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Corruption and attempts to control markets are everywhere and if you don't fight them they will win. In Switzerland fiber needs to be accessible to all provide

Corruption and attempts to control markets are everywhere and if you don't fight them they will win. In Switzerland fiber needs to be accessible to all providers which results in many places having fiber run by the local power providers and the large state owned telephone company. This is what allows providers to offer 25gbit synchronous for under 70 USD per month. However this did not stop the large state owned communication provider to attempt to kill competition by no longer running p2p (1 or 4 fibers directly from a home to the local exchange bulding) fibers but p2mp (1 fiber to a splitter in the street with a backbone to the exchange) which requires active splitters (the environmental impact of this was completely ignored). This automatically limits any other provider from offering a faster service than the phone company. Even after a court case and then an injunction they spent millions to expand this network thinking they can somehow perswaid the courts and use people complaining that they can't have fiber because of an injunction (they told customers on the phone that fiber is available but can't be connected due to a court case). In the end they however back peddled and it appears they will loose the case now. Thanks to the small provider that took this to the courts (init7) it appears we will keep a network open for competition and future proof. There are fines pending but those are a 2 edges sword. The tax payer effectively pays it since the majority stake belongs to the tax payer. So a large fine is bad and a small fine is bad because it's not a deterrent. The executives that caused the mess's are already mostly gone (hence the back peddling) but the correct action would be to claw back their pay and bonus or something like that so the next "hot shots" don't try such shit again.

entropicdrifter 3y ago
I have never wanted to move to Switzerland more
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Why do people want the extra bandwidth? Isn't latency in distant end server response times generally much slower than speeds, unless the concern is bandwidth for streaming?
  - sharts 3y ago
    Probably the same reason people want extra free speech? If available and technically feasible, then why not ensure it as much as possible.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    Peaks. If you have a home with 5 people in it - watching 4k content, downloading games, etc. There can be contention and performance gets degraded. This is a case where size of pipe matters more than latency.
  - entropicdrifter 3y ago
    I pay $90 a month for 1Gbps up/down fiber to the home. To pay $70 a month for 25x that speed is ludicrous. I imagine I could pay half of what I do or less to get the same speeds.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    > Why do people want the extra bandwidth? This reminds me of "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Right now I have 1gpbs up and down at home. That was an upgrade I did from 50 down about five years ago. The reason we upgraded was because at night when everyone was streaming things would slow down and we'd be fighting with each other. The 1g stopped that issue. Right now the 1g is more than enough. But I'm sure there will come a time when it won't be. Maybe we'll have 8k streaming from AR headsets that require one stream for each eye. Or who knows what else. I'd rather get ahead of it. And right now it still takes a few minutes to download a movie at full quality. I have to say that when we went from 50m to 1g it was nice to be able to download TV shows in seconds.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    High latency is not the same thing as low throughput. It is wild how many people do not understand this. Latency can inform throughput if your windows do not scale. But the whole reason we have window scaling schemes is to optimize throughput in the face of latency. With regards to remote server performance - yeah - CDN's exist for this reason. I may not saturate my gigabit connection while downloading game patches, but I get close enough. I have also had the experience on a different ISP of having spent more time downloading and installing updates than I ever did playing my PlayStation.
trogdor 3y ago
> 25gbit synchronous for under 70 USD per month Wow. And I thought my 10GbE home network was fast... TIL there are 25GbE Thunderbolt 3 adapters.
- sschueller 3y ago
  You need some hw to take advantage of it but it's not too bad. https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
  - trogdor 3y ago
    That is a fantastic resource. Thanks for putting together such an accessible and comprehensive overview.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  You could say: bandwidth that burninates.
philjohn 3y ago
Why use active splitters when it's much cheaper to install passive ones?
- sschueller 3y ago
  It was calculated to save about 50 USD per connection (p2p vs p2mp). Why active I don't know, they may not all be. There were probably also other interests which I would love to know about but I wasn't a fly on the wall when those decisions were made. The sheer amount of money spent to expand the network after the court injunction forbid connecting those seems sus to me. It will take many years and many more millions to undo. I should also point out that a lot of this money to expand the fiber network comes from government grants.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  If you're talking about 25 Gb/s specifically, standards didn't exist until relatively recently (e.g., IEEE Std 802.3ca-2020, 25GS-PON/G.9804), so if you want to handle those speeds you had to go active. If you were building out in later 2022 or 2023, you have have (more) 25Gb PON parts available. Pre-2021 your options may have been more limited.
throw0101b 3y ago
> providers to offer 25gbit synchronous What use cases are there for residential (or even most business) connection to be 25Gb/s (or even >10 Gb/s)? Are there 'practical' application for homes or offices to have this much? At $WORK we have both 10 Gbps to both our office and our DC, and we don't come close to saturating that. There's really only so many Linux ISOs that you can download at home. (I'm not "against" having it, just curious on possible uses.)
- Gelob 3y ago
  How about streaming actual 4k content at not a terrible bitrate
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    Youtube 4k is 25mbps and I don't think anyone's 4k is over 100mpbs.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      For streaming, probably true. However my 2016-era 4K camera records at up to 150Mbps and I noticed recently that due to compression I was totally unable to show off some gorgeous telephoto video of a hummingbird bathing in a river because the fast running water looked truly horrible under compression, even though the original video looked great. I would love 100mpbs streaming options.
      - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
        Bitrate on a camera and on a video aren't comparable. The camera has to use a compression algorithm that can run real time on very low power (the cpu in a camera is probably ~5-10 watts. Anything non-real-time video will have been re-compressed and can probably maintain quality at roughly half the bitrate.
        TaylorAlexander 3y ago
pnw 3y ago
IMHO many of these US and EU comparisons don't pan out due to scale. Switzerland is a small, wealthy and densely populated country compared to the US. Utah alone is five times the size of Switzerland. Swiss GDP per capita is ~20% higher and most importantly, the population density of Switzerland is 213 people per sq km versus 34 in the US (and undoubtedly that number is even lower in Utah which has one of the lowest population densities in the US).
- sschueller 3y ago
  You could make the same statement when it was time to wire the US for power or telephone lines. Yet a large chunk of the US has power and telephone.
  - b59831 3y ago
    [dead]
- monocasa 3y ago
  That doesn't explain why dense, high GDP parts of the US don't have Switzerland's speeds.
tw04 3y ago
>The tax payer effectively pays it since the majority stake belongs to the tax payer. So a large fine is bad and a small fine is bad because it's not a deterrent. The executives that caused the mess's are already mostly gone (hence the back peddling) but the correct action would be to claw back their pay and bonus or something like that so the next "hot shots" don't try such shit again. If it's state owned, they should be allowed to determine how the penalty is levied. Make the fine directly payable by the executives in charge, it'll stop immediately. Also not to nitpick as I'm guessing English is a second language and it's quite excellent - *persuade the courts
- Etheryte 3y ago
  I think this is the best kind of typo. The spelling given by the original comment pronounces the same way as the correct spelling, we've just all memorized that one of them is the correct way to go from verbal to written.
babypuncher 3y ago
This still reads like a success story of municipal networks to me. It is much easier to hold public institutions like this accountable than private regional monopolies. A private company is not subject to the whims of the Democratic process, and regional monopolies ensure that free market forces have a much harder time cultivating competition or disruption. The fact that your courts were able to put an end to these practices and the executives responsible are gone while Comcast continues to operate unchecked throughout large swaths of the US really demonstrates this. In Utah, we've been fighting the corruption and anti-competitive practices of Comcast and CenturyLink for over two decades. And despite many small victories like the recent one in Bountiful, many residents are still getting screwed over with no viable recourse. The city my parents live in fell for Comcast's intense lobbying a few years ago and now they have no real path towards getting a meaningful alternative.
pabs3 3y ago
Is latency better with 25Gbit fiber than with slower speeds?

