“When it comes to broadband, America is the original shithole country” | Hacker News Reader

“When it comes to broadband, America is the original shithole country”

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UK enters the chat. We could have had the best broadband in the world, but Mrs Thatcher decided to cull fibre optic networks in favour of copper ones as in her mind BT would get competitive advantage over companies offering copper network. Absolute madness and seems like the motive of money changing hands under the table was never investigated.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...

Funny,the same happend in Germany during the Helmut Kohl era.

https://www.epr-blog.de/2018/09/21/fiber-optics-is-the-futur...

I think UK still has it better fiber infra than Germany overall.

We're now in the position that just one company has a FTTP network. It's mad that Virgin Media has a monopoly on one cable that runs into my house, but all the other providers have to compete over the other cable that runs beside it (and I believe are unable to provide their own, even if they wanted to). I guess she got what she wanted.

"unable to provide their own" seems to me like it's not universally true across the UK, at least -- CityFibre are digging up the roads just along from my house right now, installing new fibre all the way along the road, presumably in preparation for being able to provide fibre directly to each house...

This is not true at all. The UK is seeing an explosion in non-BT FTTP networks - Hyperoptic, CommunityFibre, CityFibre, B4RN to name just a few off the top of my head. Granted, BT's network is probably currently the largest but that's because it's had a headstart and is a massive company - but they are certainly facing lots of competition at the local level which is great.

That's not true at all, OpenReach[1] is putting fiber to the door in all kinds of small villages and other rural environments. There are many other providers. I think Virgin Media got the edge because of an acquisition of TelNet (or named something like that?) which laid a bunch of the groundwork infrastructure for fiber in the 90s, mainly in cities.

1. https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband

Telewest?

NTL, just googled it. They merged with Telewest at some point

I missed the edit window. Thanks for the corrections (orf, tebbers, pm215).

I meant to say that we're effectively in a localised monopoly to whatever provider has decided to invest in covering our area. Are there really buildings with cables from multiple competing providers which would allow a genuine choice? And as an individual consumer, it isn't possible to commission your own infrastructure.

There is this incredible tale about how the UK was on the verge of getting a fiber optic (analog then!) television network, where they would have had a bunch of LaserDisc players, all playing various movies starting at staggered intervals, all streaming into the fiber optic network, so you could have had basically Netflix back in the 80s, by "tuning" in to the correct station.

Taking advantage of the immense bandwidth available in fiber. Alas, it would have been a monopolistic crime against Capitalism or something, so it never came to be.

With 80s tech, one could have easily created a set top box for browsing titles (in text format), possibly based on Ceefax technology. (Teletext in other parts of the world.)

I can't understand why they had this assumption that it will create a monopoly? At very least they could create a new state body in charge of the network and then lease parts to different companies. Kind of similar fashion how National Rail works, but being able to enable true competition as multiple companies could lease the same routes to customers.

It's too reductive to blame this on one politician. We had a similar thing happen in Australia, and so did Germany, and countless other countries.

Infrastructure tradeoffs are made all the time - it just so happens that that one backfired due to a very sudden technological revolution predicted by almost no one at the time.

Thatcher was the prime minister, not "one politician"

>a very sudden technological revolution

Except in Germany's case it wasn't sudden. Kohl's Government was instructed by experts that copper will die and fiber is the future yet his cabinet knowingly shelved that idea so that his copper buddies could make a profit.

Whether good or bad, it wasn't a trade-off - it was an ideological decision. There's always a struggle between those that treat infrastructure as a national interest and those that want to privatise it

The one thing I took from most threads on this topic is: Everyone seems to think broadband speeds are terrible and expensive at their place, fed by many anecdotes.

Hah! Well I'll counter that, in my apartment in central London we got something like 100Mbps via cable, that was an artificial cap because I didn't want to pay more (300 was available, we got the cheapest package) - thought that was pretty decent for my wife and I.

Moved to Helsinki, didn't know what the options were for internet access so bought a 4G router from Amazon before flying out and stuck a pre-pay net-only sim in it (that you could buy from any kiosk) as a temporary solution. Year later (and all the WFH shit-hits-fan stuff that has happened in the last year) and it's still going strong, again getting around 100Mbps.

