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Comment by amazon_not | Hacker News Reader

I call BS. Finland has less than 48 people per square mile and universal cell and broadband service. By law the locally dominant service provider has to deliver a minimim of 1 Mbps to all inhabitants. In practise the delivered speed is a lot more and the minimim will be raisdd to 10 Mbps shortly. 3G is almost 100% and 4G covers most areas.

The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the should category.

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Rhetoric aside, I'm not sure the broadband situation in Finland is actually any different: http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2014/01/11/OECD-fixed-bro....

The U.S. has a larger percentage of people on fiber, and Finland has a much larger proportion of people on fixed wireless. The U.S. has way more people on cable, while Finland has way more people on DSL.

94% of the U.S. has access to at least 4 mbps broadband. 59% has access to at least 100 mbps, versus 50% for Finland. According to Akamai, average connection speeds are about the same for the two countries: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka....

I have no idea where you got the idea that people in Finland use fixed wireless. The OECD graph is few years old anyway. Here are the most recent statistics from three months ago:

https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...

The access methods by popularity are: xDSL, cable, Ethernet, FTTH and others, which might include some obscure fixed wireless operators using Wimax in the 3.5 Ghz band.

Furthermore, I'd say that the broadband situation in Finland is substantially different from the US, despite the very low popularion density of Finland.

In Finland everybody that wants broadband can get broadband. In fact everybody that wants it has it. 92% of Finns have an Internet connection, either fixed only (22%), mobile broadband only (i.e. 3G or 4G at 28%) or a combination of both (42%). Source: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...

Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government. All permanent recidences shall be within a mile of an Internet backbone access point where service is available at 100 Mbps or more. This means local residents, co-ops or ISPs will easily be able to hook up anybody at 100 Mbps or more. Since a mile is the maximum distance average loop lenghts will be much shorter. Source: http://www.lvm.fi/pressreleases/4425644/broadband-for-all-20...

Funds are actually made available to provide broadband access to not-spots. The last 5% of a population is always hard to reach with fixed broadband, but subsidies are provided to hook up areas which aren't commercially viable otherwise. Source: same as above.

3G/4G mobile broadband is cheap, unlimited and uncapped with three facilities based operators and a handfull of MVNOs on top of that. 4G is actually faster and cheaper than a xDSL connection. Mobile broadband is thus actually a viable fixed broadband substitute.

20% have a fixed broadband connection of 100 Mbps or more. Not as in has access to, but as actual delivered connections. 46% have 10 Mbps or more and 7% 30 Mbps or more. Source: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...

It is left as an excercise for the reader to figure out why Finland does better at broadband than the US despite a low population density.

Further required reading: Regulatory capture in telecommunications

If your point is, "Finland does broadband better than America," then well done you. It can join the club with just about every other first-world nation on the planet.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for anything that looks vaguely like a solution to that problem, and not merely gloating about it.

EDIT: I'm sorry for the tone, but I see no value in pointing out flaws and failings without offering solutions to them. It's plenty easy in today's world to hate on the US. Most of it is probably even deserved. But it doesn't make anything better, so I don't see what it contributes to the discussion, beyond an opportunity for smugness.

No worries, mate. I'm not that thin skinned. As to solutions, I've already pointed out the USF in a sibling comment, but using that would actually require the political will to, you know, actually do something to solve the problem.

EDIT: my actual reply to rayiner wasn't made to gloat, but to point out the substantial differences as a counterpoint to the statement that the US and Finland are statistically similar. It also contained the core problem, the lack of a properly constructed regulatory regime, which also points out the obvious thing to fix i.e. the solution required.

However if political activism isn't your thing then the only other solution is to build your own network.

> Furthermore, I'd say that the broadband situation in Finland is substantially different from the US

I don't think you can actually reconcile that with the available data.

> 92% of Finns have an Internet connection

Yes, 92.4% of Finns versus 87.4% of Americans: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2?order=wba....

> Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government.

Maybe so, but access to 100 mbps connections is pretty much the same between the two countries: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/finland-plan-for-uni... ("Parantainen also provided government figures showing half of all Finns currently have a 100Mbps connection available to their door."); http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/usbb_avail_r... (see table on page 5, showing 47% access to 100 mbps+ wired broadband). Both are 2012 data.

