Google tried to break regional US monopolies with Google Fiber, which to my surprise is still going despite Google’s best efforts to kill off projects that aren’t immediately successful and is active in 19 US states or around 40 different cities.
The only way I can see this catastrophe ending is one of three ways:
- Satellite internet - Elon Musk would need to massively drop the price of Starlink to encourage others to switch, or a competitor would need to pop up and offer similar service at a lower price point, likely through Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
- The US collectively vote the Republicans out of office by a landslide and bring in a left-wing Democrat leader. Won’t happen for so many reasons.
- Mesh networks. Something like Freifunk but on a much bigger scale.
Not only is Google Fiber still going, it actually has begun expanding service again after being stuck in limbo for a while.
It’s a strange one, to be sure, but I guess they see a benefit to the infrastructure they built.
Switzerland is fucking tiny.
That’s why.
No, read the article
Well, Austria is right next to it. It’s tiny, too. So why is it not as good?
I love how that’s always the cop out for any advancement.
How exactly are facts and maths cop outs?
There are states with better fiber deployment than Switzerland.
But generally, think of it as highway design. That’s the American way, after all, and it also stinks.
Switzerland: mostly point-to-point where each home gets its own dedicated fiber strand. Upgrading to 25 Gbps can be as simple as swapping optics(multi spectrum) on each end. Some places in USA do this. Some offer 100 gbps, symmetrical.
United States: mostly point-to-multipoint (PON: GPON/XGS-PON) One fiber is split among 32–64 homes. Everyone shares the bandwidth.
And they say Americans don’t have socialism. But that’s the problem. When there’s socialism it’s the public subsidizing corporations.
Honestly, fuck American ISPs, but what on earth would you need 25 gig fiber in your home for? We have a gig line that actually runs at a gig 99% of the time, and I can be downloading a steam game while 3 separate videos are being streamed and I won’t have stuttering. 25 gig sounds cool, but also utterly pointless
Home e-business and you run your own servers. Or cohousing, one building where multiple families live under one address.
The only use for such speeds in the home is offloading all your data and computing to cloud services. Yay? Symmetrical gigabit is already about 5 times faster than I would ever need. Most people are too lazy to even run a LAN cable to get better than 150-300 mbps.
Or hosting your own services. 25 gbit/s is a lot of potential to scale up to a pretty decent sized web business before you need to get dedicated hosting.
I host video streaming for personal use and gigabit doesn’t even flinch.
How many people do you serve concurrently?
The us internet situation sucks but the author has a complete misunderstanding why. I dont k ow if they are very young or no from the united states but there is big misunderstanding of whats wrong. Its all bad but you need to go back to wwii. You need to talk about the nsa. You need to talk about 9/11.
Also we have fiber, its not shared and they rip up all the roads they want. They are a local company, locally owned.
25 Gbit Internet
Sounds like they overspent massively on infrastructure. This is a waste of taxpayer money. You have to run some top tier industrial service from your home to utilize even 10% of that. There’s literally no use case for avg Joe.
Here’s how this works in poland: Infrastructure is private, but law mandates that telecoms share with each other. The result is extremely competitive industry that delivers cheap internet over entire state. I’m running 600Mb down/30Mb up at equivalent of $20 a month, 23% VAT included.
It’s possible to get 1Gb+ but at that point most common networking hardware and cables are becoming bottleneck.
I know literally noone who needs more than 1Gb symmetric connection.
Market delivers what’s mostly in demand, and it isn’t 25Gb That needs extreme infrastructure on both sides, provider and user
ITT: Europeans don’t understand population density and actually believe they have villages that can be described as “remote”.
OK, now explain why you can’t find a decent ISP in a major American city. (That’s right, it’s because of monopolies and enshittification.)
