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Comment by detourdog | Hacker News Reader

Estonia when it left the Soviet Union was offered a used phone system from a country that wanted to upgrade. Estonia decided to build new.

https://theconversation.com/estonia-is-a-digital-republic-wh...

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"Neighbouring Finland offered an analogue telephone exchange as a gift and the Estonian government declined, [...]"

In 1997 even to think about an "upgrade" to an analogue system is a negligence. Estonia already had 3 GSM networks in a country with a population of 1,400,000.

At the time [May 1997] of Ritabell's entering the Estonian market, there were about 64,500 GSM subscribers in the country. 53,000 belonged to EMT and 11,500 to Radiolinja, [...] [0]

EMT (Eesti Mobiiltelefon) claims even bigger numbers:

By 1996, EMT had 100,000 subscribers. [1]

[0] https://books.google.lt/books?id=SrFXo6qDRjcC&pg=PA152

[1] https://www.telia.ee/en/uudised/celebrating-25-years-of-mobi...

Smart move.-

PS. Also, interesting that there - apparently - is a "second hand" market for used phone systems. As in, wholesale.-

Obviously excepting the cruelty I love the modern world. I marvel at the organization and patterns.

The Soviet Union was suffering some food crisis in the 90’s. One morning the news was discussing Clinton granting food aid to them. That same morning as my subway crossed by the Dominoe sugar factory there was already a Russian ship docked.

That was such a strange cause and effect moment for me.

It's interesting with East Germany - after German reunification it was covered with fiber. However then DSL became the standard way of going online in Germany, while that doesn't work on fiberand with only few to no consumer priced offerings for FTTH many areas were left out from "fast" Internet for a while, while having the, in theory, superior net.

My guess it was the asymmetry that was the attraction of the DSL. If everyone has equal access to bandwidth the message is harder to control.

That's conspiracy. It's more like they could sell SDSL for more money to business customers, as people who need more upload bandwidth gotta pay more, while being able to sell huge numbers in downstream. Plain simple capitalism.

I admit it could be conspiracy but I don't understand why you think the ability to sell a subscription for more money has an effect on the transport medium of the service. They could invent any service they want and run it over fiber.

Do you consider it a conspiracy theory that cable companies sell asymmetric bandwidth? Anytime I see asymmetric bandwidth I see it as an assault against the Hunan right to publish.

That is my reasoning for thinking such conspiratorial thoughts.

The ISP absolutely doesn't care if you publish ... they just don't want somebody to host stuff without paying a premium, since people are willing to pay more for it.

Sounds like a disincentive to publish to me. Remember when all bandwidth was synchronous in the USA. The telecoms were indifferent to which direction the packets went. The cable companies either through technical limitations were the first to offer asynchronous bandwidth as a product to the masses.

Cables companies distribute content and the business model relies on scarcity of access to the content. Their content evolved to leverage centralized advertising model and scarcity of access to content.

This was completely different in the USA during the T1, ISDN, and eventually SDSL.

I always associate the xDSL with the eternal September of the web and it's content.

How one classifies a conspiracy is actually a whole different topic. I would call this more market manipulation.

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