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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.

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Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...

France had Minitel and now, for less than 50, you have up/down 8Gbps with TV etc. 5G is half that price.

Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom )

US just has many excuses that's it.

Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.

Haven’t you heard? We barely have electricity here in Europe, let alone phones. Or so I keep reading online.

Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters.

There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.

> Because Europe didn't have as much...

Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.

South Korea isn't the developing world neither (at least since the mid 90s), but 10 years ago I could barely read HN on the subway in Berlin while I saw people watching YouTube on the subway in Seoul.

Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones

The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users

Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower.

2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%.

Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/.

The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....

There is a real disadvantage of countries with large population: More layers of management in politics, more corruption.

Oh certainly. I'm not saying that "we did it so it should be just as easy for you". But neither having an existing copper network nor being sparsely populated is the reason for why the US does not have extensive fiber coverage.

AFAICT the required political will just isn't there due to how campaign financing works. Just look at the plain insanity of laws like this https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....

Maybe the US should split themselves up into 50 smaller divisions of populations that have more local autonomy to optimize things like this.

In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster.

European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst.

For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners.

Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases.

An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled.

https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/

In Ireland at least local calls were a fixed price, no matter how long the call was. Long-distance calls were billed by the minute.

No they weren't - they were billed by the minute. About 5c/min in new money. That's why you had things like night and off-peak tariffs for 56k dial-up services in Ireland in the early 00s.

Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing.

Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.

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