Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
France ranks near the very bottom in Europe in percentages above 10mbps, 15mbps, and 25mbps. In the developed world, France is behind - typically far behind - nearly every nation, including Russia (a far poorer country). France's broadband situation is an embarrassment, nothing has fundamentally changed in that picture for the past decade.
And they are slooow as shit too.
Now that's interesting. Do you have some stats on CPU efficiency and overhead?
And I recommend mosh ( https://github.com/rinne/mosh - the SSH Agent forwarding fork/branch ) to hide the latency as much as possible.
This is just categorically false. Where I live our state owned telco is horrible and you have to jump through hoops to cancel your account with them. People have to keep paying them for literally months (sometimes more than 6) after they cancel their service with them to cancel as they just do not process cancellations and then sue you if you do not pay up.
Our fiber revolution was driven not by the state, but by private profit-focused corporations. In fact the state telco now also has fiber - but it costs about twice the price and then you still have to deal with a provider which is sub standard and makes it near impossible for you to cancel their service. I pay about $10 USD more a month for 100mbit/100mbit up/down FTTH than I payed for 4mbit/512k ADSL up/down from state telco.
With just about every other "utility" or "public service" the story is the same here. Police is shit so I have to pay for security if you don't want to get armed robbed raped or murdered, schools are shit so you have to pay for private schools if you want your child to be able to read and write. Electricity supply is shit - every year we have load shedding and prices keep going up while govt is lining their pockets and then looking for ways to further fuck rate payers while getting kickbacks from Russia. And now because the govt has made everything worse for years there is talk about nationalizing industries to fuel populism amongst the almost 30% (official) unemployed and many poor people as our economy has been shrinking for years (and of course this is capitalism's fault now - because private industry makes govt look bad in comparison).
It is theoretically possible to have decent services where there is no competition and govt monopoly - but it is not the norm and I would say in most cases it does not work out this way.
And yes the problem is exceptionally high levels of corruption - but if the Govt does not have a self granted monopoly on providing services this provides some measure of containment for corruption and also means that you don't have to pay for everything twice as I have to do now.
And sure - I would like to have a non corrupt govt - but that won't happen ever. So people who make this blatantly false statement that Govt services will always be superior from private services is just giving fuel to the cash grab perpetrated by the Govt of my country.
So yeah, thanks, I guess - thanks for giving the govt of my country excuses for looting even more money - like they needed any to begin with.
Um..not sure how validating your evidence is irrelevant. Or even wanting to know more about it.
And to the other poster's point, personal experience impacts interpretations a lot (in both directions). I myself consider the govt inefficient but reliable when compared to private companies. I'm not a libertarian because I trust the govt, but because I trust companies less. I've spoken with people from countries with lots of govt corruption and they find the idea of a reliable govt to be a joke. We each have a lifetime of experience to support our positions.
Does that explain why France is so dramatically far behind the US on Internet speeds, and has been for the last 20 years? Ideally the US goes out of its way to not follow France's path on telecom.
As of Q1 2017:
US average speeds: 18.7 mbps
France average speeds: 10.8 mbps
To put France's figure into perspective, they rank toward the bottom in Europe, behind Russia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. They're #27 out of 31 nations ranked in Europe.
France also ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 10 mbps, at just 31%. The US is at 67%.
And again France ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 15 mbps, at just 18%. The US is at 48%.
The US is #10 globally when it comes to % over 25 mbps, with 21%. That category saw a one year increase of 65%..
The US ranks in the top 15 globally for highest percentage at 10 mbps, 15 mbps and 25 mbps.
France should be copying the US based on their persistently atrocious broadband figures. And that's with the US approach being subpar.
https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...
And keep in mind that in France currently "fiber" means "at least FFTN", much of rural france won't see FTTH for a long time.
France claiming 100% fiber by 2022? They are dreaming, or perhaps even delusional. No way they can get FTTH by 2022. There are some places that don’t have any connectivity and you have to use Satelite.
They’re going to fix that in 4 years?
I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understanding is that for them the FTTN node would be roughly at the center of each village.
All of a sudden, unless the village is huge there's <2km between any home and the node and you can expect 15~20Mbps over the entire village.
The kind of engineering to distribute such a large network seems to mirror the issues with the nationwide power grid that was proposed to allow for consistent solar energy. The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
> I'm not saying that a similar model wouldn't be easy to implement in the boroughs of New York, Boston, SV, Austin, etc.
