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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling".

Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation.

I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere.

Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.

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Rural area? Hard to build.

Dense city? Hard to build.

Got it.

Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.

> Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.

Sort of?

If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.

Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.

But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.

For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?

Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.

At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)

This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"

It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.

You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Corporations can't feel greed, greed is an emotion. Publicly traded corporations are automatons. It's the same reason they don't experience shame.

If you think a company could easily do something better than they're doing it right now then start a company and show them how it's done. If that's prohibitively difficult, e.g. because the incumbents have captured the regulators, then you've identified the root cause of the problem and what you need to change to make things better.

No, I'm using a convenient shorthand.

The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels.

They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

> They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

The thing you're intended to show them (or make sure someone else can show them) is that they lose business to someone else when they don't satisfy the customer, which doesn't make the stock price go up faster.

You can't make them want something else, you have to make doing the thing you want the best way for them to get the thing they want.

Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs.

Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently.

Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.

Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk.

I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure.

The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space.

The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.

> Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk.

You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to.

Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere.

Edge cases are hard is not a bad rule of thumb.

High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.

Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.

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