According to Akamai, average speeds are pretty much the same too: http://readwrite.com/2014/10/08/us-broadband-speed-global-ra... (11.7 mbps for Finland, 11.4 mbps for U.S.)

Also according to Akamai, average peak connection speeds in the U.S. (a good measurement of the total capacity of the link) are slightly higher in the U.S. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka... (40.6 mbps versus 36.5 mbps).

If you look past the rhetoric at the actual statistics, I think it's pretty clear that at the median, the internet situation is about the same between the two countries.

Now, within the bottom 15-20% I'm fully willing to bet Internet access and speed is worse in the U.S. than in Finland, but so is pretty much everything else. We have higher income inequality and more systematic poverty. The U.S. has about 20% of children in poverty versus less than 5% for Finland. Nothing really unique to internet service.

I think we agree upon Finland being substantially different with regards to universal broadband access. Only looking at the median (which is pretty useless for assessing universal service) the US might come off better.

Broadband statistics for the US are of notorious bad quality, so any findings are to be taken with a grain of salt. The FCC statistics are useless and unless the NTIA statistics have been published in full and vetted then I'm inclined to put them into the category of wishful thinking.

The World bank data is also not comparable since it uses both narrowband and broadband access to tabulate Internet access. 92% of Finns have a broadband internet connection (see previous post for primary source). How many Americans have the same is an unknown quantity based on the data.

The key point is that Finland is inclusive with regards to broadband access while the US is exclusive.

Finland has an area of 130k mi². The US has an area of 3.7 million mi². As such, it would cost an order of magnitude more, and then some, to provide equivalent service, just based on raw numbers. When you actually look at population density maps of the US, however, and realize just how sparsely populated most of the area between the West Coast and the Mississippi River is, the picture is probably much worse.

Look, I'm not disagreeing with you that broadband access should be a universal thing. I emphatically agree that it should, which I'd have hoped one might have inferred from my comment, given, you know, that I said exactly that. But should, by itself, won't make a damned thing happen. Someone still has to pay for it, and I don't see the entrenched mobile (or wired) carriers in the flyover parts of the US jumping up and down with checkbooks in hand.

The US, whether for cynical, bureaucratic, pragmatic, or other reasons, doesn't have a legal regime mandating that kind of coverage. I wish to hell it did. But calling BS on reality, as time-honored of an internet tradition as that may be, is a pretty lousy place from which to start changing it...

I was calling BS on the statement that it would be a staggeringly expensive undertaking to provide universal broadband access in the US. It is not, and this is the most important part, expensive on a per subscriber basis which is the only measure that matters. Sure, it would require a total capital outlay which would be large, but that's not the real issue.

The US has roughly twice the population density of Finland. Thus it would be roughly half as expensive per subscriber to wire up the US compared to Finland. The key takeaway here is that Finland has shown that it can be done and has been done.

As to whether it should be a should thing or not, it most definitely should be. The regulatory framework already exists for it, it's called the Universal Service Fund. The only thing lacking is that it is not being used for broadband. That needs to change, but as you said there isn't a legal regime mandating that...

In closing, population density isn't the real issue. Otherwise we would not be lamenting that you can't get broadband in California.

The thing with population density is that it's an average. Averages are notoriously useless for this sort of thing.

For example, the average density of the universe is 3-6 atoms per cubic meter. And that includes things like mountains, people, and stars.

When you're talking about provisioning broadband access, you have to provision for the worst case (or close enough that the differences are insigificant), not the average. Otherwise, you're looking at half the population being under- or unserved.

When you build networks you always work with averages. How many subscribers per mile on average, how many Mbps of IP transit per subscriber on average. Averages are useful and used to determine feasibility, cost and profitability. Population density is a useful average to estimate things with, including network buildout costs.

If you want a better estimator we can use linear density. The US has 321 million people and 4 million miles of roads. Finland has 5.5 million people and 282 thousand miles of roads.

US: 80 people per mile Finland: 20 people per mile

By this estimate average cost for a network that covers all roads, and thus all permanent residences and businesses, would be significantly cheaper in the US than in Finland.

Agreed on than analysis (this a legacy issue)

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