We had a lot of investment from the EU to install optical fibre everywhere, even in small towns. Now we have even small companies that only operate locally with very, very competitive prices.
It really should be a national shame, how much the US has permitted AT&T and Verizon and Comcast and Time Warner et al to derail the correct functioning of a market so insanely critical to the growth of prosperity (both personal as well as the wider economy).
This is what happens when you let the state decide who is allowed to offer certain types of services: pretty soon the large, well-funded incumbents take over the state-run process about deciding who is allowed in the market, and enact policies and regulations that make it cost millions to serve even a single customer. This is peanuts for large existing companies with billions of dollars of recurring revenue, but impossible for new entrants.
The guy who runs the FCC and decides this kind of stuff, for example, used to work for Verizon, one of the largest telcos in the country.
In most of the US, it is basically illegal to start a new ISP.
Australia's current government has literally held the country back a decade in network infrastructure progress, one of the key foundations of any country's economic future.
It IS a national shame.
13 states cap pole attachment fees at cost or at a fixed number. [1] I'd be interested to see this pass in Pennsylvania.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-surv...]
You mean lobbying by telcos to make permitting and other things expensive in municipalities and counties.
> This is what happens when you let the state decide who is allowed to offer certain types of services
Yes. Absolutely this.
The situation isn't entirely terrible in Germany, but extremely variable depending on your location. I have 1Gbit for 40 EUR per month, but there are certainly places that aren't even remote that get no reasonable broadband.
And in some places, even big cities, people don't even have a choice as there's only company.
Why does that excuse America? The continent of Europe is also huge. It isn’t like this stuff is installed by one solitary overworked technician going house-to-house, big countries (and regions) can employ more people to do more work, and can raise more money from more customers.
That being said, they've also done a pretty good job in managing that money (which is rare for natural resource rich countries).
In the US, on the other hand, remote places are a lot more inhabitable. There are just more remote towns in the US, with more people owning more land and being spread out more as a result.
Of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that some dense towns in the US a few miles from a major city still have to deal with shitty broadband because no ISP is willing to invest in hooking them up to FttH. On average, though, the US will probably do worse than Norway for the foreseeable future because of the difference in where and how people live.
But yeah the bigger issue is that often even in urban or suburban areas, the internet is still bad.
That could be an excuse if you ignore the fact that the terrible service is not limited to rural regions in the US. It's often really expensive and slow even in places that are packed with people.
1. I live in the UK, in a town 25 minutes by train from central London. The best broadband I can get is ~45Mb, and the best I've seen in the rest of the town is ~120Mb, provided by Virgin Broadband (which, for one reason or another, can't provide that service at my home).
2. I'm currently visiting my family in Croatia, and they've recently got a fibre connection; I just measured 527Mb [0]
Huh? Where do you get that from? "A lot of parts", even? I've lived in one of the most rural areas with basically only villages and small towns (<10000 pop) around. When I lived in my village of 600, we got broadband access in 2005.
There was also talk about increasing it to 2 Mbit/s some years ago.[2]
Not that that change would make a difference if you look at broadband accessibility for Germany here.[3]
Point is: What was written was a load of bollocks. There were no facts to back up the statement but people lapped it up anyway.
[1] https://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/TelecomICT_Indicators...
[2] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/committees/scv/Documents/T17-SC...
[3] https://www.bmvi.de/DE/Themen/Digitales/Breitbandausbau/Brei...
In Germany this is due to regulation. Deutsche Telekom has no incentive to lay cables, as they will have to share the infrastructure with competitors at a price that makes doing so unattractive.
As in, you compared the regulated prices?
Seems like a pretty severe failure of government if they actively disincentivised investment into fiber tech...
Source: this is was actually happened when they still had the monopoly.
That being said, it seems the networks have a lot of congestion at the neighborhood level (equivalent to oversubscribed DOCSIS nodes), at least in my experience in several neighborhoods in Barcelona. This became much more visible when COVID hit and Netflix and such had to limit quality in Europe as a result.
I only have experience with Movistar and Vodafone fiber, I Haven't used Orange's so I'm not sure if they're any better.
For me personally, 4G is extremely fast and cheap while being, importantly, low-latency.
Even gaming and other latency sensitive applications are possible on 4G/5G. Why not just roll out 5G networks?
Eventually, 5G will outperform fibre on a cost and speed basis (for a long time my FTTH home internet was slower than my 4G connection by a large margin). Of course, I mean practical terms rather than theoretical. Practically, fibre speeds are usually limited by 1Gbps-maximum middleboxes in community fibre cabinets that are not cheap to upgrade.
2 Gbps XGPON2 is starting to roll out in my country and it's a rather simple upgrade (but costly). If your ISP isn't offering gigabit on fiber, it's purely motivated by greed and lack of competition.
Also I'm not aware of any "community fiber cabinets" limited to 1 Gbps. Are you talking about GPON or Ethernet networks? Ethernet is not FTTH but FTTN, like DOCSIS or VDSL can be.
The network is not technically capable of it.
GPON is 2.4/1.2 Gbps and it's shared with multiple users so it's incredibly unlikely that any part if the core infrastructure is limited to Gigabit. Only the CPE is.
You can deploy 2 Gbps service on GPON though the quality will be low-ish, or you can run multiple versions of xPON standards on a single fiber network and offer > 1 Gbps to users who you switch to XGPON2. Others stay with existing CPE and plans and GPON as if nothing changed.
However, whilst the speed is great, the reliability is not. Its currently been disconnected for the last 48 hours with no timeframe given for repairs to the mast. So I'm having to tether of 4G on my phone (on another network).
tl;dr
5G speeds ++ 5G uptime --
It's worth noting that 5G explicitly combines very different techniques with very different properties (e.g. high-bandwidth short range systems and low power slow networks for things like smart meters), and the 5G systems that are competitive with fibre are essentially designed for dense metropolitan areas, USA won't cover all the suburbs with high-speed 5G.
You are welcome to come check out our excellent unlimited and uncapped 4G coverage in rural Finland.
Proper network coverage isn’t an issues in countries with functioning telecom regulation and coverage minimums in frequency licenses.
Excellent, doesn't match my experience. I'm not sure if I've been too rural or not rural enough.
For $60/month I get 1 GB down, and about 100MB UP. I have google fi, and yesterday I could barely get reddit gifs to load (it was slow for some reason)... usually it's better, but my FIBER IS WAY BETTER.