entropicdrifter 3y ago

I have never wanted to move to Switzerland more

jjtheblunt 3y ago
Why do people want the extra bandwidth? Isn't latency in distant end server response times generally much slower than speeds, unless the concern is bandwidth for streaming?
- sharts 3y ago
  Probably the same reason people want extra free speech? If available and technically feasible, then why not ensure it as much as possible.
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  Peaks. If you have a home with 5 people in it - watching 4k content, downloading games, etc. There can be contention and performance gets degraded. This is a case where size of pipe matters more than latency.
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  I pay $90 a month for 1Gbps up/down fiber to the home. To pay $70 a month for 25x that speed is ludicrous. I imagine I could pay half of what I do or less to get the same speeds.
- jedberg 3y ago
  > Why do people want the extra bandwidth? This reminds me of "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Right now I have 1gpbs up and down at home. That was an upgrade I did from 50 down about five years ago. The reason we upgraded was because at night when everyone was streaming things would slow down and we'd be fighting with each other. The 1g stopped that issue. Right now the 1g is more than enough. But I'm sure there will come a time when it won't be. Maybe we'll have 8k streaming from AR headsets that require one stream for each eye. Or who knows what else. I'd rather get ahead of it. And right now it still takes a few minutes to download a movie at full quality. I have to say that when we went from 50m to 1g it was nice to be able to download TV shows in seconds.
- RajT88 3y ago
  High latency is not the same thing as low throughput. It is wild how many people do not understand this. Latency can inform throughput if your windows do not scale. But the whole reason we have window scaling schemes is to optimize throughput in the face of latency. With regards to remote server performance - yeah - CDN's exist for this reason. I may not saturate my gigabit connection while downloading game patches, but I get close enough. I have also had the experience on a different ISP of having spent more time downloading and installing updates than I ever did playing my PlayStation.