The Finnish one is CGNAT-ed though so for any 'hacking away for fun (and British TV)' stuff I set up an RPi with a WIFI ap and L2TP tunnel to AAISP back home.

The 4G is uncapped?

Yes - here it seems to be the speed which is capped as standard, so 2Mbps would cost €10/month, 100 €20 or something (prices are inaccurate)

4G in Finland is un-limited. The population density removes the need for it.

Doctorow's point is that the citenzens need to make themselves heard so this problem can be fixed. If you think your country has worse broadband than the US, vocally complain to your politicians too. Arguing over who's the worst won't help anyone.

Our politicians tried to fix it, centralised it, and made it a much worse development than countries that didn't.

Simply demanding the government do something is no guarantee it'll end up any better, and it could well prevent the development that preceded the "action" from continuing apace.

Fiber runs down the middle of the road along my property line. I doubt Openreach will ever get me connected.

Remember The USA doesn't even have LLU.

To be honest FTC (Fiber to CAB) and VDSL for the local drop (35 - 70 MBS is 10x better than almost all US subs get access to.

And very few consumers need (or want to pay for) FTP

The part of the US with which I'm familiar (Intermountain west) is mostly connected with HFC. DSL is what bottom feeders looking to pay as little as possible use and as a result its QoS is poor. HFC is fine imho for 100% of retail subs at present. We have 650/40.

> And very few consumers need (or want to pay for) FTP

Consumer 'needs' have been formed by gatekeepers to shape their profit motives, so this is a bit of a red herring.

So exactly how do you persuade an OAP (Senior) who uses their phone mostly to call their Children to upgrade and pay more so that you can have pointless bragging rights about FTP.

I am sure incumbents would love to move low revenue customers onto more expensive plans.

Arguably social media, etc. could be home appliances much like anything else.

Some people might not actually need high speed internet - but this doesn't change the possibility (I would say fact) that the market of available goods and services, and in turn, the entire 'culture' around internet usage, has been distorted by industry interests.

Perspective appreciated. I’m a long block from the cabinet and do get 20 down and 10 up fairly reliably. Some nights, the winds of the Etherium, so inviting in their promise of flight and freedom, make my download speeds soar to 80.

Unless you've got the money for FTTPoD ofc :)

America? You surely mean Germany/Austria.

Same case in Australia I guess? India on the other hand has leap frogged many developed countries here. Fiber to home with unlimited data is quite reasonable.

I had fibre to the curb in QLD and fibre to the node in Sydney. Was the fastest broadband I've ever experienced!

In Major cities and middle class areas possibly but I doubt rural connectivity gets FTP

Oh, the infrastructure has been/is being laid. It's called BharatNet.

154,000 villages (of around 600,000) are now connected using OFC[1]

With private service providers in a city, I pay around $15/month for a 150Mbps connection with a 1000GB data cap (after which the speed drops to 1Mbps). I can go up to a 1000Mbps/5500GB plan at around $80.

BharatNet will likely be cheaper since it's government run.

1. https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/over-1-...

:-)

I live in small town.

I pay 645 rupees ~ 9 dollars per month, for 60mbps speed till 3.3TB, 2mbps beyond 3.3TB.

Other plans range from 30mbps to 300mbps with costs ranging from 590 - 1800 rupees i.e., 8 to 24 dollars.

Government plans to cover whole country by end of 2022.

I live in city and pay 12k p.a all inclusive 1000GB p.a with speed 10mbps... you are fortunate to have that value which you are getting

It was terrible 10 years ago (less than 32mbps). Nowadays I get 250mbps.

Really depends where you live. Even in the big cities there are buildings/neighborhoods where you can't get more than slow DSL or some overcrowded LTE.

Once you go outside the city, then Godspeed.

Has Mr Doctorow ever visited the DACH region?

I'm living in Germany, and coming from NZ (where we have fairly universal 1Gbps FTTH) it has certainly been a big step down, but it can't compare to some of the insanity that my US friends deal with.

