-connected clients.
But generally the real question is how often the extra speed would give you a real measurable advantage. If it’s only a few times per month then it’s probably not worth the extra subscription cost.
If the concern is cost (rather than recabling the house) Mikrotik sells solid, inexpensive gear. Its management UIs take a bit of getting used to, but are fine once you've figured them out. You can also find two-port Intel 10gbit NICs on the Newegg "Marketplace" for ~40USD [0], and -while most already come with modules (and you will be informed if they don't)- if the X520s you're sold don't permit non-Intel transcievers, the NIC's firmware can usually be easily modified to change that. [1]
[0] <https://www.newegg.com/intel-e10g42bfsr/p/N82E16833106041>
[1] <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fpatching...>
If people don't actually use the extra speed then it's effectively free to provide, anyway. If providers could advertise 25Gbps while only needing the same capacity they do for 1Gbps, I imagine they'd do it just to bring in a few more customers. The fact that they don't suggests it would result in more usage suggests it would be useful.
Sounds like racketeering with extra steps..
Our infrastructure at times goes back 200 years old. We have rules and words in today's networking linguo that go back 70 years old. You can't just go and tell that it would have been better this way. It absolutely would. And I'm happy for Swiss people who can have 25gpbs at a fraction of the cost. But you can't do that with an emerging tech that is trying to replace existing architecture.
Swiss guys built all that after the tech was wide-spread in the world, and they have built it over a very outdated infrastructure. It was a breeze.
US just unable to use this approach. We can't.
Should we come up with a new one? Yes. Should we look at the Swiss solution and try to replicate it. Yes. Is it awesome? Yes. Would it work here? No.
Do you seriously think 70 years ago Swiss had no telephon net so they create a new one?
Or is this argument that US is just too special to change?
But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.
https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kup...
A dedicated last-mile connection gives you a dedicated link to your ISP’s edge network, not a dedicated path across the internet. You won’t compete with your immediate neighbors on a shared access network anymore, sure, but you’re still sharing the ISP core, peering links, and transit links with the rest of their customers.
In practice this usually works well enough, because ISPs engineer their core and peering capacity with low over-subscription, especially for business and DIA customers. So you can often push near line rate anyway, but not because you have a truly reserved slice of the internet. A Switzerland-sized country would need like petabit-scale connectivity to provide actually dedicated 25G links (or even just 1G links) to everyone.
The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.
There are other things we could do without completely changing the dynamics or policy. We could mandate all home leasing and selling to have Internet Speed labeled. Giving consumer the knowledge and choice. And all future new home to have at least 1Gbps Internet and upgradable to 10Gbps or higher as standard. The market will sort itself out. And give government some space and room to further negotiate terms with companies.
Now the technical question, why no sharing? why point to point? why 4 fibre and not 2 or 8? And the no sharing is a little bit of gimmick, because at the end of the day everything is shared. The backbone has 100Gbps and you cant have 10 labours all using 25Gbps. I also dont think P2P make sense in a metropolitan city like Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong, especially in high rise, ultra high density buildings with limited space. When 50G-PON barely meet demands we are looking at 100G or 200G-PON. Individual fibre is simple not feasible in those settings.
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.
Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines
Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre
We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation, that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote communities.
Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.
And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes are all marketing bs).
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.
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.
Some of these qualities are more legible than others.
* no fiber in the neightbour I am * internet on mobile: 10M when lucky * all houses have no city water pipe
I'm glad they started to collect blak water (a month ago)
That's on top of the usual problems with comparing small European countries to all of America. Switzerland's entire population is barely larger than the population of New York City. There are several metro areas in the US with more people than Switzerland.
Switzerland is also very, very small. It's lands mass is equal to about 0.5% of the United States. We only have a handful of states smaller than Switzerland.
There are valid geopolitical discussions to be had, but it's hard to read these articles that single out tiny little European countries and compare them to the sprawling United States and ignore the elephant in the room.
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.
The different levels of governments in the US are corrupt. Sometimes from town all the way up to Federal. Actually its definitely completly corrupt at the Federal level. A politician or Judge has already been bought to make sure a case like the Swisscom lost. Would never happen here.
