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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

None of the big European countries (Germany, the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy) require unbundling cable lines: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf. Unbundling of POTS in the US was not much of a boon, because DSL was a dead-end technology even then.

What Europe does isn't really a good benchmark for how to structure a telecom market, because all the big European countries have slower broadband than in the US: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (the U.S. beats the U.K., Germany, Spain, France, Italy--which accounts for 2/3 of the population of the EU).

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VDSL is certainly not a "dead end". 50Mbit is available in most of Germany, with 100Mbit slowly rolling out.

A lot of people will opt for the cheaper standard DSL though (<16Mbit), which I suspect is what brings down the average. In the US you have little choice but to pay obscene prices for a very fast cable line, usually with a monthly cap.

The 35b profile with active DSLAMs in neighborhood cabinets "may" reach 300mbps with a fully vectored network (but just a couple of loops not being vectored greatly reduces speeds [1]). It still requires lots of infrastructure upgrades, replacing the old passive cabinets with bigger active ones containing DSLAMs, laying lots of fiber around etc. I still think its a dead end and countries like Greece that only now are installing such networks are making a big mistake.

FTTB, either through G.FAST OR Ethernet is a better use of all that money in my opinion and it's a lot easier to upgrade in the future (either the building terminal or switcing to full fiber i.e. AON/GPON etc).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/39pCRjN.png

I wonder about that. Obviously the future of internet connections is wireless. Why are we still bothering to hook up individual houses. Apartment blocks, perhaps. Houses ... why ?

> VDSL is certainly not a "dead end". 50Mbit is available in most of Germany, with 100Mbit slowly rolling out.

Using increasingly involved techniques to get more speed out of a century-old technology is pretty much a dead end.

100Mbit is decent, but it comes at the price of * the wires needing to be very short by telco standards * the use of DSL vectoring, which creates mini-monopolies in the DSLAM and allows one provider (usually Telekom) to hold all users on that DSLAM hostage

And keep in mind that if we had fiber, we could probably get a Gbit.

Make no mistake, the strong position of DSL in Germany is the result of politics, not common sense.

In the US, 100 Mbps availability hit 60% in 2014, and the next milestone is gigabit.

How often is the performance difference between 100 megabit and gigabit internet all that measurable, though? For that matter, how often do truly get even, say, 900 megabits allocated to you on that sort of connection?

I'm not doubting they actually give you a gigabit connection, but especially during peak hours, I doubt the transit links you hit would necessarily have that much to spare.

> How often is the performance difference between 100 megabit and gigabit internet all that measurable, though?

For doing backups/restores, in this age of multi-terabyte disks, fast network links (especially in the upload direction) are a necessity.

I don't mind some oversubscription, I can work around peak hours, hell, I'd love to temporarily trade away most of my downlink bandwidth in exchange for uplink bandwidth -- average upload speed is all that matters for this sort of large transfer.

It's the tail end of the PM peak here, and I'm getting 420 mbps to my web host, about 450 to Azure (on a 500/500). I think it's growing pains from Verizon's gigabit rollout, because when I was at 300/300, I consistently got over the rated speed.

In the US, if you don't have symmetric streams, the average high-speed stream is 6mbps/100mbps up/down. The next milestone is still going to discriminate against content producers, IT workers, and software engineers.

Compounding that, the latency comcast deliberately introduces into their network (I've got many ISP's to judge on here) makes the internet ugly, but only if you don't pay for their services.

What we need is not a target for faster downstream, but higher competition - I could give a shit about network neutrality if the providers offered network honesty: a 500 GB monthly limit is a 1.5mB stream - full stop.

I'd actually dispute "slower broadband": from that doc I get

United Kingdom 16.3mbps average 91% above 4mbps United States 17.2mpbs average 88% above 4mbps

which implies that the US has a slightly different, more unequal curve where slightly fewer people have "adequate" broadband and a small number have much faster broadband.

I wouldn't say a "small number" have faster broadband in the U.S. than in Europe. In the U.S., 42% of people have above 15 mbps (enough for more than one Netflix HD stream at a time). In U.S. states that are as dense as the big European countries (Maryland, Delaware, etc.) that number is 50-60%. The U.K. is at 39%, but the other big European countries are much lower: Germany (30%), France (16%), and Italy (10%).

So I think it's fair to say that the U.S. curve is more unequal. There's more people without access to adequate broadband (in New Mexico, or inner-city Baltimore) than in Europe. But the median American likely has a faster broadband connection than the median European.

I'm the UK, the vast, vast majority of cable infrastructure is owned by openreach (BT) because it used to be a government run service. While it's not a general requirement, it is one for them, which in effect means it is general.

Does BT have cable, or just DSL and fiber?

I was using "cable" to mean lines in general (not very clear, my bad) - it's almost all ADSL over phone lines, with FTTC in a lot of places now. The only other big network of physical cable is Virgin who run their own cable network.

Cable for TV was never a huge thing in the UK like it is in the states - satellite TV (Sky) was the bigger thing.

They do ADSL, FTTN/VDSL and FTTP (very sporadically).

If this is true why is my Virgin Media fibre pretty damn fast and reliable and every American seems to constantly whinge about their cable provider?

What do you mean, "if this is true?" I linked my sources (Akamai and OECD)--you can see for yourself.

As far as that perception goes, my suspicion is that it has to do with the tech press/readership skewing young and urban. The U.S. is highly unusual in making the actual building of wires largely a state/local issue, and also in treating cities as ghettos instead of national priorities. Maryland, where I live, is a microcosm: if it were a country, it'd be just below Finland for broadband speeds. But it's only major city (Baltimore) is impoverished, and doesn't have fiber even though all the counties around it do. My neck of the state is pretty rural--large parts of it don't even have public water/sewer. But it's had fiber for a decade. Meanwhile, New York and Boston are just now getting fiber, and San Francisco still mostly doesn't have it.

> treating cities as ghettos instead of national priorities

This sounds completely backwards, until you realise all persistent problems in the US can be traced to racism.

(I'm still unconvinced as to the idea that broadband is statistically "better" in the US but the customers complain far more. I suspect that a huge chunk of people prefer slow/cheap/reliable to fast/expensive, certainly once you get beyond about 10mbit.)

So what you’re saying is averages don’t give the whole picture?

If you're talking about how well a national regulatory regime works, nationwide or statewide averages are probably more relevant data points than anecdotes about specific cities.

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