I live in central Berlin, and it is is downright embarrassing, internet access in Germany is terrible. 10 years ago I had 1Gbps fiber in Sweden.

For reference I have 400/20 Cable, for 44Eur/m. No caps. Provider Pyur. Overall medium terrible experience.

200/5 runs $80/month here (upstate NY, USA), and I’m in a “good” broadband spot for my area.

Jan Böhmermann (Germany's John Oliver) did an investigation on his show[1] into Germany's terrible internet infrastructure and proved it's basically down to corruption from Kohl's regime that scrapped the fiber plans for copper in order to enrich a certain friendly company with political ties that was big in the copper business back then.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDNYS_4dkAc

And for 40 years they could not change? Fiber is comming close and close to homes every year as it's needed for FTTC (and doing vectoring on DSL for the last 400m) and for DOCSIS on coaxial cables.

>And for 40 years they could not change?

Of course they 'could', but that would mean for corruption to have gone down and political competence to have gone up in those 40 years but unfortunately it hasn't, quite the opposite.

In Germany, high level corruption and political incompetence has only increased in that time (see BER airport, VW emissions scandal, and the handling of COVID).

Basically if you're well connected and rich, you're untouchable in Germany and your corruption mishaps will be swept under the rug as casual political 'whoopsies' right after you retire to a gold plated pension.

Well, quite a number of politicians got shitcanned after it turned that their dissertations were plagiarized.

So it's not that you're completely untouchable. Even with friends in high places.

Germany privatised telecommunication in the 90s (was done by German Post before) including all the infrastructure (which was a really bad idea in hindsight). Most of the infrastructure is in the hand of the former state business and they want to squeeze the last Euro out of the copper wiring instead of investing in proper fiber infrastructure. Vectoring is just one more tool to squeeze the last bit out of old copper wires that have been in the ground for over 70 years. Also vectoring only works with one provider per node, and the German state gives most of the privilege to the Telekom.

It was written in some comments before, but Germany could have had the most modern fiber infrastructure in the world when the plans of former chancellor Helmut Schmitt wouldn't have been stopped by the Helmut Kohl government who was good friends with Leo Kirch, who was a big player in the German TV market and would rather benefit from copper wiring than fiber.

Also in central Berlin with the same speed connection. But my friends in the US, both in major metropolitan areas, can only dream of such a connection.

One has no option but ADSL which reaches 8Mbps on a good day, the other is luckier and has Cable but only 100Mbps.

> only 100Mbps

What use would you have for throughput in excess of 100Mbps?

It's nice when you want to download RDR2 on Steam.

Sure, but how many times a year does something like that crop up? Personally I don't mind leaving a vast download like that to run overnight. On a related note, software updates run in the background, so whether it takes a minute or an hour makes little difference. Same for automated backup.

I very rarely have use for capacity beyond 40Mbps, or perhaps even 25. 4K streaming is as demanding as it gets. If 40Mbps is appreciably cheaper than 100, I'll take 40.

If your Internet connection can't handle video chat and streaming, then you're right to say you don't have a decent modern Internet connection, and it's holding back what you can do. Capacity beyond 40Mbps, though, is rarely of any real consequence.

(I mean this in the particular context of home broadband, of course.)

Sure, it's rare enough that you download to such excess.

But the thing is that thanks to fiber there's hardly any difference price wise. So why not use it, when it's on offer?

Before that I had 100Mb up and down and was pretty happy with it. Large games could be a bit of a drag. Especially when GTA5 became available and I wanted to play it right now!

> Especially when GTA5 became available and I wanted to play it right now!

Once the JSON parses, that is ;-P

Agency PDF, clients videos to review, things that take less time to watch than to download.

As I already said in my reply to CaptainZapp, 40Mbps is more than enough to stream 4K video, and it's rare to need to quickly download tens of gigabytes of data.

If you want to run several 4K streams at once, you'll need more than 40Mbps. I don't think many households have this requirement though.