So before we have any progress in really any industry in the US. We need to desperately clean house with our politicians, attorney generals and judges.
/thread
In addition, requiring fiber to each new home would expand housing costs in the US substantially because many are not located close by to existing fiber networks.
I’m not familiar with Swiss government policy but their government construction efforts are frequently far more successful for lower costs than ours. I cannot say whether Switzerland does it differently but usually in the US if there is surplus to be captured it is captured. As an example, if the Swiss system were to be implemented with US tools it would look like a government project would here: private companies would be invited to build the fiber to each home, and eventually one would win the contract and if the economic benefit would be $1b, they would charge $0.99b to construct it. M
If the government itself attempts to build it, it is constrained by its pension obligations and its desire to remain solvent to not actually have employees on staff. It therefore will use contractors in order to do things and we’re back in situation 1.
Governments originally formed for this kind of shared task and to enforce no free riding on it. But whatever factors drive US politics, US government purposes are to extract maximally from economically productive classes and redirect it to politically productive classes - through the use of selective government contracts and populist giveaways.
To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing even better than that.
Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be ahead of most places, although they certainly pay for it. (Even that has gotten way, way better. I'm getting really nice MVNO service with unlimited data and even a decent unlimited tethering plan for less than $30/month)
25 Gigabit is nice but that's so expensive on the client device side to the point where it's basically unattainable for any consumer. Your average consumer primarily uses the Internet via WiFi devices that might max out at 300Mbps practical speeds or lower depending on when they purchased their devices and WiFi access point and their distance from it.
Then you've got the problem of the speed on the other end. 25Gb fiber is great until you realize that the server you are downloading from is only going to give you 1/100th a lot of the times.
I haven't even mentioned the fact that you're now adding CPU and SSD bottlenecks to the equation. I'm pretty sure 25Gb/s is higher than the maximum write speed on my SSD.
I have gigabit fiber at home and the ability to buy faster speeds from my ISP but I find the idea totally pointless when that means I would have to buy $500 in networking equipment (if not more) and possibly rewire my home (currently sketchy Cat 5e that seems to be installed poorly and I'm lucky to have that). I even have the latest WiFi 7 from a highly reputable prosumer brand along with very new WiFi 7 and 6E 6Ghz client devices but the highest speed I see using those devices where I want to use them is around 600Mbps.
I spent 4 days on it and the video I made to go along with it with me speaking every word. The video has no AI, it is all stock video and audio footage which I pain stackenly stiched together in DaVinci Resolve.
I used AI to spell check and fix my ESL grammer in the article. Initially I also generated a number of unnecessary AI images which I removed again. I only left the ones that explain certain things like the p2p model.
makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.
I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.
I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.
One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.
USA: 9,147,590 km^2
Switzerland: 41,295 km^2
That's a factor of 221.5 to 1.
Obviously you're not going to lay fibre to the last 1% of population in the US (for the most part).
The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.
A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.
Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.
Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.
Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.
Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.
The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)
No? I've been trying to download my MyMiniFactory library[0] and I'm currently getting 25MBps over 5 downloads. A single download will easily do 15MBps.
[0] Which sucks, even at high speed - they have no API, no bulk download, and you're limited to 6 items at a time. I have to click through 1000+ items with easily 5000+ sub-items and individually download each one.
[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.
First image: extra. "The Paradox" section header: extra. "The Natural Monopoly" section header: sort of helpful. "The German Model" and "The American Model" headers: also sort of helpful. Also, the chart of monopoly territories is definitely helpful. But then after that, the "monopoly power" image is complete slop. "The Swiss Model" header is sort of helpful. The following couple of photos are also helpful! Speedtest result is helpful. But then the image after that is kind of pointless. "The Oversight" header is kind of pointless. The photo after that is kind of helpful. "The Answer" header I can't really make sense of and I'd lean more towards not helpful.
And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.
The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.
1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber
2. Everyone on the internet is using a “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream. If your ISP doesn’t provision enough upstream capacity, the last mile doesn’t matter.
3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland
5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day.
Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M
Yes there is: the cost.
> Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
It is in Switzerland. That's the whole point of this setup.
> Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland
It is in the big cities. Elsewhere the same arrangement is true, but on a lower scale.
The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps - thst isn’t true.
