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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile here I am in the Netherlands (semi-rural I'd say), having two fiber modems installed because we have 2 competing fiber networks here. At least one of them goes to 2500/2500 for about 75 eur a month. Probably it'll go much higher in the future.

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I'm in a farming village in Spain, all of 2 families living here, 45 minutes drive from the nearest population center, and they rolled out symetrical gigabit fibre last year (and not just to us - to every rural village in the region).

The base 300/300 service is price capped at 38 euros/month as well. I'm paying a few bucks more for higher speed.

A 45 minute drive doesn’t even get you out of Brisbane, where I live (and has gigabit down — drives me nuts that our upload is capped at 50mbps. That’s the worst part of our system IMO).

We have a pretty different scale in a lot of ways: Australia is huge and basically empty, density wise.

> semi-rural I'd say

How many hundered km are you from the nearest settlement of >10,000 people?

People in England, Netherlands, etc don't really get what remote means.

Ah yeah, the famous Netherlands outback’s. Nearly 20km away from the nearest city.

If you're 20km away from the nearest city you're not in the Netherlands.

Yeah, I am 1 hour of biking away from a train station haha, we call it rural.

2.5 Gb/s symmetrical is a sweet deal. Here in Italy in a town of 3k people I got "only" a 1Gb/s symmetrical, but so far I can't complain. It costs 25€/month so it's a pretty great deal

and here in Austria I just cannot get symmetrical, running on 1000/50 Mb/s right now

Well, consumers in Austria and Germany have by far the shittiest internet in all of EU.

That's what you get when you let your corrupt politicians sell your national infrastructure and customer base to private monopolists who will rentseek you instead of competing and investing in infrastructure.

I remember walking into an A1 shop browsing for internet offers for my new apartment and the lady working there straight up told me "you don't need more than 80 mbit" without even asking what I do with it or what I need it for, as if 80mbit is the national standard all citizens should get, like in communism.

Gigabit here is a rare and expensive luxury while in most of EU is a freely available commodity.

Thank you Mr. Dr. Helmut Kohl!

Just a few years ago our office (two floors, Fortune 500 company, more than 100 people on site) had a 100Mbps connection to the Internet (and a dedicated 1Gbps to a branch office). We had video conferences, mirrored OSS and back'ed up over the 'net. The dedicated link was at times a bottleneck, but I don't recall that the link to the Internet ever was.

With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.

Honestly, I don't saturate my connection 99% of the time. I could have done that 10/15 years ago when I used to torrent a lot.

The download part is great because now it's faster to buy a game on steam for instance and download it than getting in the car, driving to the closest store to purchase a physical copy and bring it home.

Regarding the upload, I built a small utility that stores the videos from the cameras I have at home to the cloud in a rolling window (I didn't want to pay the service from the cameras provider). So at any time I am uploading something like 7 1080p streams (it's more bursty as I chunk the streams every 10 minutes and upload the resulting files). So, while 1Gb is still an overkill, once you have the bandwidth you find uses for it.

And here I am in the US in a metro area with a population of over a million and I can't get fiber despite AT&T having come door to door hawking their service on the premise that they were installing fiber. Clearly there's just not enough people in my area and it's impossible.

I'm in rural Mississippi. AT&T buried fiber lines here a number of years back and never lit them up. I think there were some grants or something. Power company coop ran fiber last year though so AT&T can go to hell.

I’m with you on that. I live in Evanston, IL. For those unaware, it is the first city north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. Hardly a backwater.

On the one hand, I have two competing cable providers (RCN/Astound and Comcast/Xfinity). Being able to swap between services as offers change has been huge (hey, competition is a thing!) Currently I’ve got 1400/40 (measured) on Xfinity.

But fiber? Totally absent. AT&T seems to serve other areas nearby but not mine. Why? No clue. But I’d sure love having a symmetric connection.

Incidentally, there are multiple fiber cables strung on the poles in the alley behind my house. Presumably they are the infrastructure for our two cables cos.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. I remember speaking with colleagues in various parts of the US (mostly Seattle and Silicon valley areas) and I was shocked by how expensive and relatively low quality internet and mobile connections compared to most of western Europe. I guess having de-facto cartels in AT&T, Verizon, ... that don't encroach in each other territory is a terrible thing

"Semi-rural"

Proportion of urban population 92.57%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...

Not to mention NL is like a blip on the world map as compared to AU on size..:)

Au is only slightly smaller than the USA with 25.7 million people vs just California’s 39.24 and the Netherlands have 17.53 million — but bear in mind Australia is 186 times the size of the NDs. So it’s not surprising service is so good — the density of population makes broadband extremely profitable.

People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.

The population density is a correlated number, but it's not necessarily an issue, which makes this into one of my pet peeves.

You could have a gigantic nation which is completely centralized into one city, giving you a super low population density on paper.

It's not the case in any of your example, so not really an issue here. Nonetheless...

For that matter, Australia as a whole--like some other low density areas like Alaska--actually has fairly concentrated population centers.

Yes, absolutely true. I think there’s something like 8M people just in NSW and the majority are Sydney.

Only trying to provide context for the economics of density in places like Singapore and the a Netherlands, not necessarily prove the opposite use case. I just wanted to highlight a contrasting factor that is very important for fiber and other high speed service viability. There are many others!

These criticisms are totally valid.

I ordered KPN gigabit internet but I live on my own and probably don't need the bandwidth.

It's cheaper than Ziggo' coax though (300 mb).

I also don't need that much bandwidth directly. But, I'm a biologist specialized in the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data. I'm also self employed and such bandwidths are true enablers of my business. I need Terra Bytes of data analyzed, most of this data comes from research institutes' IT departments. I can avoid a lot costs with a server at home. In fact, it can be a unique differentiator for me if I can sit in the niche where a couple of beefy cpus with a nice array of discs can still outperform the cloud cost-wise.

To be honest, I still have to research that.

Here I am in Marseille, 3rd city in France, with shitty ADSL... Sure I can choose between 4 carriers, but none offer fiber.

> NL

> (semi-)rural

Pick one.

cries a little

I too am in Australia

Are the two fiber modems hooked up to different networks?

Yes, one is already sticking up from the ground and will be brought into the house in the next month. And someone just came by to see if a second one can be installed, that one still needs to be brought to the house, somewhere in the next weeks.

It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.

Where I live it's very similar to electric and gas supply, where you have a common carrier that you get your supply over. There is one fibre cable into the building that goes out to some kind of interface accessed via a manhole ourside; all the local telcos use that fibre as common carrier and either rent existing fibre thats already been laid and hooked up to that interface, or lay their own at their own cost.

I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.

which provider goes to 2500/2500?

Delta does, although I see now it's 8000/8000 (XGS-PON): [0] I need new gear ;)

It's a bit annoying to find, everything is hidden behind area code filters.

[0] https://www.delta.nl/internet/glasvezel/xgspon/

awesome, thanks, can't wait until they extend to my area

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