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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." If you haven't done that drive, by the way, you should. It will add some perspective to these comparisons. A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden (population 9.5m) and the state I live in, New Jersey (population 8.9m), which is one of the geographically smaller states in the U.S. We've enjoyed wide access to high speed broadband here for fifteen years or so now. I currently have clean 120 mbps service that is operated at utility levels of reliability. I have no complaints.

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Maybe you are a troll, or maybe you just don't understand how networks work. The relevant factor is not the overall size, but rather the population density. Lower population density means more cable per person (on avg.), so it makes it MORE expensive.

Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.

Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2

You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!"

People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.

> Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.

If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live).

Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.

Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.

What you really are interested in is linear density.

The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.

There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

> Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).

I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.

> If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale.

Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.

> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level

This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.

These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.

> Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.

The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.

But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street. Only 60% of Swedish households have fiber, and you can reach that figure without serving households outside of relatively dense towns.

Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

> But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street.

Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.

Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.

Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.

By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.

You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads. You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

> You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads.

Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with?

> You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110...

Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also covering much of the road network.

Look at the HSPA map on page 5. Look at how little of the country you need to cover to hit 99.6% of the population.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if that 99.6% figure is a mistake or if they use a different coverage definition for wireless, because the numbers don't add up.

Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.

There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.

> If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density

That's a fair point.

> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.

The Op also pointed out that not all of Sweden is served by this municipal ownership arrangement. It may very well be the case that the Op has his or her own bias and Sweden is in fact not widely services this way.

Sweden does "x" better argument is getting tired. Sweden has a lot of negative outcomes as well from socializing so much. Our problem isn't that fact that internet isn't socialized its that its monopolized by 3-4 companies. The incentive to innovate at rapid rate is not there but rather keep the status quo. That being said Google and Verizon are two fiber companies that are leading innovation and forcing other companies to keep up or get left behind by leaving a vacuum of people that want that service. Thats how/why capitalism works. Over time fiber options will rise and we will be in a better position to have some options of our provider instead of being stuck with a state run service that could become crappier over time.

In the US, it's locally monopolized with a single provider.

Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.

Interesting, I had to go searching, but here's the info on the firing of Verizon employees:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizo...

Meh, this is just union posturing to try to save obsolete jobs.

"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."

Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.

> No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.

Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.

The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.

NYC is not 13,318 sq mi which is what your talking about aka an area ~200 miles wide and bigger than the state of Maryland. By comparison DC is 61 square miles total your figure is like lumping DC, Baltimore, and Richmond VA into one metro area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

DC and Baltimore are typically lumped in as one metro area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...

Not really: "It is composed primarily of two major metropolitan statistical areas, the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV MSA and the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD MSA. In addition, six other smaller urban areas not contiguous to the main urban area but having strong commuting ties with the main area are also included in the metropolitan area."

I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.

Okay but then you can't compare that to Stockholm proper. It should be exceedingly obvious to anyone who has even Google image searched the two cities that NYC is much denser.

I didn't compare it to Stockholm proper. I compared the NYC urban area (basically, NYC and it's suburbs and satellite cities) to Stockholm's urban area. Stockholm proper is less dense than NYC proper, but that is by itself not that useful a number. More people live outside NYC in the urban area as live inside NYC. The opposite is true for Stockholm.

>"The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT."

Not it does not, that is the "Tri-State" area. I have never heard anyone use the term "NYC Urban area." What you are saying makes it sounds as if those places are suburbs of New York City and none of them are. New York City is 5 boroughs.

Also I think you are confusing Manhattan and New York City. Half the daily population of Manhattan are commuters:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearl...

Jesus Christ, Stockholm is more densely populated than NYC? No wonder getting an apartment around here is so absurdly difficult.

They're comparing to NYC, not Manhattan. NYC includes 5 boroughs (and some of them are _large_), and while Manhattan and inner parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are dense, most of Staten Island and outer parts of Bronx and Queens are relatively sparse.

You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen

It's much worse than that, NYC is 789 km^2 of land, the metropolitan area is 8,936: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-ne...

Looks like you've awoken to the syndrome.

Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective if they live in an appartment or suburban house. The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. The people who don't have fibre to the home are mostly old people (lots of them!) and farmers (and lots of them have it anyways).

> The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it.

I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually.

Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.

They might pay, if they got to chose their provider freely like they can in Sweden, where they build open access networks where any ISP can provide service.

I bet you could build it in to the sale price of reselling a home. IE this improvement must be made to make it distinct in the market.

I would happily pay 100-200k if I could capitalize it on a 30y 0-3% mortgage to bring fiber from a carrier neutral facility (say, the Westin Building in Seattle) to a farm. It's about $10k/km for aerial fiber and $50k/km for buried fiber in most places (far higher in a city, but the distances are shorter.)

There's probably a reasonable market doing this at $10-20k/house. There's clearly a market for multi-family dwellings like condos/apartment buildings (webpass, condointernet, etc. have shown), but maybe the next step will be neighborhoods pre-wired with fiber to some kind of switchbox with your choice of carrier coming in.

I would totally pay 1-2k upfront (assuming I owned the home or was planing to stay at least 5 years) if I "owned" the fiber and could choose my own ISP.

At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.

I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.

Most of the monthly fee you pay does not go into paying off the initial investment. For example, Verizon wireline's EBITDA margin is 25%. So out of your $100 bill, $75 goes to maintenance, customer service, etc. and $25 is left before paying interest in debt used to build the network, paying taxes, or accounting for the depreciating value of equipment marching toward obsolescence.

The carrier owns the fiber, but you still have to pay $2500 upfront plus a $100-500 monthly fee. Most of the time you can choose the ISP though. If you live in a co-operative you can own the fiber yourself and buy transit. Then there's the municipal fiber carriers that will own the fiber, but you only pay the prime cost resulting in lower upfront and monthly fees, and if you live on the countryside you can get a government grant, install the fiber yourself, then sell it for 1$ to one of the carriers usually resulting in low monthly fee.

Is this in Sweden? In the U.S., if a carrier wants to build fiber in a town or suburb, they have to build all the fiber first, then hope people sign up for $70-$100 per month with no money paid up front.

What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.

Yes Sweden. The Carriers only own the last mile, then they rent fiber from the backbone. Some carriers have backbone fiber, but most of it is owned by government funded Tier 1 Carrier "Telia" that makes sure all providers and Carriers get equal access.

Maybe that's why there is so much more fiber deployment in Sweden than in the U.S.? The fact that people are willing to pay the infrastructure costs up front? No carrier would be able to get a franchise under those terms in the U.S.

What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?

EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.

You get an offer to pay it off in like three or more years. But if you can't you don't get any fiber. But you can often install afterwards if there is fiber in the area.

Stokab is a municipal and non-profit carrier and almost all cities have one of those, competing with the private carriers. The municipal often requires 70% + coverage, witch is very hard to get in a small non tech village with old people. Stokab is a bit different because they have about 1.5 million people living in their area witch is dense compared to the rest of Sweden.

The private carriers don't even bother if they can't get a few hundred subscribers in the area. So if you live in a small village, but not small enough to get a government grant it can be though.

When you start digging up the streets you must allow competitors to also join, so when one carrier has decided to start digging, you often get offers from other Carriers too, with a slightly lower price. So there's usually many carriers in the same area.

In the US we typically capitalize utility projects over long time periods, e.g. 30 years. When you pay your water bill the loan is added into the base payment before usage. We built electricity to virtually every home in the US, we could build fiber too.

It's notable that the phone network was built by a government sanctioned monopoly that was permitted to be quite profitable for most of its existence. Pull AT&T annual reports from the 1950s and 1960s and compare them to the financials of Verizon's wireline division today.

I live in a smaller city, not in Stockholm (the capital) or anything close to it. I still have access to 1gbit/s if I want to. :)

There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.

I don't think it has all that much to do with population density. I think it has everything to do with Sweden not having AT&T, Comcast, and TWC to establish the ground rules for network deployment with their lobbyists.

You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree.

Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?

Yes, but that's hard to calculate. What you really want to calculate is linear density. My best approximation for this is people per mile of road. This is easy to calculate and this data is readily available.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people.