> The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps
Lack of reading comprehension skills.
The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.
Care to give a rebuttal?
Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).
Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing.
if a community has been screaming for fiber internet for years and the service companies cry “oh it’s just too expensive” when we know that isn’t true, then the people who pay the taxes should say “ok, apparently you’re not up to the job, you and/or your business model is clearly a failure, we’ll do it and provide it cheaper than you would have anyway.”
maybe this would force the competition we know can often work. if they can’t figure out a way to do it without subsidies, then we’ll do it ourselves. you can call it “spooky government” all you want, but that’s just another term for “us”
something to the effect of: ok, this thing has become integral to society. ceos, you have 5 years to compete and prove that you’re up to the task by delivering A, B, and C for $N. can’t do it? not up to it? no worries, thanks for trying.
That's what my town (Longmont, CO) did! We had laid a fiber loop around the city back in the '90s for traffic signal coordination. Over the years the town would engage different private companies to try to get them to lay fiber (or even directional wifi) to the door. None of them took off, so the city decided to do it themselves. Xfinity tried to sue us and ran a weak attempt at astroturfing, but after about five years of concerted back-hoeing most of the town has gigabit. It isn't 25 gigabit by any means but it works.
Bonus: you call a 303 number for support and somebody who lives here picks up like "What can I do for ya, hun?" (I exaggerate, but not by much). Half an hour later your problem is solved.
Edit: It's $50/month for that.
https://communitynetworks.org/content/municipal-ftth-network...
How to Build a Fiber Network on a Small-City Budget [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhtdBZbOMc
Getting Fiber to My Town [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 - September 2020 (126 comments)
Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?
I’m not saying commit to bluffing. But after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumb.
Your community is still going to be paying whatever the cable company wants to charge for the service. There's definitely a reason to run it yourself.
You don’t care if it works next time. It worked this time. If it doesn’t work next time, build it next time.
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.
No, it’s the time that it worked. The cable company upgraded. That’s all that matters. Whether it’s happened many times or not is irrelevant. The next time will come next time.
> which has yet to be successful
OP said they laid the fiber. It was literally successful. Preëmptively striking your service provider because they might screw you in the future is silly.
what did people think abbot and turnbull were selling? wasn't better service for users, it was servicing telstra and murdoch.
In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the government, tying the case up in court for years.
We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell, they struggle to just fill potholes.
A common variation is that they just provide the physical infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.
As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually a larger problem in the cities than out in the countryside.
even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are educated intelligent people in rural areas…
Also everybody else responding to me is ignoring the point that most rural municipalities can barely afford keep their roads marginally flat, let alone tear up the roads, lay fiber, then repair those roads. Municipal fiber is a pipe dream in most scenarios, but workable in reasonably high density regions that have a tax base to work with.
better than dsl? i mean, sure? but absolutely not even close to better than fiber. there’s a reason data centers in rural areas run fiber for miles and miles to their centers and aren’t on … starlink.
Straw man. It doesn’t need to comparable. Just sufficient. If a rich rural community wants to pay to lay fiber into the boonies, they can still do that. But it shouldn’t be a shared cost across society. (I live in a rural community.)
We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."
Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.
It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
Subsidies.
> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure
Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.
Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.
My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.
If someone came to you and said - you have two choices:
Work incredibly hard, raise a lot of money, build a bunch of infrastructure. And at some point in the future you will make some more money.
Or - keep taking your very nice high guaranteed salary for the foreseeable future.
What would you pick?
I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
It's the old Marx quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Except you know, the opposite.
If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper.
With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.
I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.
There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.
However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.
Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.
Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.
And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.
if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.
(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)
think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.
some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?
The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.
Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.
no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.
its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.
a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.
Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.
In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.
But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either
In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.
Would borrowing money (issuing a bond) be an option in cases like this? Pay it off over the course a decade (two/three?), and make the payments part of the fee put to users?
Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
If you want something more or less weather proof, you can get microwave P2P links that run in licensed bands and you don't get any signal interference from similar nearby antennas.
Both WiFi and Microwave equipment act just like bridges and you can connect them to a switch or router.
Except that opening the manholes is a crime, using the ISP's channels would be at least a civil cause of action, laying such infra requires a municipal permit... The ISP was not worried about such "competition".
