12 ms·

When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may

by markbnj 10y ago

When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." If you haven't done that drive, by the way, you should. It will add some perspective to these comparisons. A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden (population 9.5m) and the state I live in, New Jersey (population 8.9m), which is one of the geographically smaller states in the U.S. We've enjoyed wide access to high speed broadband here for fifteen years or so now. I currently have clean 120 mbps service that is operated at utility levels of reliability. I have no complaints.

Spooky23 10y ago
Good for you. You probably had a bunch of former AT&T employees on the local board negotiating with cable company twenty years ago. Unfortunately, you're the exception because cable companies are able to exploit gaps in the regulatory framework. The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems. The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.
micahbright 10y ago
Sometimes people struggle to find something good to say about Sweden, the rape capital of the world. Glad we can find a good comparison - New Jersey...less rape...more, faster internet
- weatherlight 10y ago
  Totally inappropriate!
- sctb 10y ago
  The issue of the unfairness of this comment towards an entire country aside: > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
notyourwork 10y ago
I agree, generalizing country to country comparisons without considering population and size are usually not valuable unless you have context to these things.
j1vms 10y ago
> When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale. If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true. Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.
- talmand 10y ago
  If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while. First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions. Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo. It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.
  - hash-set 10y ago
    The US has a corruption problem.
    - Aloha 10y ago
      In general, democracies have corruption problems, the US doesn't seem any worse than the median.
      - pjlegato 10y ago
        I would go even farther and assert that the US is much less corrupt than the vast majority of democracies in the world.
xigency 10y ago
> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically. Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.
- oblio 10y ago
  Sweden is actually one of the best European examples since its population density and GDP are both lower than the US ones (yet still comparable).
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    Sweden is also the country that people always pick, when they want to illustrate that Europe has better broadband, but as you say, it's one of the best examples. Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city. Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.
daveFNbuck 10y ago
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a bit smaller and more densely populated than New Jersey. Yet I have an unreliable and expensive 20mbps connection. If this issue were about size, Silicon Valley would have world-class high speed internet.
- fragmede 10y ago
  Silicon Valley has 100 or 200 Mbit Internet options available, and for the lucky, gigabit Internet. Funny thing is, like money in the Valley, it's very unevenly distributed. (I pay ~$50/month for 100Mbit) Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.
  - daveFNbuck 10y ago
    I live in Redwood City, where I have the choice between a slower AT&T connection and a faster Comcast connection. It's partially my fault for being unwilling to pay Comcast, but these are the only choices available just a short drive from Palo Alto.
  - brianmartinek 10y ago
    I live in San Mateo and also pay $50/month for 100mpbs, which is mostly reliable, and the speed is 'good enough'. I could pay more but the gains in speed aren't worth the extra $$. The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.
  - dahdum 10y ago
    Sunnyvale here, it's Comcast (now including data caps!) or DSL.
- eddieplan9 10y ago
  This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the problem is the sense of good enough. I have the option to purchase 100mbps but I am only paying for 20mbps because it is virtually good enough for everything I do: working from home, video chat, streaming HD videos, backing up to iCloud, etc. When I rent HD movies from iTunes, my wait time is 0. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.
rayiner 10y ago
I wonder how much of the difference in perception is due to very different urban/suburban/rural dynamics in the U.S. versus Europe. I just bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland (a dense east-coast state). My neighborhood just got public sewer/water in the last couple of years, but we've got fiber! Meanwhile, you can't get fiber in Baltimore, the state's largest city.
mountaineer22 10y ago
He means citizens of municipality X within the US. We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.
nickik 10y ago
Maybe you are a troll, or maybe you just don't understand how networks work. The relevant factor is not the overall size, but rather the population density. Lower population density means more cable per person (on avg.), so it makes it MORE expensive. Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests. Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2 You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!" People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests. If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live). Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people. Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.
  - amazon_not 10y ago
    What you really are interested in is linear density. The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country. Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road. Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
csydas 10y ago
Except I'm relatively certain that like most states once you're outside one of the major cities the options and quality of broadband access drops significantly. In many non-US countries this is not the case. Likewise the level you're able to get isn't even equally available in main cities across the U.S. My hometown of Milwaukee WI for example has very poor options for s moderately large city. Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access. It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.
guelo 10y ago
> I have no complaints. Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.
- refurb 10y ago
  Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).
awinder 10y ago
Assuming you're in Verizon's FiOS service area. They do seem to do a fine job, but I had problems when they were unable to foster a decent union relationship and they went to total shit for a few months. I had issues during this period and was totally stuck. So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.
BurningFrog 10y ago
After giving it some thought, I can not figure out why the time to drive from Boston to Seattle is relevant to whatever argument is trying to be made here.
lameexcuse333 10y ago
Yet the country put people on the Moon, built that highway system that spans edge to edge, has telephone services across it, places cables across oceans, built oil pipelines running crazy lengths, among numerous other ridiculously complex engineering projects. But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task? The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.
- oppositelock 10y ago
  The engineering is not complicated, but it involves fights for right of way and obstructionist land owners and municipalities who will fight against it. This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
  - lameexcuse333 10y ago
    Agreed. I was being facetious by suggesting the engineering was complicated. And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.
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espadrine 10y ago
> You may as well say "citizens of Europe. I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds. The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance). Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military. Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces. The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles. Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.
RankingMember 10y ago
A nitpick, but crossing the US takes much closer to 4 10-hour days than 5 (New York to Los Angeles): https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2 https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2
- refurb 10y ago
  A nitpick, but that would assume you eat in the car and pee in a jug.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    No it doesn't; you intersperse that with the 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of driving, two hours of generous breaks and lunch, twelve hours for dinner/sleep/shower/relaxing.
- ralph84 10y ago
  Google's calculation doesn't include stops for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention that with that much driving you're bound to run into a few delays due to construction or accidents, or just bad timing hitting a metro area during rush hour.
ezzaf 10y ago
The United States was a country last time I checked, unless Mexico and Canada have mysteriously disappeared. A country roughly the same size as Australia, which has a significantly smaller population. The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays. If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.

