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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, 25 Gb/s fiber (symmetric) is rolled out around Zurich.

Is this slow broadband in US a country wide thing or only certain areas?

Varies widely. I could be fantastic in one town, but terrible in the next town over, even if the towns are similar in terms of size, density, demographics, and wealth. But in general, more places than not have pretty poor broadband.

From what I understand, most European countries have some sort of system in place where one company owns the copper/fiber line to your house, and another company connects that line to the backbone. (I'm oversimplifying because I don't understand it) The US doesn't have that- the same company that maintains the copper maintains the connection to the backbone. And if there's only one line to your house, that company has a monopoly on you, and they have no financial reason to better their service.

Thankfully, my house/neighborhood is serviced by at least three broadband providers. I pay $60 a month for 150Mb/s up, 150Mb/s down. Customer service is pretty good. I'm very happy with it.

25Gb/s though, that's wild. I have difficulty imagining it just from a technical perspective.

Trying to generalize across Europe is not very practical.

The poster was fairly explicit about that, no need to nitpick. They provided good information on the US system.

It’s mostly a population density thing.

Most mid or large US cities have gigabit options, sometimes multiple options (in which case prices will be affordable)

Small cities and towns probably won’t have fiber. If you’re lucky and the cable infrastructure is new, you might be able to get gigabit cable, but it’s more likely that the affordable options are 25-300mbps.

If you are in a rural village, you may or may not have cable availability. (Likely depending on your proximity to other populated areas) Without cable, you may be relying on LTE or DSL.

And finally, if you’re in an area more rural than this, the only utilities that come to your house are likely electricity and copper phone. You’re either choosing between satellite or a (likely weak) cell signal.

The problem in US with cable isnt download speeds, it is that the major providers limit uploads rather drasticaly (they never talk about how much upload they can give and talk about "gig" internet). I've had a 300/12 Mbps connections, that's pretty insane...

That's, at least partially, a technical limitation. The cable television network was designed and built for massively more signal going to homes (vudeo) than coming back from them (authentication or whatever).

DSL does it more by choice, but the main problem there is that there's just so little bandwidth all together (upload and download combined).

That's not to say I disagree with you. I dropped cable internet and switched to fiber the moment it became available, because it gave me symmetric speeds.

It isnt about density, it is about monopoly power. There are parts of Manhattan on ADSL, in 2021.

Maybe so, but that’s an extreme outlier. In general, cities have good networks even if it’s a monopoly and rural areas don’t have them at all, not even one run by a monopolist.

Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to be mostly country wide. A US colleague of mine lives less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.

Median download speeds in the US are generally 50-70mbps with a few outliers. Here’s a state map.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-sl...

Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming online.

you must not live in a city -- older homes and older sections of a city are very late to get physical upgrades.

Used to live in Philly. Had fiber gigabit in old building. Please stop making assumptions.

I’ve lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely connected areas.

S/older/poorer/g

Here is the fiber map for a Minneapolis ISP laying their own fiber: https://usinternet.com/fiber/coverage-map/

The unwired parts of the city are where poor people live, the wired parts are where not poor people live.

it makes sense though, can poorer people afford faster speeds?

That map is pretty close to being a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/

I think that speed by state is a pretty bad measure for conveying anything useful. Speeds vary within each state by orders of magnitude, depending on whether you can get a connection to a particular medium or not.

I bet the full data set of speeds is not a bell curve. There are probably huge peaks for each medium, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the mode and mean are significantly different.

Yes, it’s not great, but I hoped it would serve to correct the misperception that such slow speeds are typical in the US. I hope I can find better data next time.

It’s country-wide, except in the very few areas where municipal broadband or community-local ISPs have stepped in and run their own fiber.

There’s a fiber loop a hundred feet away that’s restricted to businesses, but it still scares Comcast (because it’s a fiber run by one of those local ISPs) enough that my price for a symmetric is half what it would be on the other side of town.

Who is doing 25gbit to the home?

Init7 offers it since a few weeks ago.

I need to move to Switzerland. Here I was feeling fancy with my 10G/10G at home.

Woah. Is it like available to everyone in the city area? How's the price?

Not the OP but as a resident, it's available at my address near the edge of the city, albeit in a larger building rather than an older individual home, so I imagine it's accessible to most people in the city limits. The city has municipal connections into homes that ISPs can then lease, allowing them to compete for customers without competing over infrastructure rights, so it seems to have the benefits of both ends of a public-private partnership.

One of the most well-known providers of the fastest speeds, Init7, charges 64.75 CHF/mo (~70 USD) with a 333 CHF (~365 USD) setup fee.

It's fairly easy nowadays to find 10 Gbps symmetric plans for 50 CHF/mo, although they used to cost more a few years ago.

How does that work when even 10Gbps ethernet is still cost-prohibitive for SOHO applications and "real" 1Gbps+ Wi-Fi just doesn't happen in thick-walled european houses...

