And yet your typical American on the Internet still blames greedy companies for their slow speeds. As if companies elsewhere with faster Internet were less greedy.
The fastest country on the list, Denmark, has almost no competition in the sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Denmark. And it’s been a model of deregulation: https://reason.com/2017/10/24/how-denmark-has-overtaken-the-...
> Regulators around the world took notice and strove to emulate the success of the U.S. approach. Denmark in particular styled its own telecommunications regulations on the U.S. model, slashing its chief telecom regulator altogether and assigning small regulatory functions to other departments.
Denmark is basically the situation where you have a “benevolent former monopoly,” like Verizon here in the mid Atlantic US.
This worked too. A small ISP came along (init7, they're awesome https://www.init7.net/) and started offering symmetric gbit at $65 per month, disrupting the ISP market. The big ISPs were scrambling at first, now there's actual competition, with offers like 10git for ~$40 a month (https://fiber.salt.ch/en). Granted that's marketing 10gbit and not real 10gbit, because it's XG-PON [0], so "up to 10gbit/s" and it's a shitty ISP. But still way better than you used to be able to get.
So it would seem to me that many roads lead to rome. Eitherway I'm pretty happy because I don't hate my ISP anymore, something that was unimaginable 10 years ago.
- No bandwidth caps.
- ISPs competing to offer the best service in a system similar to how health care is done in Japan.
- Being able to switch ISPs without issue.
- Being able to run my own hardware instead of being required to use their routers.
- Net neutrality. I pay for gigabit duplex but if I'm not uploading to a fast lane I'm limited to 10mbps, or 1% of what I pay for. This is terrible for VPNing for work, and other work related tasks.
(However, a provider deciding on some kind of 'neutrality' by itself and offering that as a selling point to customers is perfectly fine.0
And the article itself points out that it might be important for ISPs to feel the threat of net neutrality regulations.
It's hard to claim that the ISP market, at least in many locations, isn't subject to plenty of market failures that need some kind of remedy.
I don't think it's a reputable source for analysis, their bias is obviously apparent and not necessarily based in reality, it's an ideology.
Having one of the Koch brothers as founder just adds fuel to the fire...
The most important player indebted itself with ~50k million € and it's basically replacing all the copper coverage with FTTH.
Other HFC players are turning into FTTH too, as HFC won't be able to compete with +600mbps FTTH offerings, and symmetry is more and more valued over time.
Also, I don't have the figures at hand, but the coverage in Spain is extraordinary. FTTH is reaching places that barely had 3mbps ADSL, and it's probably going to cover places that had nothing in the long run.
Public money is paying for capital costs in places that would be impossible to make a profit otherwise, but still the main obstacle are municipalities and nimbys.
I've seen some pretty stupid stuff, like blocking FTTH deployment in historical centers under aesthetic concerns, where they already have ugly copper wires in the facades. In reality what those municipalities expect is ISP to bury the cables and pay for the whole renovation of such streets, which no one in his right mind will. So this people will not have FTTH unless their municipalities change their mind, but they blame ISPs.
The infrastructure is public and leased to private companies, avoiding the tragedy that happens in the US where laying down cables is the most expensive part and which shuns away competition, leaving with oligopolies where each company got their turf and that increases the barrier of entry significantly.
[1] https://www.government.se/496173/contentassets/afe9f1cfeaac4...
There are 3 separate 4G networks with very high coverage selling mobile broadband rather cheaply (you can fx get 1 TB a month for approx 36 USD a month).
TDC was also forced to give competitors access to their PSTN, coax and fiber network so resellers can compete on selling on their physical network.
The power companies have also been aggressive in recent years rolling out fiber, so several places people can choose either infrastructure from TDC, their power company or one of the mobile providers.
