European Internet, according TFA, is for the most part not better. The largest country above us on the list has 17 million people. The big European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, which together comprise 70% of the EU) have slower Internet.
> Regulators around the world took notice and strove to emulate the success of the U.S. approach. Denmark in particular styled its own telecommunications regulations on the U.S. model, slashing its chief telecom regulator altogether and assigning small regulatory functions to other departments.
Denmark is basically the situation where you have a “benevolent former monopoly,” like Verizon here in the mid Atlantic US.
Switzerland, right behind Denmark in that chart builds the physical networks either entirely with public money or public/private partnerships, but sets a fixed rate at which the fiber must be leased out to any interested party.
This worked too. A small ISP came along (init7, they're awesome https://www.init7.net/) and started offering symmetric gbit at $65 per month, disrupting the ISP market. The big ISPs were scrambling at first, now there's actual competition, with offers like 10git for ~$40 a month (https://fiber.salt.ch/en). Granted that's marketing 10gbit and not real 10gbit, because it's XG-PON [0], so "up to 10gbit/s" and it's a shitty ISP. But still way better than you used to be able to get.
So it would seem to me that many roads lead to rome. Eitherway I'm pretty happy because I don't hate my ISP anymore, something that was unimaginable 10 years ago.
It depends what your values are. To my values most or all of Europe has better internet. A few things I care about:
- No bandwidth caps.
- ISPs competing to offer the best service in a system similar to how health care is done in Japan.
- Being able to switch ISPs without issue.
- Being able to run my own hardware instead of being required to use their routers.
- Net neutrality. I pay for gigabit duplex but if I'm not uploading to a fast lane I'm limited to 10mbps, or 1% of what I pay for. This is terrible for VPNing for work, and other work related tasks.
Exactly.. I'm on 1Gbit down/1Gbit up at home, there are no caps, and the full speed is always available. It's not throttled, it's equally fast at all times as far as I can tell. It's not expensive, there are no hidden charges. I use my own router (though I'm also using the equipment that came from the provider, for the fiber-to-Ethernet part). All of this I could get in Japan years ago, we're finally catching up in Europe.
You wouldn’t know it by reading their periodicals: cancel culture, right vs wrong thinking, evil multinationals, class struggle against the exploiting "rich", the inhuman capitalism, the wonderful socialist utopias and it goes on and on...
This is quite rant-ish. There is a class struggle, there is a rich powerful few who can use their leverages to affect millions of people that have almost no voice. What is your point?
For someone complaining about divisiness you seem to be quite deep down into the rabbit hole.
The world is a large place. With 7.8 billion people in the world today there is bound to be 1 or 2 who go off the deep end. To say those represent the majority is insulting. It's like you're saying, "You wouldn’t know it about the US right wing by reading their periodicals: antisemitic, pro-fascist, anti humans rights, pro totalitarian, and more."
That wikipedia article is very outdated. For example, the two most common offers in Spain are symmetric 100mbps and 600mbps FTTH.
The most important player indebted itself with ~50k million € and it's basically replacing all the copper coverage with FTTH.
Other HFC players are turning into FTTH too, as HFC won't be able to compete with +600mbps FTTH offerings, and symmetry is more and more valued over time.
Also, I don't have the figures at hand, but the coverage in Spain is extraordinary. FTTH is reaching places that barely had 3mbps ADSL, and it's probably going to cover places that had nothing in the long run.
Public money is paying for capital costs in places that would be impossible to make a profit otherwise, but still the main obstacle are municipalities and nimbys.
I've seen some pretty stupid stuff, like blocking FTTH deployment in historical centers under aesthetic concerns, where they already have ugly copper wires in the facades. In reality what those municipalities expect is ISP to bury the cables and pay for the whole renovation of such streets, which no one in his right mind will. So this people will not have FTTH unless their municipalities change their mind, but they blame ISPs.
And then you have our case here in Sweden [1] with a thought out plan to roll out broadband to the whole country as a strategic need.
The infrastructure is public and leased to private companies, avoiding the tragedy that happens in the US where laying down cables is the most expensive part and which shuns away competition, leaving with oligopolies where each company got their turf and that increases the barrier of entry significantly.
That wikipedia article is somewhat wrong. There is a lot of competition in denmark.
There are 3 separate 4G networks with very high coverage selling mobile broadband rather cheaply (you can fx get 1 TB a month for approx 36 USD a month).
TDC was also forced to give competitors access to their PSTN, coax and fiber network so resellers can compete on selling on their physical network.
The power companies have also been aggressive in recent years rolling out fiber, so several places people can choose either infrastructure from TDC, their power company or one of the mobile providers.