Now try doing this in the US, the land of endless red tape, NIMBYs and HOAs. And without having an already dug cable channel. Sure, that's going to scare the probably multi-billion-$ incumbent ISP...
To put it another way, the building of infrastructure should be a monopoly, but the use should be free (as in speech, not beer)
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
Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The key is knowing which laws you can break, how much you can break them, and what's likely to happen if you're caught. When an illegal good thing is caught, the response is usually to slap on the wrist and legalise it.
A lot of current ISPs did start out illegally too.
Don't splice into other people's fibers though. That's a much worse crime of property damage.
You won't be in front of a jury for "setting up fast internet". You'll get caught climbing into a manhole with electrician tools and charged with terrorism. The jury will be fed a story of how you had expensive specialized equipment on you, so this was a well-funded professional attempt at sabotaging critical infrastructure. You'll have a shitty public defender who will only realise that fiber in this case is about internet not clothing because he first read the file in the taxi to the courthouse. You'll take a plea deal because you can't afford a trial.
The system doesn't work how you think it does, at least not for the people on the ground.
Sometimes it works in ways you don't expect though https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-ins...
I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.
I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit that competition is good and necessary.
These are the kind of short-sighted tactics that competition and capitalism breeds that belongs in luxury markets, not utilities or essentials.
If you just say "competition", you can point at the efforts of ten people to gain a seat on the politbureau as a clear case of this.
- more competition comes with margin squeezing and cheapest source for service or goods
- less competition brings the monopoly, the dream of any capitalist (owner, not user).
Either way comes enshittification, and there's no middle balance, it drifts towards one of the sides always.
So I disagree.
They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically provide functional competition, if you think about it, the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help you here.
> The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre).
The OP is about free market failures, not about competition. As another example, many people have pointed out that there is much more competition in China than in the US. Hope, this is enough for you to understand the difference.
Not true and oversimplification. Some markets tend toward monopolies, but you rarely will get one unless enforced/protected by a state. If you navigate through history, you will find almost exclusively monopolies on salt extraction, coal mining oligopolies (with the help of worker unions), silk... Curiously, the Standard Oil was accused of being a monopoly, and the proof was they were offering lower prices than anyone thanks to their scale, destroying the competence. The reward for offering low prices was disolving the company (notice that they never reached the hypothetical price hike stage).
It is also common practice for the state to declare something "public utility" or "natural monopoly", on things like snail mail distribution, telephone or TV, that were clearly not a natural monopoly and could be offered by free market. Here fall a lot of ISPs, that get a "public utility" status and only then can abuse that monopolistic position with the help of the state.
A lot of free market sectors tend to atomization: think hair or nail saloons, masonry, plumbers, carpenters... if you know someone in the sector, it seems that as soon as they get a size over 5 or 6 people, two of them always decide to split and go by themselves.
It's exactly how OP describes it. It's unproductive for multiple companies to maintain disconnected, parallel telephone infrastructures. The most productive use of resources is to lay more wires to more houses, not to lay more wires to places which have already been wired up for telephone service by somebody else. That creates a monopoly, and the government should step in.
With modern tech, you can mandate local-loop unbundling and fix some of this, but that wasn't possible with 1970s (and earlier) phone infrastructure.
Eventually the municipality renewed the previous contract with the same previous company, a contract that forbids other companies from entering the city center, and we went back to the worse service we were used to. Of course they were a lot of narratives: they were trying to capture the market, drive competence away and then hike the prices; they were bounded to bankrupcy at such prices; that many buses were damaging the roads, and others. But the reality was that for a brief time we had the best bus service in the modern world.
As for telephone wires, we went through some years, between copper-IDSN and fiber (the DSL bridge) that a lot of companies found a way to make it profitable to put new copper cable parallel to what it already existed. The only thing the municipality did was to make it mandatory that the first to install it must use a wider-than-needed conduct (a solution much less disruptive than giving a natural monopoly, latest shown by new small companies born everywhere), so if a company wanted to add more cable later could use the same tubing. Predictions about company A blocking their tubing showed false, as other companies could retaliate in other places. No second tubing was allowed until the first tube was full, this was the only state intervention in the issue. The same tubes have now the optic fiber.