I don't stream PDFs, I don't stream reels, I don't stream PPTs, I don't stream WeTransfer.

PDFs are small files. 40Mbps is way more than enough for that. Same for PPTs.

If you're regularly dealing with huge video files, then sure, you may be in the small minority that really does benefit from an extremely fast connection.

No, a 200Mbytes PDF file is not small. Especially when it's sent on the spot by a participant in a zoom meeting. I don't want to wait 2 minutes, I want to have it as soon as I click the download link.

And yes I regularly have PDFs and PPTs of that size (thank you web agencies that keep on sending 20 pages product kit with 8K background pictures).

I do agree it's overkill and we all could do without if we prepared better but that's how it is.

I’ve had 900 mbit an 100 mbit and there is barely any practical difference.

And like 1/10 houses are actually networked well enough to even use a 300 mbit connect.

The only practical difference I’ve seen is upload. Cable internet is usually slow enough to impact actual use.

Running a CI, checking out repositories, doing backups, etc.

I've had 1Gbps before, and it was fantastic.

Does your CI really require extremely high bandwidth? Doesn't caching resolve this?

Checking out repositories is a rare event. It's even rarer to check out repositories weighing tens of gigabytes, such that throughput in excess of 100Mbps is noticeable.

As I said in my reply to CaptainZapp, it's generally fine if a background process like a backup takes several hours, and that's just for the few people who need to backup tens of gigabytes of data to the Internet every day. For everyone else, 100Mbps is far more than enough.

For most home users in particular, capacity beyond 40Mbps rarely brings any benefit.

> For reference I have 400/20 Cable, for 44Eur/m

That's not too bad, is it? Sweden has had world-leading broadband for a decade, and your upload could be higher, but "downright embarrassing" is people stuck on a 24Mbit ADSL connection.

(I have 300/30 Mbit/s cable for 340DKK = 45€. I could upgrade to 1000/500 Mbit/s fibre for ... actually only 320DKK, but I haven't bothered.)

I live in a German state capital, one stop away from central station. Best I can get is 50 Mbit/s.

German internet infrastructure drives me crazy when I visit. I live in Sweden and broadband here is really good, both mobile and land-based ones, whenever I go to a major German city (München, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg) I suffer with 4G, I suffer with my friends' or offices' internet connection. It's not even the slowness that bothers me more, it's the spottiness: 4G signals dropping to 3G and depending on the area even to 2G (haven't seen this happen the last time I visited in 2019 but definitely saw it before).

Home broadband have issues that the operator can't solve quickly (once working from home at a friend's place we got the house apartment internet cut off for a couple of days), Telekom sucks, their customer support sucks, sending a technician can take a month or more sometimes.

It feels so damn backwards, even more for the largest economy in the EU, not investing in digitalisation (both infrastructure and public services) is gonna bite Germany's ass for the next decade. Can't believe most bureaucracy is still done through paper-based mail, or faxes.

The Big T in Germany has strong ties in the government, both regional and central. They don't have to innovate when they can just block others via lobbying.

Ex Telekom worker here.

This is not surprising for a ex-government agency that is still substantially government owned. Somewhat anti-competitive, expensive, and they clearly have no sense of urgency with regard to fibre.

But more than half their revenue is now from the US Market, which they didn't enter in such a privileged position.

Anyway, 100% of Germany to be covered with FTTH by 2030 :)

https://www.telekom.com/resource/blob/619512/394bebe64a0f87d...

Even new buildings in central Berlin are being built without Fiber, which is pretty hard comprehend.

What impact should the central station have?

I work in the communication industry and we call this "A problem that can be solved by money" - while on wireless we have "Problems based on the law of physics".

In Eurasia railway companies often run fibre because they already have rights to the tracks. More importantly, one stop from a central station is basically city centre with high population density.

So? We have fully developed fiber networks everywhere in EU, but the last 500m ... 200m to every building is expensive (this about tree structures).

But it's less expensive per subscriber (and therefore more profitable and more expected to be delivered) when you have higher pop density.

It only looks to you like less expensive. Opening a street inner city and put something in the ground gets more and more expensive (think factors) the higher the building density and 'other things in the ground' get.