by markbnj 10y ago

Spooky23 10y ago

Good for you. You probably had a bunch of former AT&T employees on the local board negotiating with cable company twenty years ago. Unfortunately, you're the exception because cable companies are able to exploit gaps in the regulatory framework. The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems. The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.

micahbright 10y ago

Sometimes people struggle to find something good to say about Sweden, the rape capital of the world. Glad we can find a good comparison - New Jersey...less rape...more, faster internet

weatherlight 10y ago
Totally inappropriate!
sctb 10y ago
The issue of the unfairness of this comment towards an entire country aside: > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

notyourwork 10y ago

I agree, generalizing country to country comparisons without considering population and size are usually not valuable unless you have context to these things.

j1vms 10y ago

> When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale. If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true. Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.

talmand 10y ago
If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while. First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions. Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo. It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.
- hash-set 10y ago
  The US has a corruption problem.
  - Aloha 10y ago
    In general, democracies have corruption problems, the US doesn't seem any worse than the median.
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      I would go even farther and assert that the US is much less corrupt than the vast majority of democracies in the world.

xigency 10y ago

> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically. Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.

oblio 10y ago
Sweden is actually one of the best European examples since its population density and GDP are both lower than the US ones (yet still comparable).
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Sweden is also the country that people always pick, when they want to illustrate that Europe has better broadband, but as you say, it's one of the best examples. Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.
rayiner 10y ago
I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city. Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.

daveFNbuck 10y ago

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a bit smaller and more densely populated than New Jersey. Yet I have an unreliable and expensive 20mbps connection. If this issue were about size, Silicon Valley would have world-class high speed internet.

