Hacker News Reader

Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives.

Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.

View on HN

A lot of it is down to those countries being early adopters of telecom infrastructure. It meant when a lot of other countries were wiring up internet for the first time, they weren’t faced with the prospect of having to piggyback existing and aged infrastructure. eg in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.

>in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.

I visited Nepal several years back. They were going straight to wireless. All of the villages in the mountains had a solar panel on their roof that they used to charge their cellphones and there was a cell tower on the ridges.

It was surreal to see villagers use Facebook but have no road access to the main city.

"Moving bits, not atoms" :-). Have you had a look at India's progress in FinTech / Telecom ?

This one and the plain difference in the size.

It is easier to upgrade everything in some Blatic states than in some US cities.

Yeam, but there is also masive difference in wealth. And then you can't use size as enxcuse in a comparison with India

Politicians in "old world" countries explicitly decided to stick to existing copper infrastructure instead of rolling out something better. These countries like to pretend corruption isn't an issue for them, but then you have asinine decisions like this.

In Canada it is down to our telecom oligopoly, which our government protects by (a) refusing foreign competition and (b) installing industry heads to run the consumer protection regulator, i.e. allowing the oligopoly to capture the regulatory body.

In actual fact, our telcos were heavily subsidized during their formative years, granting them a monopoly, rights of way, and helping to pay for their infrastructure. In return for a guaranteed profit margin, we had extreme control over their pricing structure and guarantees of service quality and coverage.

Then we allowed them to be privatized and deregulated, in exchange for which we get fucked. Which is, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the inevitable outcome of converting public services to private.

Govt created monopolies are bad whether they are public or private. Private is worse because money is removed as profit, not just reinvested.

Privatisation is good if competition is fostered at the same time. For example by opening existing physical infrastructure to multiple service providers.

Where I live we had (historically) one fixed lined govt provider. When mobile arrived we got 3 private providers. With fibre we got multiple hardware installers (ie multiple companies digging fibre) and then dozens of ISPs running on that.

So far, so good.

As a German I weep and cry. 25Gbit/s seems so so far off. And I live in a major city. I only get 150Mbit VDSL at the moment. I have no cable connection so one of these to get the theoretical 1Gbit/s download is out of the question.

Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!

I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible. I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.

What a pain in the arse!

Just fyi as I know you aren’t a native speaker, it’s ‘chip in’, if you were native I’d assume a typo, probably is for you too, but it’s a phrase easy to mishear and when I was learning a second language I appreciated these corrections.

Argh yes I’m not a native speaker but in this case it was a typo ;) Thanks

The drawback is that cable it is a shared medium, so it can be quite bad when demand is high (in the evening) and the upload bandwidth usually is very low.

Interesting. In populous areas of the US they use HFC so the cable to your house only services a few buildings, with the neighborhood having a fiber optic back-haul that is shared, but much faster

Lived in Germany for 5 years and cable internet was generally terrible. We had 200/20MBit. But the actual upstream would often be 1MBit. Downstream was better but at many times not great. There would also be regular outages, that would take hours to solve. The only alternative was VDSL with a maximum downstream of 50MBit.

We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.

The whole thing is quite a bit easier in a small country like NL though.

Yeah the classic argument, but at some point every internet connection becomes a shared medium. It really depends on how the network is setup and where the fibre backhauls start. If the building has older wiring which can only support 1Gbps and you have a bunch of high bandwidth users, then yes it can affect your bandwidth more than using other technologies.

We have similar situation in Poland. I live in rural area, but quite close to bigger city and enjoy 1Gbps for the last 4 or 5 years.

I wonder how the upgrade might look considering that 10Gbps hardware is quite expensive (and house cabling might need upgrading) and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps is quite new and hard to find router or laptop dock/hub supporting it.

Still quite expensive though, especially compared to almost every other country out there. It's insanity.

The maximum speed available at my London address is 35 mbps download and 5.5 mbps upload. It hasn't changed in the seven years I've been living here. The best mobile connection I get is two bars of 3G unless it rains.

Oh boy I feel for you. Is it because of the house/street or a general issue in London?

It's not typical for London. Not that extreme anyway. I think our postcode is among 2% or 3% left without a fiber connection. Many others have 100 mbps or so (I try not to look what they really get :)

I have 1gbps fibre in central London and generally see >750mbps in real link speed, 900 on a good day.

At my previous flat 150mbps was the fastest available. So it varies a lot in London on where exactly you are.

Are you with hyperoptic or community fibre? I’m with the former and see speeds around what you’re saying. I think CF are rolling out 3gbps connections in my area though.

wow. that's ridiculous

My previous address was stuck at 8 mbps dowload and 0.25 mbps upload and it will not be upgraded anytime soon because every corner of that street is listed / protected. I literally moved just because of that. Not I won't rent anything without fiber.

We are still creating newbuilds in cities without fiber. In other news, someone fucked up construction and left an entire complex of brand new apartment blocks with 7 mbps internet

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/03/mistake-leaves...

Same as banking. Inventors and early adopters get stuck with "works well enough" old systems and all their deficiencies and limitations. Late newcomers roll out newest and greatest solutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com