So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.

Based on the writing style, it would seem you're the troll.

I'm not going to get into a debate in the comment thread, but I will respond to you. You should try not to be so reactionary. I am neither cheerleading for the U.S.A. nor condemning Sweden. What I am saying is that the U.S. spans a continent. There are areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet and everything in between. If you think large areas of Sweden are sparsely inhabited have a drive through Utah or New Mexico or Arizona. If you look at Europe I assume you'll also find areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet, and that would at least be a somewhat reasonable comparison to make with the U.S.

> When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe."

I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale.

If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true.

Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.

If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while.

First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions.

Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo.

It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.

The US has a corruption problem.

In general, democracies have corruption problems, the US doesn't seem any worse than the median.

I would go even farther and assert that the US is much less corrupt than the vast majority of democracies in the world.

I'd agree with you, I'd go further to say that there are very very few less corrupt than us either.

While true, it's not the entire explanation. Apathy is far more of a factor here than corruption; average citizens don't care enough about their Internet access choices to lobby their politicians about it. The incumbent providers do a pretty good job of offering just enough service to keep average people satisfied at a price that is not quite high enough to make customers really angry.

> If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while.

Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?

> Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?

While it's hard to hear much about policy plans over the personal, historical, and character attacks this cycle, yes, I've heard Clinton promoting her "broadband for all" plan, as well as seen some criticism of and debate about it in the press, etc.

Here's an article from earlier this month: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/hillary-clinton-v...

Clinton's proposal is the usual appeal to rural voters by talking about the "broadband gap." That has little to do with fiber, which is presumably what 'talmund was talking about.

“The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives.” -- misattributed to Winston Churchill

> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey

Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.

Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.

Sweden is actually one of the best European examples since its population density and GDP are both lower than the US ones (yet still comparable).

Sweden is also the country that people always pick, when they want to illustrate that Europe has better broadband, but as you say, it's one of the best examples.

Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.

I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city.

Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.

'That would be quite unusual in the U.S.'

...depending on your provider. try driving around in the sticks of Maryland just 20 minutes outside Baltimore, good luck getting EDGE on tmo!

And that is why I don't use tmo. :) I bet that your experience would be different with Verizon, AT&T, or maybe even Sprint.

but that hardly makes it an unusual proposition - tmo is the 3rd largest network.

Look at Google maps around say Blacksburg VA or Charleston WV. Which are both is city, city, city, forest. Which is fairly common across much of the US. The eastern seabord being basically one big city is very much an exception not the rule. The US has ~1/3 it's population in ~1/20th of it's land.

The difference is that Blacksburg and Charleston have 50,000 people, while Munich has 1.5 million people.

Las Vegas has 600,000 people and the same thing. While less extreme, Chicago has over 2.5 million people and farmland is very close by.

And there's farmland in Maryland 20 miles from the White House, despite the DC metro area having 6 million people. Although, in some directions the suburban sprawl does extend much further (30-35 miles in Virginia, and twice that if you draw a line through to the far side of Baltimore).

The farmland is over 7 million people away from the city.

Mocking the wounded-pride-per-pound calculation, are we? Have a upvote for that.

These arguments are now decades old and unresolvable since everyone is trying to extract a meaningful comparison from a single dimension of a complicated metric. I'm pretty over them. Can we call a halt?

If you want to use a single metric, why not use people per mile of road?

This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

That metric works great if you have 100% penetration.

But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.

Sweden had 98,5% xDSL coverage in 2011 and aims for 90% coverage of 100 Mbps service by 2020.

Isn't people/mile still incorrect because you basically have islands of large dense cities with roads between them that nobody lives on.

People still live in the countryside. Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness.

If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.

Apparently you can get to 86% by just covering urban areas.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS

Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness

Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.

It can still be the case that Sweden is easier to serve than New Jersey, it depends on how the people are arranged within, not on the average density.