Oh please, the village I'm talking about is not a borough of a major metropolis, it's a small rural village, the closest thing which could be construed as a city has a population of under 50k and is 20km away.
Boston and Austin have metro populations in the millions, there's barely 6 cities in all of France which reach that.
> you still have 20% of Americans living in not-urban environments
Oh good point, let's check the percentage of rural population in france. Hey look, it's 20%. Wow, probably an outlier, let's check Germany. Oh, 24%. Maybe Spain? 20% again.
And these are highly urbanised countries mind, Ireland and Portugal are sitting at 36% rural population.
> The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
None of London, Paris or Munich are countries, they're major/capital cities inside countries which have their own non-urban populations.
I still agree with you, though, that America could do something if there was a strong enough will. Even if the cost of fiber is prohibitive, it seems like there are wireless technologies out there that would be better than the zilch broadband 23 million Americans currently have. (https://www.npr.org/2018/03/03/590546371/rural-communities-t...)
Consider this, the state of Texas alone is bigger than all of France, and while it has several huge cities in it, it still has less than half the population of France. Montana is more than half the land area of France, and only has 1 million people living in it.
It would be a lot easier to just give up on the 1% that are truly scattered to the winds with little homesteads in the middle of no-where. But hopefully we can get some really good low earth orbit satellite internet and not have to worry about all this.
The NBN failed largely because of a government ideology that neutered it from FTTH to FTTN, if that.
Australia is fairly equivalent to the US for many areas with the exception of the (relatively) uninhabited interior.
If you combined a list of US and Australian cities by population, the top five Australian cities would be in the top 10:
New York (8.5M), Sydney (5.0M), Melbourne (4.7M), LA (3.9M), Chicago (2.7M), Brisbane (2.3M), Houston (2.2M), Perth (2.0M), Philadelphia (1.6M), Adelaide (1.5M).
The notion of Australia as quaint rural villages is used as an excuse by defenders of the status quo. The US is just so unique, "Oh, it's bigger", "more dense", "cities are different here", etc., et al.
(1) New York - 20.2M (2) Los Angeles - 13.3M (3) Chicago - 9.5M (4) Dallas - 7.2M (5) Houston - 6.8M (6) Washington, DC - 6.1M (7) Philadelphia - 6.1M (8) Miami - 6.1M (9) Atlanta - 5.8M (10) Boston - 4.8M
Only Sydney would make the top 10, coming in just above Boston.
Both the US and Australia have cities / metro areas that are significant in population as well as huge low-density areas, but the US metro areas are definitely larger. This makes sense given an overall population of 323M vs 24M.
See
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
For example, the Seattle MSA extends as far north as Burlington, Mt Vernon, as far east as almost Lake Chelan, and as far south as Packwood near White Pass.
No one would credibly claim that White Pass was a part of Seattle, any more than Lake Chelan.
Whereas Melbourne absolutely would consider Boronia on the east a suburb, Campbellfield on the north, and Frankson in the south all suburbs.
I do get what you are saying, and of course with that population number it is so, but I don't think that there's really a great correlation (mainly as a result of Census in the US using a non-standard definition of the internation "metropolitan area" to basically... "anywhere else".
That being said, when you look at "as a percentage of the population", Sydney and Melbourne at ~20%, the others at ~10%, there's also not the argument of "hey, these US cities are far more dense and complex than Australia's", when the complexity is far more often a result of _artificial barriers and restrictions in the market_ than anything logistical.
In practical terms, this means that DSL has already reached its practical limit with speeds around 30-50 Mbps, whereas Cable Internet still has room to grow around 2-4 Gbps, depending on how many TV channels the operator is ready to sacrifice to Internet traffic.
Of course, this doesn't address congestion / oversubscription issues around cable, but assuming a competently managed network, FTTN with coax as the last mile is still a very good choice in 2018.
The successor, G.fast, will nominally do a gig, but about 500 Mbps over short loops.
Thanks French government, you suck. I pay confiscatory taxes — including incredibly high taxes on my internet and phone service and what do I get for it? Abysmal speeds. Given the geographic size of France — it should be covered in fiber already, but my area is projected at 3 years out.
