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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

European Internet, according TFA, is for the most part not better. The largest country above us on the list has 17 million people. The big European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, which together comprise 70% of the EU) have slower Internet.

The fastest country on the list, Denmark, has almost no competition in the sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Denmark. And it’s been a model of deregulation: https://reason.com/2017/10/24/how-denmark-has-overtaken-the-...

> Regulators around the world took notice and strove to emulate the success of the U.S. approach. Denmark in particular styled its own telecommunications regulations on the U.S. model, slashing its chief telecom regulator altogether and assigning small regulatory functions to other departments.

Denmark is basically the situation where you have a “benevolent former monopoly,” like Verizon here in the mid Atlantic US.

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Switzerland, right behind Denmark in that chart builds the physical networks either entirely with public money or public/private partnerships, but sets a fixed rate at which the fiber must be leased out to any interested party.

This worked too. A small ISP came along (init7, they're awesome https://www.init7.net/) and started offering symmetric gbit at $65 per month, disrupting the ISP market. The big ISPs were scrambling at first, now there's actual competition, with offers like 10git for ~$40 a month (https://fiber.salt.ch/en). Granted that's marketing 10gbit and not real 10gbit, because it's XG-PON [0], so "up to 10gbit/s" and it's a shitty ISP. But still way better than you used to be able to get.

So it would seem to me that many roads lead to rome. Eitherway I'm pretty happy because I don't hate my ISP anymore, something that was unimaginable 10 years ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10G-PON

+1 for init7. Bring your own Infrastructure is a big plus too! Crappy branded modems are nearly always the bottleneck

It depends what your values are. To my values most or all of Europe has better internet. A few things I care about:

- No bandwidth caps.

- ISPs competing to offer the best service in a system similar to how health care is done in Japan.

- Being able to switch ISPs without issue.

- Being able to run my own hardware instead of being required to use their routers.

- Net neutrality. I pay for gigabit duplex but if I'm not uploading to a fast lane I'm limited to 10mbps, or 1% of what I pay for. This is terrible for VPNing for work, and other work related tasks.

Net neutrality is brilliantly named, but it's not a good regulation to force on providers for various reasons. See eg https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regu...

(However, a provider deciding on some kind of 'neutrality' by itself and offering that as a selling point to customers is perfectly fine.0

Lol Cato finds regulation is bad, you don't say?

Linking to Cato is like linking to those "Ludwig van Mises"-inspired think-tanks.

I don't think it's a reputable source for analysis, their bias is obviously apparent and not necessarily based in reality, it's an ideology.

Having one of the Koch brothers as founder just adds fuel to the fire...

The linked analysis is rather outdated - it mentions that if video over IP becomes popular, perhaps the conclusions might change.

And the article itself points out that it might be important for ISPs to feel the threat of net neutrality regulations.

It's hard to claim that the ISP market, at least in many locations, isn't subject to plenty of market failures that need some kind of remedy.

Exactly.. I'm on 1Gbit down/1Gbit up at home, there are no caps, and the full speed is always available. It's not throttled, it's equally fast at all times as far as I can tell. It's not expensive, there are no hidden charges. I use my own router (though I'm also using the equipment that came from the provider, for the fiber-to-Ethernet part). All of this I could get in Japan years ago, we're finally catching up in Europe.

That wikipedia article is very outdated. For example, the two most common offers in Spain are symmetric 100mbps and 600mbps FTTH.

The most important player indebted itself with ~50k million € and it's basically replacing all the copper coverage with FTTH.

Other HFC players are turning into FTTH too, as HFC won't be able to compete with +600mbps FTTH offerings, and symmetry is more and more valued over time.

Also, I don't have the figures at hand, but the coverage in Spain is extraordinary. FTTH is reaching places that barely had 3mbps ADSL, and it's probably going to cover places that had nothing in the long run.

Public money is paying for capital costs in places that would be impossible to make a profit otherwise, but still the main obstacle are municipalities and nimbys.

I've seen some pretty stupid stuff, like blocking FTTH deployment in historical centers under aesthetic concerns, where they already have ugly copper wires in the facades. In reality what those municipalities expect is ISP to bury the cables and pay for the whole renovation of such streets, which no one in his right mind will. So this people will not have FTTH unless their municipalities change their mind, but they blame ISPs.

I have really cheap fiber in the Basque Country.

And then you have our case here in Sweden [1] with a thought out plan to roll out broadband to the whole country as a strategic need.

The infrastructure is public and leased to private companies, avoiding the tragedy that happens in the US where laying down cables is the most expensive part and which shuns away competition, leaving with oligopolies where each company got their turf and that increases the barrier of entry significantly.