In Denmark,the former state-owned, TDC has to provide equal access to their network for other competitors, meaning they can only charge the cost of maintaining the infrastructure, which has mostly been build through governmental funding
They have on multiple occasions tried to force competitors out of the market by making unfavorable pricing models or straight up blocking third parties from using their infrastructure
They are in no way a "benevolent former monopoly" and there's a lot of regulations in place to avoid them exploiting their market position, since they in the past have tried exactly that
Denmark has cheap, fast internet because of the regulations enforced on the market, which makes it possible for me to get a 1gbit symmetric connection from a small provider for 120 DKK (approximately $20) per month
I moved from Texas (Comcast) and while living in Sweden I assumed internet in the EU was much, much better compared to the US. Then I tried living in Germany for 3 years and it felt like I had Comcast again. I couldn't believe it takes a month for a technician to come to your apartment in Germany to flip a switch so your DSL works but that was reality there.
"Countries who jumped on the Internet earlier can't have fiber because of existing competition"
Fiber is actually MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER to deploy for higher speed networks than any high speed copper, because the later almost always implies to deploying a fibre network too to do everything other than the last mile.
1. You have to build your fibre backbone anyways. That's an even bigger trouble in countries with no culture to share fibre. And you would usually have to get much "brainier," and more expensive fibre equipment in this case.
2. You still need to wire the fibre fairly close to premises.
3. High speed copper network equipment costs huge sums, more than commoditised GPON.
4. Copper often needs to be torn, to be replaced with higher grade copper
5. You still need to drill buildings to install niches for copper equipment.
6. You need to put extra equipment into equipment closets.
7. Copper needs more equipment overall
8. Copper has lower reliability overall, and costs more to maintain
So, in the end, you just do the same FTTH, just with copper as the last few tenths of metres. This is so obvious, but people keep dogmatising over "it's already wired with copper."
GPON by comparison does not require anything in the closet, but a piece of glass passive optical slitter.
You can easily have 1024 end-users on a single powerful GePON OLT, covering few square kilometres of 100% passive net.
They are aware. That's why you get 20Mbit/s, maybe 50 if you're lucky. Cheaper in the short term and it's not like you have a choice.
AFAIU, GP is talking about FTTC (or VDSL), which is moderately faster than typical ADSL via existing phone exchanges or (far away) cabinets, while being much more expensive. FTTC can be cheaper than FTTH, but silly IMO - any increase in bandwidth will be expensive.
Curious why population is even a factor here. If it legitimately should be... why not compare states of the US with states of the EU? (Seems a roughly equivalent thing to do)
Bigger and more diverse countries have a wider variety of political issues and priorities. When was the last time broadband even registered as a political issue in the news, except in the context of some other more important political debate (urban/rural, racial disparity, etc.) And in the US, construction of infrastructure is mostly a municipal level issue, so its both low priority and varies dramatically by state.
It's best to say that both USA, and EU are very, very bureaucratised, and regulated. It's just one is marginally better at not introducing damaging regulations than the other.
Japan too had 100mb/s since nineties for example, and theeeen..... they stuck. Speeds there not been rising by much since because regulations froze in nineties, and so did the market.
Countries which had near zero telecommunication regulations covering the Internet, or had no Internet as such did advance more uniformly.
I can have a 500mb/s over GPON, or even a symmetric gigabit over 1000BASE-LX even in *stan countries, and Africa these days. Fiberlink has 1Gbs for $30 a month in Lahore. PCTL is starting a 10Gb/s GPON trial in Islamabad.
Single mode fibre based tech is much cheaper to deploy, and maintain than any legacy tech, and properly designed GPON net probably being the cheapest option ever.
I had (and still have, when I get back after Corona) fiber to the home in Japan. That fiber was installed some fifteen years ago, it was just a phone call away and then the fiber was hitched on the poles and into the house (everything goes on poles in Japan..). This is a nearly rural area by the way. Japan is not 'stuck' on 100Mbit - 1Gbit was only approximately 2-3 dollars more per month, compared to 100Mbit/s a few years ago.
>Japan too had 100mb/s since nineties for example, and theeeen..... they stuck. Speeds there not been rising by much since because regulations froze in nineties, and so did the market.
The UK internet is worse because of forced competition. British Telecom started plans in the 1970s to roll out fibre optic connections to every household in the country. BT were even going to manufacture the fibre themselves. But the Thatcher government decided that competition was a good thing so shut that down and instead invited cable companies to lay competing infrastructure. A small handful of companies accepted the offer and proceeded to lay infrastructure during the 90s to compete with BT. They installed infrastructure only in highly lucrative towns and inner cities where cable runs are short and easy but subscriber counts are high. No rural infrastructure whatsoever. None of them have laid any infrastructure since the 90s and by now they have all merged into one company which has been rebranded as "Virgin Media". So much for competition.
So what we have now is primarily a copper infrastructure with zero to two fibre backbones to choose from depending where you live. It's a shambles.
The big mistake was not recognising that the physical infrastructure is a natural monopoly and, like any monopoly, should be state owned. Just like sewerage, electricity, water etc. it makes absolutely no sense to have parallel infrastructure. The UK shows that while it is possible, you make great sacrifices in the name of "competition" and "free market".
No, not really. Europe is a little bigger. The countries are more like eastern states. [1] This is somewhat important, considering most of the regulation on utilities are at a state level - and the utilities kind of are as well. Some of the countries are somewhat populous - you know, like states - and some have a pretty sparse population. You know, like states.