I am not fully anti-state, but there are undeniable overreaching everywhere, and a lot of zealots of intervention that are itching to issue mandates and interfere with everything, and then fix what fails with more interventions.
Hmm. Seems the tool is working as expected.
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
A little slippery to bring China into the telecom free market discussion and contrast it with “Western-style” while failing to mention the structure of its telecom industry.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_industry_in...
Untrue - in the context of the OP, telecom is just an example. Look at the title.
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
"More competition" doesn't mean "no monopolization". Communications are political everywhere, I'd be surprised if they were a subject of less control in China than in the US. However, even on Amazon and even with tariffs, there's more competition between Chinese sellers than between sellers of other origins.
The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the problem with a free market.
It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber, it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or government action (such as eminent domain) it's impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will always be some person with property right in the way of a cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you bury a line (including pointing out that it's very temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say no.
It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how much harder that is if the land owner is related to or owns stock in a competitor company.
We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of way that ultimately grants burying rights near public roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those, it'd be almost impossible.
That means if you are a new comer, you have to employ significant military strength to guard and defend your line going in. Otherwise, existing powers will simply stomp it out as soon as they get a whiff that someone is trying to compete with them. That, or they'll simply take your line by force.
That is probably the most difficult form of entry because it requires someone to be independently very wealthy before they could dream of putting in new infrastructure and it requires them to enforce their own property rights since there's no government doing that.
Are you an anarco-communist by chance? That's about the only group I'm aware of that would advocate for the complete elimination of property rights, but they also usually don't advocate for a "free market".
Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.
Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.
Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.
To quote myself: "the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies"
Guess who's the highly influential investor, with strong connection to the WH who said the following:
"Competition is for losers".
This sums up pretty well what the free market is keen on.
Okay, totally meaningless, it didn’t prove anything.
They called in a favor that put pressure on the company from public expectations.
The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they behaved according to that information. That's how it works.
> Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even the most charitable interpretation of this statement could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties involved.
If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong about? :)
Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man fallacy thrown in.
It can be two things, anyways. You can utilize fraud to manage your competitors expectations. CEOs lie constantly about the state their products are in, in order to drum up more sales.
It has absolutely zero requirement to be beneficial to the public in order to be a competitive marketplace. They're also competing to make as much profit as possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the public.
The end result is plenty of cheap stuff for people to buy. It's why free markets have full supermarkets and socialist markets have long lines.
Take the free market in software, for example. My entire software stack on my linux box cost me $0.
In deficit economy, economic agents aren't really interested in people's money, and competition is between consumers - who'll bid higher and offer something of real interest to provider. So providers hoard stuff and there are long lines.
Benefit for public is not a boolean, it's a spectrum. Lots of cheap poor stuff readily availible is better than having to compete for stuff, but less good than having choice between cheap poor stuff and more expensive better stuff, for example. For the latter, you need non-nominal competition and providers having to compete whithin the market, not outside of it, and also each individual provider having infinitesimal effect on whole market.
That's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.
> "Companies optimize to make as much money as possible, which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically follow.
Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price of kerosene by 70%.
Law of supply and demand works in the really free market, when providers are essentially infinitesimal and are not able to exert their will upon consumers. If a single provider is capable of significantly affecting the prices and supply of the whole market, it can bend law of supply and demand.
>Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price of kerosene by 70%. They (I suppose, don't know for sure) had plenty of margin for that, and as price-demand relation is not linear, increase of volume was larger than margin reduction. That is often not the case, and race to (quality) bottom and shrinkflation happens.
> race to (quality) bottom
When people aren't willing to pay for quality, there's no point in increasing the costs for more quality.
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 to pay more than $4
So this would be the demand curve.
Now, let's do the supply curve. Keep it simple and assume a constant cost of production equal to $1 per unit.
The question is, if you are a greedy corporation, then how much should you charge to maximize your profits?
You should charge $2.
At that price, you will make $10 selling to the poors, $5 selling to the middle, and $1 selling to the rich. $16 bucks in profit for the greedy corporation.
If you charged $3, you would make $10 in profit selling to the middle, and $2 in profit selling to the rich, for only $12 in profit.