fragmede 10y ago
Silicon Valley has 100 or 200 Mbit Internet options available, and for the lucky, gigabit Internet. Funny thing is, like money in the Valley, it's very unevenly distributed. (I pay ~$50/month for 100Mbit) Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.
- daveFNbuck 10y ago
  I live in Redwood City, where I have the choice between a slower AT&T connection and a faster Comcast connection. It's partially my fault for being unwilling to pay Comcast, but these are the only choices available just a short drive from Palo Alto.
- brianmartinek 10y ago
  I live in San Mateo and also pay $50/month for 100mpbs, which is mostly reliable, and the speed is 'good enough'. I could pay more but the gains in speed aren't worth the extra $$. The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.
- dahdum 10y ago
  Sunnyvale here, it's Comcast (now including data caps!) or DSL.
eddieplan9 10y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the problem is the sense of good enough. I have the option to purchase 100mbps but I am only paying for 20mbps because it is virtually good enough for everything I do: working from home, video chat, streaming HD videos, backing up to iCloud, etc. When I rent HD movies from iTunes, my wait time is 0. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.

rayiner 10y ago

I wonder how much of the difference in perception is due to very different urban/suburban/rural dynamics in the U.S. versus Europe. I just bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland (a dense east-coast state). My neighborhood just got public sewer/water in the last couple of years, but we've got fiber! Meanwhile, you can't get fiber in Baltimore, the state's largest city.

mountaineer22 10y ago

He means citizens of municipality X within the US. We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.

nickik 10y ago

Maybe you are a troll, or maybe you just don't understand how networks work. The relevant factor is not the overall size, but rather the population density. Lower population density means more cable per person (on avg.), so it makes it MORE expensive. Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests. Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2 You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!" People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.

rayiner 10y ago
> Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests. If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live). Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people. Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.
- amazon_not 10y ago
  What you really are interested in is linear density. The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country. Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road. Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

csydas 10y ago

Except I'm relatively certain that like most states once you're outside one of the major cities the options and quality of broadband access drops significantly. In many non-US countries this is not the case. Likewise the level you're able to get isn't even equally available in main cities across the U.S. My hometown of Milwaukee WI for example has very poor options for s moderately large city. Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access. It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.

guelo 10y ago

> I have no complaints. Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.

refurb 10y ago
Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).

awinder 10y ago

Assuming you're in Verizon's FiOS service area. They do seem to do a fine job, but I had problems when they were unable to foster a decent union relationship and they went to total shit for a few months. I had issues during this period and was totally stuck. So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.

BurningFrog 10y ago

After giving it some thought, I can not figure out why the time to drive from Boston to Seattle is relevant to whatever argument is trying to be made here.

lameexcuse333 10y ago

Yet the country put people on the Moon, built that highway system that spans edge to edge, has telephone services across it, places cables across oceans, built oil pipelines running crazy lengths, among numerous other ridiculously complex engineering projects. But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task? The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.

oppositelock 10y ago
The engineering is not complicated, but it involves fights for right of way and obstructionist land owners and municipalities who will fight against it. This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
- lameexcuse333 10y ago
  Agreed. I was being facetious by suggesting the engineering was complicated. And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.

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espadrine 10y ago

> You may as well say "citizens of Europe. I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds. The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance). Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military. Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces. The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles. Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.

RankingMember 10y ago

A nitpick, but crossing the US takes much closer to 4 10-hour days than 5 (New York to Los Angeles): https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2 https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2

refurb 10y ago
A nitpick, but that would assume you eat in the car and pee in a jug.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  No it doesn't; you intersperse that with the 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of driving, two hours of generous breaks and lunch, twelve hours for dinner/sleep/shower/relaxing.
ralph84 10y ago
Google's calculation doesn't include stops for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention that with that much driving you're bound to run into a few delays due to construction or accidents, or just bad timing hitting a metro area during rush hour.

ezzaf 10y ago

The United States was a country last time I checked, unless Mexico and Canada have mysteriously disappeared. A country roughly the same size as Australia, which has a significantly smaller population. The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays. If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.