8 ms·

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. Low

by 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.
  - weberc2 10y ago
    > Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service. While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).
    - jules 10y ago
      I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.
      - weberc2 10y ago
        > If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale. > If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale. These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.
      - harpiaharpyja 10y ago
        > Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale. The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  > 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. Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 10y ago
    The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.
    - Retric 10y ago
      NYC is not 13,318 sq mi which is what your talking about aka an area ~200 miles wide and bigger than the state of Maryland. By comparison DC is 61 square miles total your figure is like lumping DC, Baltimore, and Richmond VA into one metro area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
      - snowwrestler 10y ago
        DC and Baltimore are typically lumped in as one metro area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
        Retric 10y ago
        Not really: "It is composed primarily of two major metropolitan statistical areas, the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV MSA and the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD MSA. In addition, six other smaller urban areas not contiguous to the main urban area but having strong commuting ties with the main area are also included in the metropolitan area." I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.
- toxik 10y ago
  Jesus Christ, Stockholm is more densely populated than NYC? No wonder getting an apartment around here is so absurdly difficult.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - galdosdi 10y ago
    They're comparing to NYC, not Manhattan. NYC includes 5 boroughs (and some of them are _large_), and while Manhattan and inner parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are dense, most of Staten Island and outer parts of Bronx and Queens are relatively sparse. You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
    - dantilkin 10y ago
      It's much worse than that, NYC is 789 km^2 of land, the metropolitan area is 8,936: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-newark-jersey-city-ny-nj-pa-metro-area/ https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-ne...
  - j3FF3ry 10y ago
    Looks like you've awoken to the syndrome.
- jamesblonde 10y ago
  Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective if they live in an appartment or suburban house. The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. The people who don't have fibre to the home are mostly old people (lots of them!) and farmers (and lots of them have it anyways).
  - wahsd 10y ago
    What you don't understand is that you are experiencing a kind of confirmation bias. Although you are partially correct and Sweden does have a great network, there is significant weight behind the argument that the small scale networking of a few population dense centers in Sweden is nothing on the scale of something like rolling out a comparable network in the USA. It's such a different level of scale that totally different forces are at play and factors that are not even measurable or noticeable on the Swedish scale are amplified to the point where they have fundamental impacts. I do agree though that in America, the main problem is public policy on the Federal level that essentially prohibits competition or even just consequences. We will see in a couple of days how the election goes, which will also determine whether the centralization of power and corruption at the Federal level expands though Hillary Clinton, or if market forces with compulsion to become the best and improve everything will drive Donald Trump to enact market competition and bust the de facto monopoly on internet the cable companies have a death grip on.
  - gopalv 10y ago
    > The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually. Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.
- staticelf 10y ago
  I live in a smaller city, not in Stockholm (the capital) or anything close to it. I still have access to 1gbit/s if I want to. :) There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.
logfromblammo 10y ago
I don't think it has all that much to do with population density. I think it has everything to do with Sweden not having AT&T, Comcast, and TWC to establish the ground rules for network deployment with their lobbyists. You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree. Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?
- amazon_not 10y ago
  Yes, but that's hard to calculate. What you really want to calculate is linear density. My best approximation for this is people per mile of road. This is easy to calculate and this data is readily available. 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. Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people. So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.
rayvd 10y ago
Based on the writing style, it would seem you're the troll.
markbnj 10y ago
I'm not going to get into a debate in the comment thread, but I will respond to you. You should try not to be so reactionary. I am neither cheerleading for the U.S.A. nor condemning Sweden. What I am saying is that the U.S. spans a continent. There are areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet and everything in between. If you think large areas of Sweden are sparsely inhabited have a drive through Utah or New Mexico or Arizona. If you look at Europe I assume you'll also find areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet, and that would at least be a somewhat reasonable comparison to make with the U.S.

by nickik 10y ago

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.
- weberc2 10y ago
  > Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service. While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).
  - jules 10y ago
    I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.
    - weberc2 10y ago
      > If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale. > If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale. These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.
    - harpiaharpyja 10y ago
      > Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale. The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.
kmicklas 10y ago
> 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. Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 10y ago
  The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.
  - Retric 10y ago
    NYC is not 13,318 sq mi which is what your talking about aka an area ~200 miles wide and bigger than the state of Maryland. By comparison DC is 61 square miles total your figure is like lumping DC, Baltimore, and Richmond VA into one metro area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      DC and Baltimore are typically lumped in as one metro area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
      - Retric 10y ago
        Not really: "It is composed primarily of two major metropolitan statistical areas, the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV MSA and the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD MSA. In addition, six other smaller urban areas not contiguous to the main urban area but having strong commuting ties with the main area are also included in the metropolitan area." I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.
toxik 10y ago
Jesus Christ, Stockholm is more densely populated than NYC? No wonder getting an apartment around here is so absurdly difficult.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- galdosdi 10y ago
  They're comparing to NYC, not Manhattan. NYC includes 5 boroughs (and some of them are _large_), and while Manhattan and inner parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are dense, most of Staten Island and outer parts of Bronx and Queens are relatively sparse. You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
  - dantilkin 10y ago
    It's much worse than that, NYC is 789 km^2 of land, the metropolitan area is 8,936: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-newark-jersey-city-ny-nj-pa-metro-area/ https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-ne...
- j3FF3ry 10y ago
  Looks like you've awoken to the syndrome.
jamesblonde 10y ago
Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective if they live in an appartment or suburban house. The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. The people who don't have fibre to the home are mostly old people (lots of them!) and farmers (and lots of them have it anyways).
- wahsd 10y ago
  What you don't understand is that you are experiencing a kind of confirmation bias. Although you are partially correct and Sweden does have a great network, there is significant weight behind the argument that the small scale networking of a few population dense centers in Sweden is nothing on the scale of something like rolling out a comparable network in the USA. It's such a different level of scale that totally different forces are at play and factors that are not even measurable or noticeable on the Swedish scale are amplified to the point where they have fundamental impacts. I do agree though that in America, the main problem is public policy on the Federal level that essentially prohibits competition or even just consequences. We will see in a couple of days how the election goes, which will also determine whether the centralization of power and corruption at the Federal level expands though Hillary Clinton, or if market forces with compulsion to become the best and improve everything will drive Donald Trump to enact market competition and bust the de facto monopoly on internet the cable companies have a death grip on.
- gopalv 10y ago
  > The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually. Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.
staticelf 10y ago
I live in a smaller city, not in Stockholm (the capital) or anything close to it. I still have access to 1gbit/s if I want to. :) There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.

logfromblammo 10y ago

I don't think it has all that much to do with population density. I think it has everything to do with Sweden not having AT&T, Comcast, and TWC to establish the ground rules for network deployment with their lobbyists. You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree. Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?

amazon_not 10y ago
Yes, but that's hard to calculate. What you really want to calculate is linear density. My best approximation for this is people per mile of road. This is easy to calculate and this data is readily available. 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. Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people. So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.

rayvd 10y ago

Based on the writing style, it would seem you're the troll.

markbnj 10y ago

I'm not going to get into a debate in the comment thread, but I will respond to you. You should try not to be so reactionary. I am neither cheerleading for the U.S.A. nor condemning Sweden. What I am saying is that the U.S. spans a continent. There are areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet and everything in between. If you think large areas of Sweden are sparsely inhabited have a drive through Utah or New Mexico or Arizona. If you look at Europe I assume you'll also find areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet, and that would at least be a somewhat reasonable comparison to make with the U.S.