12 < 16. The greedy monopoly prefers $16 in profit to $12 in profit. That's why it lowers prices.
If you charged $4, you would make only $3 in profit.
3 < 16
In other words, it is profit maximization + law of demand + law of one price that drives down prices in the face of a demand curve.
People get this all wrong, they think that it requires perfect competition or some set of unobtainable market assumptions to make stuff affordable, it does not. It's just the law of demand (charge more and you get fewer customers) plus the law of one price (everyone pays the same amount).
This is why things like government subsidies to the poor to help them buy stuff actually drives prices up. It's why businesses wage an eternal war to be able to price discriminate. Health care, for example, would be much more affordable if hospitals had to post their prices and could not charge different rates to different people based on what they could squeeze from their insurance or based on how much money they had. It's why programs to help the poor by giving them more cash to buy stuff end up making things unaffordable for everyone else. It's why section 8 rental subsidies drive up rents. It's why during the covid subsidies, the new car price index went up from 147 to 188, but after the imposition of tariffs, it didn't change at all. So much of the world is explained just by some simple math, the law of one price, and the law of demand.
Because the companies are already charging the most to maximize their profits. They are not charities. Whenever a business says "if I have to pay this extra tax, it will just drive up prices", then ask them "Are you a charity? If you could charge more, then why aren't you charging more now? If you can't charge more now, why do you think you will be able to charge more tomorrow?"
Now, I'm not saying that there is no relationship between costs and prices, and that everything is set purely by demand and the law of one price. To get supply in there, you need more assumptions about the type of competition and the cost curve. But in general, supply only enters into the picture in that if you raise a firm's costs, then some firms go out of business because they can't pay the higher costs, and for the firms that are left, there is less competition, and it is this reduced competition that allows (some) of the increase costs to be passed on to consumers.
Always remember -- firms are already charging the most they can possibly charge in order to maximize total profits. That's the normal state of affairs, and it is what drives prices lower. Whether you are modeling a monopoly, or monopolistic competition, or an oligopoly, or perfect competition, it does not matter. They always charge the most they can possibly charge, and the law of demand, working with the law of one price, drives prices down.
There are countless companies working with excellent profit margins.
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.
Imagine how that would actually play out if you were right. (You’re not)
> one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.
This type of situation sounds like an amalgamation of a few exam questions from my first year of an econ PhD. "Cheap talk in a Bertrand market with entry costs and capacity constraints" or something. No I haven't worked it out but my intuition is that it would predict exactly what was observed: the threat of a new entrant with enough capacity risks loosing your entire business so you invest to expand your capacity to prevent that entry.
It seems that spending several years working with models assuming that the earth is flat isn't being well compensated by one class on “imperfect flatness”.
(I've contemplated doing an econ PhD myself before changing course, and I've been exposed to much more than econ 101).
They used to be called robber barons.
As for Rockefeller being a "robber", the rise of Standard Oil resulted in the price of kerosene dropping 70%.
That's what happened with the telco by the way, the price is is still significantly lower than 40 years ago, but in the US it's still more expensive than it should.
For example, if you buy a car for $5000 and flip it for $10,000, you don't owe your customer a discount.
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 you'll see it how it works.
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
Competition was possible but was not working. A fake news brief is the supposed solution. That's not really competition actually lowering prices. That's the price fixing regime blinking for an unsubstantiated reason.
It would be a different story if the friend's fiber laying company actually saw an opportunity and pursued it, but they didn't.
Despite that, the single mechanism that works so well in a competitive market, the threat of competition, (this time) worked just the same in a 2 person market where you would expect the inefficiencies of a price fixing regime and for all decisions and investments to have to pass through (and have funds allocated to) an army of lawyers, politicians and special interest groups.
That is objectively what happened and reframing it into a negative light is a choice grounded in emotion and not analysis.
Have you ever taken an economics course? Nobody finishes a basic micro/macro course without an introduction to game theory. Game theory is the EXACT reason that N=2,3,4 markets struggle with competition and provide insights into the regulation and “rules” needed for markets with very low suppler cardinality.
You thinking that anyone else expects a local ISP market to function efficiently and competitively is a failure of your own understanding, not of the system.