Technology

Cries in German

They will never give you more unless something forces them to. That could have been us, forcing them to, but we're shit at accomplishing those kinds of things.

Lmao. I have 25 Mbps. Let alone 25 Gbps. Thanks Malcolm turnballs

Thanks, this reminded me that I should check the competition for now. It's not as well designed infra as in Switzerland, but I should check for an open fibre that has several service providers.

I'm sure this will be lost in the comments but you CAN get 25GBit here in 'murica. My ISP offers it... But this ISP is also considered one of the best in the world so... https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/#choose-your-plan

Here in Sweden I have over 20 choices of providers, many with specific a focus. One that is superb, which is the one I have, don't do any tracking or information gathering at all. They are fully focused on privacy, an open Internet and have helped countries in need, like Ukraine, with hardware to keep Internet access on. They've been raided and taken to court over not following the required IP address storage laws and some other things of deliberately not collecting information. Their newsletter is so good too, all about privacy and relevant tech news. Seriously couldn't dream of a better ISP.

If the internet had been around back when the U.S. Constitution was written, instead of post offices, the framers would have put in ISPs.

I'm out in the country in Colorado. I have a small local ISP. I can get 10Gb if I want it. I have 100Mb because that's all I need. Honestly, for most people, I really don't know what you'd do with 25Gb. Even 10Gb is tough for alot of home users. The equipment is out there and not even that expensive, but its also not something most people own. Most people who own that sort of stuff are either home labbers or tech enthusiasts. And even if most people did, they would rarely use it to its full potential. For most people 2.5Gb is far more practical. Oddly enough it can be harder and more expensive to get your hands on than 10Gb because it's just starting to really penetrate the consumer market, where 10Gb was common in datacenters for a long time, so used equipment is quite reasonable.

The biggest issue with ISPs in the US is that you have legacy players entrenched in a market and unwilling to spend the money to do upgrades. The main reason I have what I have is because a local company saw an opportunity to go into a space others were failing badly at and used a state grant to help fund the buildout. Soon, I may have a second option because my electric co-op is working on their own build. Since they answer to their members and not the stock market, now that fiber is cheap, they can build this stuff widely. We need more of all that.

Very good. My TL;DR take:

The American and German approach of letting incumbents build monopolies, allowing wasteful overbuild, and refusing to regulate natural monopolies is often called a ‘free market.’

But it’s not free. And it’s not a market.

True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.

The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.

That’s not anti-capitalist. It’s actually better capitalism. It directs competition to where it adds value, not to where it destroys it.

The free market doesn’t mean letting powerful incumbents do whatever they want. It means creating the conditions where genuine competition can thrive.

In Spain many towns have some tiny local ISP that offers fiber. My town (population 30k) has two local ISPs. I can get 10Gbit for 30 euros/month. Even remote villages have fiber.