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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The question is whether the Nordic model is scalable. Here is the OECD data on broadband deployment: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.2-OECD-WiredWirelessBB-2.... It breaks down DLS, cable, and fiber subscribers per 100 residents.

Sweden: 11.4 DSL, 6.6 cable, 17.5 fiber.

U.S. 8.2 DSL, 18.5 cable, 3.4 fiber.

U.K. 30.6 DSL, 7.2 cable, 0.0 fiber.

Germany: 28.9 DSL, 8.1 cable, 0.6 fiber.

France: 33.3 DSL, 4.5 cable, 2.1 fiber.

Spain: 16.5 DSL, 5.5 cable, 6.8 fiber.

Italy: 21.1 DSL, 0.0 cable, 0.6 fiber.

The U.S. does better than every big European country, whose residents are by and large stuck on DSL.

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Note that DSL means VDSL2, that is 100Mbps dedicated (while cable is shared with neighbors AFAIK). When I was in Italy I had dramatically better connectivity than my Comcast Business in SF which costs 3 times as much.

VDSL2 rollout is just beginning in most of these countries. In Italy, for example, only 21% of subscribers have access to 100 mbps+: https://www.thelocal.it/20160429/italys-internet-hits-30-and.... Compared to 59% of the U.S.: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/100mbps-internet-wide....

Its not clear that the Nordic model is being used in any other European country, so I'm not sure that we can count low fiber rates in e.g. Italy, Germany of evidence of the model's lack of scalability.

Perhaps more significantly, (data from the same table), I'm interested to know what the deployment models look like in Japan and Korea.

Japan: 2.6 DSL, 5.3 cable, 21.8 fiber. South Korea: 2.8 DSL, 8.5 cable, 28.3 fiber.

Switzerland uses a similar model, where any provider can sell services on the FTTH network that many communities are building out.

See e.g. https://www.fiber7.ch/ for a very attractive provider :).

This misses the fact that much of that UK figure is FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet). E.g. I live in the rural UK and have a 'Cable' line that is 200Mbps down/12Mbps up.

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

Zero fiber in the UK? That looks wrong. Although, a lot of "fiber" sold in the UK is not actually fiber all the way to the home.

Indeed, there's very little fibre in the UK. VDSL (DSL in that list) is being sold as fibre, and cable (cable in that list) is being sold as fibre, but cruicially, are not fibre.

Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK

I have 330mbs fttp in the UK, and I live in the countryside.

2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.

There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.

Is that the FTTP on demand product?

I've asked BT about that one and it looks like it's select exchanges only (even after FTTC has been rolled out), which is a shame as I'd happily pay for it.

The only "superfast" option I've got at the moment is a full leased line, whcih isn't a viable prospect for residential Internet..

No, I got it because of BDUK. I'm on a long leg to a hamlet, which makes fttc difficult (dslam is expensive and you have to run the fibre almost all the way in any case). Then it was option 4 infinity. In your case have you looked to an Openreach community build or Gigaclear?

Only FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) should count as fiber. In Belgium one of the larger cable providers used to advertise their plans as 'FiberNet' while it was only FTTN (fiber-to-the-neighbourhood) and the last step was cable (with significantly lower uplink speeds than what would be attainable with fiber).

We have a lot of fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK, which means you may only have copper for a few hundred metres. It's obviously nowhere near as good as fibre to the home, but I think lumping it in with plain old DSL is a bit unfair - a lot of people get 60+mbps down and 18+mbps up which isn't too shabby internationally.

I used to have optical fiber in a brand new building in Osaka: the fiber was actually only going to the building, then it was RJ45 (or something very similar, I'll admit never trying to play with it).

It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...

> Spain: 16.5 DSL, 5.5 cable, 6.8 fiber.

Note that outlier amongst the rest of the European countries excluding Sweden. Spain is a year or two into rolling out FTTP everywhere, replacing the copper twisted pair everywhere it can. 0 cost upgrade for the end user, with a speed upgrade from "Up to 10Mbps" to 30Mbps/10Mbps of actual throughput.

"Stuck on DSL"? I beg to differ: I'll take DSL in Paris over cable in NYC any day. Cheaper, faster and much more reliable. That said large European countries are definitely late when it comes to fiber...

When the DSL network is giving 50Mb/s or more, there's much less incentive for users to choose the fibre service.

I'm on a 100Mb/s cable service, even though there's fibre to my new-built apartment, since the cable company seemed much more competent when I moved in.

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