I recommend to start a business if YOU know how to keep the investment down.

This is really not some controversial discovery. Providers already know this and take full advantage. It's common for multi-tenants buildings to be wired by 2-3 ISPs and even nearby single family housing to have only one with serious installation costs on top.

Barring regulatory failure, providers don't even need to "open a street" precisely because of the other installations that already exist where wires can be run alongside.

>What impact should the central station have?

It would be a major destination, so one would expect fast cables to be laid out there (and be available in the close area). That's the case with important areas where I live at least.

I have in a 140k city 500/50, up to 1000/50 are possible. No caps, 47 EUR/month. It is not stellar, but certainly more than enough for my needs.

I would say Germany was hurt a lot though the de-facto monopoly of the Telekom and DSL, relying on copper wires. Telekom had even after privatisation a monopoly on the last mile and 0 motivation to invest. It is only when the internet over TV Cable became popular, they started to panic. They are still offering 250/50 DSL in some areas, but only if there is no TV Cable vendor. Otherwise they have no chance it is a lost battle for them. In my are DSL is only 16/2,4 because why bother to upgrade? They are not competitive.

Other problem in Germany is that the landlord decides which providers he lets in his house - it is usually one and only one TV Cable vendor, if multiple vendors are operating in the area.

Only internet in the DA area sucks, CH has pretty good, if expensive, internet in the cities.

A friend just moved to Switzerland, laid down a full fiber lan because that’s what they’re getting as broadband.

Salt offers 10Gb symmetrical for 50 CHF.

cries softly

tears buffering...

I have 10GB up and down.

The whole city of Zurich is fibered (mostly built by the public power utility) and you're free to chose between a variety of suppliers.

Interesting. Sounds like people there could setup a bunch of racks in a spare room and provide co-location services to their friends?

Maybe to clarify: Not every home is necessarily attached to fiber. That's still up to the landlord / renter.

Swisscom had a really sweet deal a few years ago (when only parts of the city had fiber), where they paid for the home installation as long as you signed up for 12 month or longer.

Bin there ever since (not always with that speed, initially it was something like 100 up and down. GB fiber was still pretty expensive) and never regretted it.

Any place can be a "shithole". If you end up being one of 2 buildings that isn't connected via Fiber where everyone else is already at 10GBits they tend to forget about you. All provider maps show 100% coverage but every time you try to get service for some reason it doesn't work. But with large companies no one really cares when you are just a rounding error.

I grew up in bumblefuck Maine, and we had cable TV run in the 90s, with cable internet since at least the early 2000s. My parents get close to 500 mb/s now on their basic package from Spectrum.

I suspect that being far enough out from Portland and Bangor that over-the-air TV never worked well was a bonus for getting cable built out.

I have Spectrum and it is fine, but it is merely 'fast' and it is expensive (comparatively anyway).

How fast is fast enough for a run-of-the-mill household connection?

I have a 300/25 connection from my cable provider (using DOCSIS) and while fiber has been available for a few years I don't feel like I'd benefit much from a faster link.

In these times I would say fast enough on both download and upload to have multiple video teams/zoom/meet meetings running at the same time, while also supporting basic websurfing and netflix.

>Broadband is the single wire that delivers free speech, a free press, free assembly, education, family life, employment, health, opportunity, civic and political engagement, and every other necessity for a decent and dignified life in the 21st century

Okay I know this is HN and there is heavy slant towards technology and tech-driven solutions but this is just a ridiculous statement. What if I get a 4G/5G router? Is my life any less decent or dignified?

There's a lot more to life than ridiculous torrent/YouTube/netflix speeds

The term "broadband" is defined by the FCC as connections of 25/3 or better. My phone is on low band 5G and gets 4x that. So your 4G/5G connection would presumably still be "broadband."

https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7932653/fcc-changed-defin...

I'm quite pleased with my 1gb up/down for $165 from TruVista. Stable, cheap, IPv6 and a static IPv4 IP.

