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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Swiss mobile internet is fantastic. It works in trains, it works in the mountains, it works in the cities, it works everywhere. OK, the country is small, but still it is quite an achievement.

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As much as I love the swiss mobile network - saying that it works everywhere is wrong. In the mountains you still have smaller regions without service from all major providers. Especially when you are high up, you have to know that you cannot rely on 100% on your mobile connection. You can take a look at the Swissom mobile coverage map here (german):

https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.js...

I once got a text message welcoming me to Switzerland from a commercial flight from Rome to London.

The data rates my provider gave me in the message where ridiculous (10+ GBP per mb), but it's impressive I got it while on an airplane.

From a plane you're usually in direct line of sight to many, many mobile network towers at once.

Mobile phone use is banned on planes because of the interference this could cause with ground based networks.

This is not entirely correct. The majority of mobile antennas are directional and are optimised to cover a ground area and not waste transmit power broadcasting into the air.

They could have been aimed at an angle in a mountainous area.

Swisscom is one of the leaders in Europe when it comes to 5G. They had 90% coverage until the end of 2019 for example.

https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/swisscom-chef-zu-5g-man-h...

Meanwhile in Canada, our providers use the “it’s a big country so that’s why it’s stupidly expensive in the few percent of the territory that’s covered” excuse.

Meanwhile, in Europe you can take a train and have good coverage in the middle of nowhere through a base station that probably sees 20 minutes of heavy use per day...

Surely population density plays a huge role in the relatively lower coverage of both US and Canada compared to Europe.

Switzerland: 206/sqkm Germany: 240/sqkm Eurozone as a whole: ~100/sqkm Canada: ~4/sqkm USA: 35/sqkm

Canada's population density figure is deceptively low because most of Canada's landmass is completely uninhabited. Most of the Canadian far north has an even lower population density than the Sahara desert.

Canada's population is tightly clustered into a small number of urban areas that have population densities comparable to places like Philadelphia or Vienna.

Despite this, Canada's population centers have nowhere near the quality of public infrastructure of Vienna.

This is all accurate, but people still expect reception and speed when travelling between those dense population centres by road or rail.

Much like Australia, this means providers build the infrastructure to supply those areas but then the cost is recovered from the dense population areas.

Theres also some capatilism nonsense oligopolies thrown in there, but that's the core issue.

> This is all accurate, but people still expect reception and speed when travelling between those dense population centres by road or rail.

Why doesn't the consumer have a choice? I'd be willing to sacrifice coverage in rural areas in exchange for 50-80% discounted tariffs, for instance.

There is no evidence that cutting coverage in rural areas will reduce prices elsewhere.

The Canadian situation is bad-to-zero coverage in rural areas and the world's most expensive cell phone service (think of plans that charge $10 CAD per GB of data) in developed regions.

The money that Canada's two cell phone networks didn't spend covering rural areas didn't reduce prices; it disappeared into shareholder pockets.

Because you don't want to increase the class divide between rural and non-rural areas. Or maybe you do, but most of us don't, and you have to conform to our values if you want to live with the benefits that a society of those values have produced.

Isn't more than half the population something like < 100 miles from the US border?

I've always wondered why no big international player tried to enter that market, it's ripe for disruption, and the local operators sound like they are far behind.

The key phrase in the comment you're replying to is "in the few percent of the territory that’s covered". The vast majority of the Canadian population live in highly urbanised pockets.

They do, but they want reception outside of those densely urbanized pockets. They want reception on the highways between the cities, at their lake house, or if they live in a rural area. The denser population subscribers still pay for the infrastructure in low-density areas.

It really depends where you go in Europe. In German mobile connections are notoriously bad. I've had moments where I'm standing in the middle of Aachen struggling to get a single byte through. Then there's Belgium (especially Flanders) where I can't remember the last time I didn't have at least solid HSPA+ available.

German here. The latter statement doesn't really hold for us. Super patchy coverage on trains.

> German here. The latter statement doesn't really hold for us. Super patchy coverage on trains.

Germany has a different issue, you have multiple providers and those combined have pretty good coverage. I visit germany frequently by train and roam and it kicks me from provider to provider.

Iirc your providers are mandated by the gov to also service these rather unprofitable areas, which they do. They split up the uninhabited regions, build a few antennas there. So if you have a plan with a national provider you get shitty coverage. If you roam and can use any provider, it's actually mostly fine (in my experience).

I don't understand why they don't do national roaming in these areas.

Especially considering the terrain, which is not forgiving. Those mountains really make coverage interesting.

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