It requires getting some relatively expensive hardware, and you wouldn't use this wirelessly

https://www.englishforum.ch/tv-internet-telephone/304268-ini...

It should be obvious but it isn't meant for WiFi. I use fibre and cat6 in my house for everything except smartphones.

> I use fibre and cat6 in my house for everything except smartphones.

I assure you that your customer profile is not representative of the vast majority of your ISP's customers.

> I assure you that your customer profile is not representative of the vast majority of your ISP's customers.

The top tier is almost always a tiny minority [1] of any ISP's customers but it's convenient marketing and usually has by far the highest margins. It's like arguing Bugatti buyers aren't the majority of Volkswagen Auto Group's customers: it's true but what difference does that make?

1: Virgin Media offers tiers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps but "The average speed across our U.K. broadband base continues to increase and was 186 Mbps at the end of Q1", https://www.libertyglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Fix...

> It's like arguing Bugatti buyers aren't the majority of Volkswagen Auto Group's customers: it's true but what difference does that make?

Actually, you raise a good point of discussion: But I'll argue that UK residential ISPs touting their highest-tiers as "proof" they're being competitive, even though only a tiny minority of punters shell out for it, as being self-serving and ultimately against the national interest.

With Bugatti: people are buying an asset. You're paying for the quality of the engineering workmanship that goes into the final product - but once you've given your $1-3m over to Herbert Diess you're no-longer an ongoing concern to them, beyond the dealer's servicing fees - and your investment in a single vehicle means little to the road and highways infrastructure where you live - even if your jurisdiction implements vehicle-value-based property tax and road-usage-tax it won't mean much at the end-of-the-day - but with residential broadband it's something else...

Not normally no but in this instance it is "representative of the vast majority of my ISP's customers with 1/1gbps connection". I'm convinced that most people who order 1gbps (or 25 for that matter) is aware that WiFi isn't able to provide those speeds most of the time if ever.

10gbit is just on the border of affordable for IT hobbyist people

Lots of data center hardware getting sold in masses on eBay.

And copper cables these days also can do 10gbit, but even fiber at home you can get the Transceivers for about 15€ each, and a switch for another 200€used, some old PC as Router with cheap 10gbit card also works wonders

The problem here is most people want new. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they're thinking of everyone buying one.

I've been looking at making a NAS box and it would cost less than 200 Euros for decent hardware (better than some QNAP, including a 10Gbps fiber adapter and Wifi) and a completely custom aluminum case.

I hope I'm not taken the wrong way - but in certain geographies technologist salaries/total-comp are such that it costs us more money to search for bargains than it does to plonk down $hundreds for brand-name SMB hardware for our SOHO gear.

That is is why we buy new kit instead of used. I could spend 2-3 hours of my time scanning eBay and Craigslist and comparing spreadsheets of compatible equipement and then waiting for USPS mail deliveries (at my $200/hr consulting rate) or I could spent 5-10 minutes on Ubiquiti's online store and be done with it.

It's ugly and I dislike it (the thrill of the chase...). But that's capitalism. Frankly I won't be able to "enjoy" this again until I'm after retirement...

That makes sense (and explains a lot, actually).

But in that case you're not complaining about the cost of hardware, I think.

I was commenting more on people who think it's too expensive but still want new.

Since we're on topic, having been born in the land of no opportunities, I've learned to save on everything.

And I've learned to build/make anything, quite literally. It's not that hard and it's really satisfying, but sadly time consuming.

Do you happen to have a list of hardware which you plan to use? Or some pointers

What part is cost prohibitive? It really doesn’t have to be too expensive to have a modem like device that attaches fiber and a number of (10) gigabit lan ports and fast WiFi.

Its an amount of bandwidth that’s difficult to fill but that’ll change.

Prices for 10Gbps switches are in the hundeds of Euros, compared to the prices for 1Gbps switches - or the type of 4 or 5-port switches embedded in ISP-provided CPE.

Nah. You can get a 4 port 10G switch for about $100 from a known vendor.

I have a bunch of WiFi ac and ax devices in the house and they collectively can easily saturate my 1G WAN link. While I don't have a workflow they would warrant 10G, the overhead is getting desirable.

"10Gbps ethernet is still cost-prohibitive"

That is old news in 2021.

Do you know about <<MikroTik 5-Port Desktop Switch, 1 Gigabit Ethernet Port, 4 SFP+ 10Gbps Ports (CRS305-1G-4S+IN)>>?

Amazon sells it for 140 USD.

It is legendary on home networking discussion boards. (They have a nice 8 port version also.)

For the past, literally 15 years, I've balked at a workgroup switch that cost more than $50.

(Granted, since last year I've been a convert to Ubiquiti gear, but that wasn't a valid option when I was a teenager living with my parents, trying to convince my dad on good tech to buy within a reasonable budget)

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