As an absurd example, you can serve 40% of the population of Alaska by establishing service in Anchorage, which is roughly 0.1% of Alaska by area.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

Ah yes, the land area would be a better comparison than total area.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

Yet the country put people on the Moon, built that highway system that spans edge to edge, has telephone services across it, places cables across oceans, built oil pipelines running crazy lengths, among numerous other ridiculously complex engineering projects.

But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task?

The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.

The engineering is not complicated, but it involves fights for right of way and obstructionist land owners and municipalities who will fight against it.

This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.

Agreed. I was being facetious by suggesting the engineering was complicated.

And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a bit smaller and more densely populated than New Jersey. Yet I have an unreliable and expensive 20mbps connection. If this issue were about size, Silicon Valley would have world-class high speed internet.

Silicon Valley has 100 or 200 Mbit Internet options available, and for the lucky, gigabit Internet. Funny thing is, like money in the Valley, it's very unevenly distributed. (I pay ~$50/month for 100Mbit)

Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.

I live in Redwood City, where I have the choice between a slower AT&T connection and a faster Comcast connection. It's partially my fault for being unwilling to pay Comcast, but these are the only choices available just a short drive from Palo Alto.

I live in San Mateo and also pay $50/month for 100mpbs, which is mostly reliable, and the speed is 'good enough'. I could pay more but the gains in speed aren't worth the extra $$.

The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.

Sunnyvale here, it's Comcast (now including data caps!) or DSL.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the problem is the sense of good enough. I have the option to purchase 100mbps but I am only paying for 20mbps because it is virtually good enough for everything I do: working from home, video chat, streaming HD videos, backing up to iCloud, etc. When I rent HD movies from iTunes, my wait time is 0.

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.

GP did mention that his connection is unreliable, which is true for me as well (suburb of Milwaukee, WI). When it's working, it's fast enough. But there are plenty of days it's slow or not working when I want it. That I'd like fixed.

Yeah, it's great until you want to stream a movie on a 3-day weekend.

The question would be why is it unreliable. SF is known for NIMBY issues, so is it something like that holding up new cabling?

I live on the east coast, and was irked to watch neighbors complain about bad cell service and about a new cell tower going up in the same breath.

Except I'm relatively certain that like most states once you're outside one of the major cities the options and quality of broadband access drops significantly. In many non-US countries this is not the case. Likewise the level you're able to get isn't even equally available in main cities across the U.S. My hometown of Milwaukee WI for example has very poor options for s moderately large city.

Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access.

It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.

> You may as well say "citizens of Europe.

I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds.

The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance).

Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military.

Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces.

The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles.

Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.

Good for you. You probably had a bunch of former AT&T employees on the local board negotiating with cable company twenty years ago. Unfortunately, you're the exception because cable companies are able to exploit gaps in the regulatory framework.

The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.

The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.

The United States was a country last time I checked, unless Mexico and Canada have mysteriously disappeared. A country roughly the same size as Australia, which has a significantly smaller population.

The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays.

If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.

I wonder how much of the difference in perception is due to very different urban/suburban/rural dynamics in the U.S. versus Europe. I just bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland (a dense east-coast state). My neighborhood just got public sewer/water in the last couple of years, but we've got fiber! Meanwhile, you can't get fiber in Baltimore, the state's largest city.

> I have no complaints.

Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.

Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).

Assuming you're in Verizon's FiOS service area. They do seem to do a fine job, but I had problems when they were unable to foster a decent union relationship and they went to total shit for a few months. I had issues during this period and was totally stuck.

So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.

A nitpick, but crossing the US takes much closer to 4 10-hour days than 5 (New York to Los Angeles): https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2

A nitpick, but that would assume you eat in the car and pee in a jug.

No it doesn't; you intersperse that with the 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of driving, two hours of generous breaks and lunch, twelve hours for dinner/sleep/shower/relaxing.

Google's calculation doesn't include stops for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention that with that much driving you're bound to run into a few delays due to construction or accidents, or just bad timing hitting a metro area during rush hour.

I agree, generalizing country to country comparisons without considering population and size are usually not valuable unless you have context to these things.

He means citizens of municipality X within the US.

We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.

After giving it some thought, I can not figure out why the time to drive from Boston to Seattle is relevant to whatever argument is trying to be made here.

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