They won’t have 100% fiber by 2022. It’s impossible given the French propensity to make the simple complex, and the inexpensive, expensive. If Orange is a representation of the power of French innovation, then I fear for the future. That’s a company that has separate sign in systems based on the type of account you have and a system that takes 2 weeks to update when payments are made by credit card. Orange represents the single worst experience I have ever had as a customer — that includes my time living in the US and dealing with companies such as Time Warner. The French electric service, EDF, is a close second.
You want to talk about government and successful internet infrastructure initiatives — have a look at South Korea.
But France? Innovative? It’s all for show. It still is a pain in the ass to accomplish anything in that country. Europe uses IBANs almost universally, for example, yet French utilities still insist on the RIB. The insurance company I have can’t do prelevements with my German IBAN. It’s ridiculous.
Just because a government spends money on something doesn’t mean that government is any good at what they’re spending money on.
Your conversions might be mistaken.
For example, at my place of work, on ADSL2:
Down Stream : 6696Kbps / Up Stream : 736Kbps
So slightly worse than you. Converting directly to kilobytes, we've got 837 KB/sec down and 92 KB/sec up. Shave off around 20% to get real-world speed, because those are sync rates, not actual throughput.
Unless you actually have 8/0.8 MBytes down/up, equivalent to 64/6.4 Mbps down/up, which is quite decent! (Still maybe not quite €100 good).
https://map.geo.admin.ch/?layers=ch.bakom.anschlussart-glasf...
Thanks to this map it was easy to select the right place to move to, and we are currently in the process of moving... to an home equipped with FFTH!
Interesting model: the price is the same for everyone, while bandwidth is the maximum they can offer in your location. Excellent support. I bought a TP-LINK MC220L + patch cables from them, and hooked up an edgerouter lite for PPPoE & VLAN tagging. Already had a wifi router (google wifi), which sadly can't do VLAN tagging. Haven't noticed any issues with the double NATing.
Once you deliver the fiber, the marginal cost of increasing port speed is a rounding error as you do routine infrastructure refresh.
Where I work, we’re increasing many wan links to 10Gb because the cost is marginal at scale. In some cases, it can save money versus an older slower tech!
There's just no way you can draw a conclusion like this. I would be equally right in say that public corporations never have an incentive to improve services due to lack of a market or competition (see mass transit).
The rollout of a nationalised national broadband/fibre network in Australia has been an interesting one for a number of reasons. We've actually seen private companies roll out their own networks to compete with both the public provider AND other private companies.
Ultimately, the quality of these services is going to depend on a whole lot more than "public vs private"
It is not the absolute size that matters, it is density and clustering degrees. And there are some sparsely populated countries in Europe that manage to build infrastructure just fine.
Population density:
USA: 35.0/km² (90.6/sq mi)
Norway: 15.8/km² (40.9/sq mi)Before he disrupted those two markets, it was just as bad as the US. Remember the "Forfait RSA" the government crowed about having negotiated for the poorest citizens? 40mn and 40SMS for 10 euros per month...
Europe, if one can even process such a mix of cultures as a single entity, seems to abhor spectacle.
Facebook is really just money, and money doesn't have a location. In terms of offices and employments and locations and blah Facebooks is as big as a middling supermarket chain.
Which isn't to say that money is bad or irrelevant or anything. Just that it isn't local in a meaningful way. Facebook is local to wherever that ugly office building is in much the same way that half the world's aircraft are Irish.
Silicon Valley has been a playground for venture capitalists and their beneficiaries but I would wager that their influence, while wildly public and social, is only important inside it's bubble, and much of that influence has been frivolous, bought or self inflated. Does anyone really need Facebook or Twitter, or Hootsuite or Gmail? They have only existed for circa ten years each.
So I don't believe it's the beacon of social benefit or industrial power. It is certainly a beacon of wild capitalism, excitement and glamour. Whether that's a good thing or not is hotly debated, but a world without SV unicorns would move on just fine.
Anyway, going on this tangent, Europe is different. We've had our share of global domination already (which was expensive and unsustainable in the long run), as well as our share of innovation-by-any-means-necessary (which resulted, among other things, in pollution and WWI). We've decided we don't really need either to live a good life. We can still easily buy whatever innovation you come up with if it proves to be safe and useful. We're happy to leave beta-testing to others.
It's true that Europe does "disruptive" startups less, because people don't like being disrupted as much, but it's not true that France is a land of tech-illiterate peasants. It's just that the tech is done in large, somewhat lumbering but nonetheless profitable, megacorps.
Orange, Vivendi, Airbus, Bull, ST, and so on.