[1] https://www.government.se/496173/contentassets/afe9f1cfeaac4...

That wikipedia article is somewhat wrong. There is a lot of competition in denmark.

There are 3 separate 4G networks with very high coverage selling mobile broadband rather cheaply (you can fx get 1 TB a month for approx 36 USD a month).

TDC was also forced to give competitors access to their PSTN, coax and fiber network so resellers can compete on selling on their physical network.

The power companies have also been aggressive in recent years rolling out fiber, so several places people can choose either infrastructure from TDC, their power company or one of the mobile providers.

Interesting, sounds very similar to the situation in Switzerland. So maybe there's something to this competition thing after all ;-)

In Denmark,the former state-owned, TDC has to provide equal access to their network for other competitors, meaning they can only charge the cost of maintaining the infrastructure, which has mostly been build through governmental funding

They have on multiple occasions tried to force competitors out of the market by making unfavorable pricing models or straight up blocking third parties from using their infrastructure

They are in no way a "benevolent former monopoly" and there's a lot of regulations in place to avoid them exploiting their market position, since they in the past have tried exactly that

Denmark has cheap, fast internet because of the regulations enforced on the market, which makes it possible for me to get a 1gbit symmetric connection from a small provider for 120 DKK (approximately $20) per month

I moved from Texas (Comcast) and while living in Sweden I assumed internet in the EU was much, much better compared to the US. Then I tried living in Germany for 3 years and it felt like I had Comcast again. I couldn't believe it takes a month for a technician to come to your apartment in Germany to flip a switch so your DSL works but that was reality there.

In Germany, it’s a mix of politics and greed that made us the running joke wrt to internet quality.

Neuland.

It’s especially bad with mobile data caps. I had a 500mb cap in ~2014.

A weird notion I see is that

"Countries who jumped on the Internet earlier can't have fiber because of existing competition"

Fiber is actually MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER to deploy for higher speed networks than any high speed copper, because the later almost always implies to deploying a fibre network too to do everything other than the last mile.

Copper is not expensive to deploy given that it already runs to peoples home for their phone line.

It is:

1. You have to build your fibre backbone anyways. That's an even bigger trouble in countries with no culture to share fibre. And you would usually have to get much "brainier," and more expensive fibre equipment in this case.

2. You still need to wire the fibre fairly close to premises.

3. High speed copper network equipment costs huge sums, more than commoditised GPON.

4. Copper often needs to be torn, to be replaced with higher grade copper

5. You still need to drill buildings to install niches for copper equipment.

6. You need to put extra equipment into equipment closets.

7. Copper needs more equipment overall

8. Copper has lower reliability overall, and costs more to maintain

So, in the end, you just do the same FTTH, just with copper as the last few tenths of metres. This is so obvious, but people keep dogmatising over "it's already wired with copper."

GPON by comparison does not require anything in the closet, but a piece of glass passive optical slitter.

You can easily have 1024 end-users on a single powerful GePON OLT, covering few square kilometres of 100% passive net.

Interesting how all these companies in countries that are stuck on ADSL are not aware of your arguments, or they would switch to fiber.

They are aware. That's why you get 20Mbit/s, maybe 50 if you're lucky. Cheaper in the short term and it's not like you have a choice.

AFAIU, GP is talking about FTTC (or VDSL), which is moderately faster than typical ADSL via existing phone exchanges or (far away) cabinets, while being much more expensive. FTTC can be cheaper than FTTH, but silly IMO - any increase in bandwidth will be expensive.

Fiber equipement is damn expensive.

Please check for how much you can buy a cheap olt, ont, and amplifiers today

That wikipedia page on Internet in Denmark is years old, and way obsolete. It talks about internet speed in the range of a few tens of megabits.

Curious why population is even a factor here. If it legitimately should be... why not compare states of the US with states of the EU? (Seems a roughly equivalent thing to do)

Bigger and more diverse countries have a wider variety of political issues and priorities. When was the last time broadband even registered as a political issue in the news, except in the context of some other more important political debate (urban/rural, racial disparity, etc.) And in the US, construction of infrastructure is mostly a municipal level issue, so its both low priority and varies dramatically by state.

Here in Maryland (which is a small, politically homogenous, rich state, just like Denmark), most of the state has fiber or gigabit cable and broadband speeds are very fast: https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/fastest-internet-connect...

> In fact, the next state on the list, Maryland, is nearly tied with Denmark for the second-fastest Internet speed on Earth.

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