They have on multiple occasions tried to force competitors out of the market by making unfavorable pricing models or straight up blocking third parties from using their infrastructure
They are in no way a "benevolent former monopoly" and there's a lot of regulations in place to avoid them exploiting their market position, since they in the past have tried exactly that
Denmark has cheap, fast internet because of the regulations enforced on the market, which makes it possible for me to get a 1gbit symmetric connection from a small provider for 120 DKK (approximately $20) per month
"Countries who jumped on the Internet earlier can't have fiber because of existing competition"
Fiber is actually MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER to deploy for higher speed networks than any high speed copper, because the later almost always implies to deploying a fibre network too to do everything other than the last mile.
1. You have to build your fibre backbone anyways. That's an even bigger trouble in countries with no culture to share fibre. And you would usually have to get much "brainier," and more expensive fibre equipment in this case.
2. You still need to wire the fibre fairly close to premises.
3. High speed copper network equipment costs huge sums, more than commoditised GPON.
4. Copper often needs to be torn, to be replaced with higher grade copper
5. You still need to drill buildings to install niches for copper equipment.
6. You need to put extra equipment into equipment closets.
7. Copper needs more equipment overall
8. Copper has lower reliability overall, and costs more to maintain
So, in the end, you just do the same FTTH, just with copper as the last few tenths of metres. This is so obvious, but people keep dogmatising over "it's already wired with copper."
GPON by comparison does not require anything in the closet, but a piece of glass passive optical slitter.
You can easily have 1024 end-users on a single powerful GePON OLT, covering few square kilometres of 100% passive net.
AFAIU, GP is talking about FTTC (or VDSL), which is moderately faster than typical ADSL via existing phone exchanges or (far away) cabinets, while being much more expensive. FTTC can be cheaper than FTTH, but silly IMO - any increase in bandwidth will be expensive.
It’s especially bad with mobile data caps. I had a 500mb cap in ~2014.
Here in Maryland (which is a small, politically homogenous, rich state, just like Denmark), most of the state has fiber or gigabit cable and broadband speeds are very fast: https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/fastest-internet-connect...
> In fact, the next state on the list, Maryland, is nearly tied with Denmark for the second-fastest Internet speed on Earth.
It's best to say that both USA, and EU are very, very bureaucratised, and regulated. It's just one is marginally better at not introducing damaging regulations than the other.
Japan too had 100mb/s since nineties for example, and theeeen..... they stuck. Speeds there not been rising by much since because regulations froze in nineties, and so did the market.
Countries which had near zero telecommunication regulations covering the Internet, or had no Internet as such did advance more uniformly.
I can have a 500mb/s over GPON, or even a symmetric gigabit over 1000BASE-LX even in *stan countries, and Africa these days. Fiberlink has 1Gbs for $30 a month in Lahore. PCTL is starting a 10Gb/s GPON trial in Islamabad.
Single mode fibre based tech is much cheaper to deploy, and maintain than any legacy tech, and properly designed GPON net probably being the cheapest option ever.
Ah yes, the infamous wired mess in the Japanese media.
https://hothardware.com/news/japanese-10-gbps-internet
You can get 1 Gbps service in Japanese farm towns.
So what we have now is primarily a copper infrastructure with zero to two fibre backbones to choose from depending where you live. It's a shambles.
The big mistake was not recognising that the physical infrastructure is a natural monopoly and, like any monopoly, should be state owned. Just like sewerage, electricity, water etc. it makes absolutely no sense to have parallel infrastructure. The UK shows that while it is possible, you make great sacrifices in the name of "competition" and "free market".
There's not much free market in domestic internet in the US nor in Europe.
[1] https://www.tripsavvy.com/so-just-how-big-is-europe-compared...).
(My building's apparently an "Xfinity Community".)
On the bright side, they're the fastest ISP in the country. On the bad side, they don't offer just the Internet, so I have to pay for cable + Internet, even though I don't use cable TV at all (not plugged into my TV at all).
The US also used to be able to build infrastructure. People weren't any less greedy back then. Other things changed. Things that are very important to look into.