Not sure I agree with this guys opinion, but I might just be lucky? Everyone in my area uses a similar fiber plan. Again though maybe my small town of 10k~ people might be an outlier?

Just to throw it out there. We all do realize laying down either glass or copper is expensive per mile. Replacing old infrastructure, per mile, is even more expensive. Add in just how incredibly large the US is compared to other countries... if the gov is going to subsidize something, I want to make sure the bridges, overpass and canal infrastructure maintenance budget is bigger than worrying about how long it takes to download a 4k youtube video.

Just do what the EU did. Mandate that the last mile must be shared between broadband providers.

It boggles my mind that this didn't happen in the US, as it's a super-US kind of solution (minimal interference in the market, people get to make a profit).

And I say this every time this comes up on HN, and people act like it's impossible.

Robelus from Canada has entered the chat!

I live in rural Québec. My county got fed up with the ISPs and actually covered _every_ road & street with fiber. Gave a swift kick in the nuts to Bell & Cogeco, and now we have actual competition here. My costs went down 20$ / month.

Has anyone tried Starlink yet?

110Mbps down/20 up, 50ms. Not bad for the price - maybe FttH is a myth after all.

I get 8-10ms latencies on most of the online games I play. FttH (well, FttB in my case) is pretty damn good.

yes, 150 to 330 down, 16-20 up, 0.25 to 0.75% packet loss in the current sparse network. It's not as good as a well implemented DOCSIS3 last mile or GPON, but it absolutely blows away anything DSL based, and 99% of WISPs.

That is pretty good, to be honest. Any experiences with videoconferences over Starlink?

I wonder if I can just build a house in the middle of nowhere, with some solar panels + battery (but with trash service and water access) and move there.

I think you almost certainly could. I've had remote access to another beta terminal since mid november, and my own since late January. There are very brief 5-10 second periods of no ping answers to the default gateway which cumulatively add up to about 0.50% packet loss over a 4 hour period. It's been getting progressively better as more satellites are launched and the make-before-break handovers are seamless. You do want to ensure you have no tree obstructions and a clear view of the sky in many directions - some people have needed to put the antenna on a 10' tall mast mount.

First world problems.

Yes, it is. But it's still a problem.

Australia would like a word...

America is a continent, not a country.

In American English (and I’m pretty sure British English too), America generally means the USA. And we don’t consider North and South America to be a single continent. If you want to refer to both you should say the Americas.

If you use the world America without other context, the lister will assume you are talking about the country and won’t even consider you mean North and South America combined.

I know some cultures consider the Americas to be a single continent. But that’s odd. They are arguably less combined than Europe, Asia, and Africa are.

Palo Alto and still no fiber. Shitty comcast goes down every day.

Your cell phone service is lame too. What gives?

Australia enters the chaNO CARRIER

This tweet is one of the most US-centric ones I've seen.

Yeah... it's a thread about the US's shitty broadband situation. What do you expect?

I'm the first who is very critical of online Americentrism, but this tweet is virtually the opposite.

It is raising an issue that is a problem in the US as compared to most, if not all, of the developed World that many ordinary Americans are probably unaware of—precisely because of their US-centric cultural isolation.

But as you can see from this thread, it's not a problem "as compared to most, if not all, of the developed World". It's a problem in lot's of countries, including Germany, Austria, France, and the UK.

As we can see from this thread, the US is worse than all of those countries (and even where it is now, it got later than them) - more expensive, less options, less speed, very limited in tons of places.

It's just that these other countries also have complains, but those are at their own level of service, not compared to the US.

No, as someone who has experience the internet in the US and other countries, the US does not have the worst internet. Not even close (and I’m talking other western countries).

It’s US-centric because the author doesn’t know this but just assumes it.

I feel you. I am normally quite critical of nearly everything about the US, but the Americans who treat every problem they have as uniquely, hyperbolically horrible (even when considering the "western" world alone) are a special kind of frustrating. To hear them talk, you'd think that Europe and Australia/New Zealand were perfect utopias. Meanwhile take this particular issue for example; many of the friends and acquaintances I have in Canada, Germany and Australia have plenty of complaints about internet service as well (even the Twitter thread has someone from Canada post a screenshot where they're only getting 0.38Mbps).