trogdor 3y ago

> 25gbit synchronous for under 70 USD per month Wow. And I thought my 10GbE home network was fast... TIL there are 25GbE Thunderbolt 3 adapters.

sschueller 3y ago
You need some hw to take advantage of it but it's not too bad. https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
- trogdor 3y ago
  That is a fantastic resource. Thanks for putting together such an accessible and comprehensive overview.
HeckFeck 3y ago
You could say: bandwidth that burninates.

philjohn 3y ago

Why use active splitters when it's much cheaper to install passive ones?

sschueller 3y ago
It was calculated to save about 50 USD per connection (p2p vs p2mp). Why active I don't know, they may not all be. There were probably also other interests which I would love to know about but I wasn't a fly on the wall when those decisions were made. The sheer amount of money spent to expand the network after the court injunction forbid connecting those seems sus to me. It will take many years and many more millions to undo. I should also point out that a lot of this money to expand the fiber network comes from government grants.
throw0101b 3y ago
If you're talking about 25 Gb/s specifically, standards didn't exist until relatively recently (e.g., IEEE Std 802.3ca-2020, 25GS-PON/G.9804), so if you want to handle those speeds you had to go active. If you were building out in later 2022 or 2023, you have have (more) 25Gb PON parts available. Pre-2021 your options may have been more limited.

throw0101b 3y ago

> providers to offer 25gbit synchronous What use cases are there for residential (or even most business) connection to be 25Gb/s (or even >10 Gb/s)? Are there 'practical' application for homes or offices to have this much? At $WORK we have both 10 Gbps to both our office and our DC, and we don't come close to saturating that. There's really only so many Linux ISOs that you can download at home. (I'm not "against" having it, just curious on possible uses.)

Gelob 3y ago
How about streaming actual 4k content at not a terrible bitrate
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  Youtube 4k is 25mbps and I don't think anyone's 4k is over 100mpbs.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    For streaming, probably true. However my 2016-era 4K camera records at up to 150Mbps and I noticed recently that due to compression I was totally unable to show off some gorgeous telephoto video of a hummingbird bathing in a river because the fast running water looked truly horrible under compression, even though the original video looked great. I would love 100mpbs streaming options.
    - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
      Bitrate on a camera and on a video aren't comparable. The camera has to use a compression algorithm that can run real time on very low power (the cpu in a camera is probably ~5-10 watts. Anything non-real-time video will have been re-compressed and can probably maintain quality at roughly half the bitrate.
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago

pnw 3y ago

IMHO many of these US and EU comparisons don't pan out due to scale. Switzerland is a small, wealthy and densely populated country compared to the US. Utah alone is five times the size of Switzerland. Swiss GDP per capita is ~20% higher and most importantly, the population density of Switzerland is 213 people per sq km versus 34 in the US (and undoubtedly that number is even lower in Utah which has one of the lowest population densities in the US).

sschueller 3y ago
You could make the same statement when it was time to wire the US for power or telephone lines. Yet a large chunk of the US has power and telephone.
- b59831 3y ago
  [dead]
monocasa 3y ago
That doesn't explain why dense, high GDP parts of the US don't have Switzerland's speeds.

tw04 3y ago

>The tax payer effectively pays it since the majority stake belongs to the tax payer. So a large fine is bad and a small fine is bad because it's not a deterrent. The executives that caused the mess's are already mostly gone (hence the back peddling) but the correct action would be to claw back their pay and bonus or something like that so the next "hot shots" don't try such shit again. If it's state owned, they should be allowed to determine how the penalty is levied. Make the fine directly payable by the executives in charge, it'll stop immediately. Also not to nitpick as I'm guessing English is a second language and it's quite excellent - *persuade the courts

Etheryte 3y ago
I think this is the best kind of typo. The spelling given by the original comment pronounces the same way as the correct spelling, we've just all memorized that one of them is the correct way to go from verbal to written.

babypuncher 3y ago

This still reads like a success story of municipal networks to me. It is much easier to hold public institutions like this accountable than private regional monopolies. A private company is not subject to the whims of the Democratic process, and regional monopolies ensure that free market forces have a much harder time cultivating competition or disruption. The fact that your courts were able to put an end to these practices and the executives responsible are gone while Comcast continues to operate unchecked throughout large swaths of the US really demonstrates this. In Utah, we've been fighting the corruption and anti-competitive practices of Comcast and CenturyLink for over two decades. And despite many small victories like the recent one in Bountiful, many residents are still getting screwed over with no viable recourse. The city my parents live in fell for Comcast's intense lobbying a few years ago and now they have no real path towards getting a meaningful alternative.

pabs3 3y ago

Is latency better with 25Gbit fiber than with slower speeds?