Up until 2007 or so, similar story in New Zealand. The government broke up our internet monopoly, then the subsequent duopoly 10 or so years after that.

idk, as a french who went to palo alto for a week, I found speeds to be embarrassingly bad in what is a major tech hub of the world compared to the gigabit fiber I've had in medium french cities since something like 2012 ?

Nobody thinks Australia is a utopia.

Yup. This is it exactly. Having spent time in the US and other western countries the US is much better in some aspects and worse in others.

Maybe it's time to take the US from the list of developed countries?

That doesn't even make sense.

First, it's an American writing about the state of broadband in the US. What exactly would it be other than US-centric?

Second, why would it need to be anything else? He wants to write about the broandband in his country.

Cory Doctorow is Canadian. I believe he also has joint British citizenship.

So, American with manners and healthcare! Close enough :-)

Completely partisan hogwash.

Australia - another giant continent with spread out population - also has a copper legacy base.

We tried to rollout FTTP (fibre to the premises) on the basis that 1000Gbps is a human right or something.

It completely fell apart and stalled within two years, and the government who passed it got thrown out, and the next govt tried to complete it with a piecemeal solution that has left swathes of the country less happy than before (though some people got FTTP on the taxpayer's dime and loved it).

And now we have much less competition in technology, a govt monopoly on the hardware mandated in 99.5% of households, and a fig leaf of greater choice in who you will pay to shape your internet speed (as all providers are selling you an identical service based on the single-option mandatory hardware described above).

TL;dr this is a nightmare, let the market solve it. Tinker with some regs, at most. It can get much worse if you start centralising the "solution" to imperfect internet on a giant continent.

Never model American infrastructure on Tokyo or Belgium or other dense small areas with different geography.

“The market” did manage to solve it in most East European countries (which had relatively rudimentary copper infrastructure which I assume played a part).

You can get a 1Gb line for €20 or less (usually from multiple competing companies) in all major cities where I’m from (low pop density/low overall population) and I’ve heard it’s even cheaper in Romania.

The situation with cellular providers is very similar as well. The downside is that due to very low margins most providers can now hardly afford investing into new tech like 5G now.

Australia has a population of 25 million on a continent the size of USA.

90% of the population lives in the top 10 urban areas. The rest are isolated in small pockets, vast distances from urban centres.

> We tried to rollout FTTP (fibre to the premises) on the basis that 1000Gbps is a human right or something.

The Labor Party's objective was to give country and regional citizens the same standard of online access as urban citizens. They would charge the same retail price for access even though the infrastructure build was more expensive per capita in regional areas.

> It completely fell apart and stalled within two years

The project's first two years were spent negotiating infrastructure rationalisation with the national monopoly telco. Before the fibre backbone was laid, the Labor government lost an election and was replaced by the Rupert Murdoch backed Liberal Party.

Murdoch ordered the Liberal Party to downgrade the network from universal FTTP so that no competitors could arise to threaten his national cable network.

The Liberal Party obliged by scrapping universal FTTP, paying billions to the monopoly telco for obsolete copper, which became a hybrid last mile component of parts of the network, which has now cost double the original estimate for universal FTTP.

Less than half the network delivers the max claimed speed of 100/25, for a typical price of A$90 per month (US$70).

As contemporaneous reporting shows, the installation had stalled before the election, and was continuing to fall apart before the MTM changes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/articl...

Conspiracy theories like "Murdoch ordered the government to not rollout the NBN, though they did so anyway but more cheaply" doesn't deserve a response.

> Conspiracy theories like "Murdoch ordered the government to not rollout the NBN, though they did so anyway but more cheaply" doesn't deserve a response.

Thank you for responding.

Did you read Paul Sheehan's 4 Aug 2013 article in The Age?

https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/murdoch-sends-trusted-gene...

How about Rudd's 2019 backgrounder in the Australian Financial Review?

https://www.afr.com/companies/telecommunications/the-myth-ma...

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