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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

We often talk of developing nations "leapfrogging" landlines and going straight to mobile, but they're also going straight to fiber. It would be fascinating to see this same type of breakdown for rural fiber infrastructure.

One obvious difference is that fiber can't self-power a phone, but with ubiquitous mobile phones/solar panels/powerbanks that doesn't strike me as a huge show-stopper.

Thanks OP, great post and content. Now I'll go through the world with new eyes!

EDIT: found the fiber page http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?t=Fibre%20Optic%20C...

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Cell phone coverage has been abysmal in my part of the world, to the point where 911 calls can be unreliable (1).

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cell...

The telecom situation in Canada is ridiculous. Even in Greater Vancouver, the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Canada and the 34th in North America, there are dead zones everywhere with major providers. I'm in a suburban development that was mostly built in the last 5-10 years, and there still aren't any towers near here so my bedroom and foyer have no reception (not 1 bar, I mean my phone says "no service, you must be in the wilderness"). I have to stand by a window to make calls. And this is a wood-frame building on flat terrain, next to two major highways.

Telus, Bell and Rogers are ingrained in the minds of Canadians as the only options.

Almost all attempts to change that over the years have failed or have not been able to get sufficent market penetration to become self funding for rapid growth.

Canadian investment funds would rather go and buy U.S. ISPs from failing ventures like Frontier (creating Ziply Fiber) than investing in Canada because they know how bad the situation is. Getting sub-30% market penetration when offering, better, less expensive fiber internet makes the Canadian market uneconomical for deeper investment by insurgent ISPs.

The Canadian consumer is easily swayed by Bell/Telus/Rogers propoganda like https://web.archive.org/web/20140402040045/http://fairforcan...

Cell phone coverage in many places is just horrible. You might get good coverage and signal quality, but the network just can't follow when everybody is watching youtube at 4K resolution on their mobile connection. Sometimes even regular phone calls become unreliable (bad sound, interruptions) despite the optimal signal level.

Available IP bandwidth at end-user points has absolutely nothing to do with 911.

911 is an entirely different class of service.

Interesting, the "straight-to-fiber" leapfrogging. Was not aware. Makes sense.-

I'd be interested to know - qua infra - what their power grids are looking like ...

Estonia when it left the Soviet Union was offered a used phone system from a country that wanted to upgrade. Estonia decided to build new.

https://theconversation.com/estonia-is-a-digital-republic-wh...

Smart move.-

PS. Also, interesting that there - apparently - is a "second hand" market for used phone systems. As in, wholesale.-

Obviously excepting the cruelty I love the modern world. I marvel at the organization and patterns.

The Soviet Union was suffering some food crisis in the 90’s. One morning the news was discussing Clinton granting food aid to them. That same morning as my subway crossed by the Dominoe sugar factory there was already a Russian ship docked.

That was such a strange cause and effect moment for me.

It's interesting with East Germany - after German reunification it was covered with fiber. However then DSL became the standard way of going online in Germany, while that doesn't work on fiberand with only few to no consumer priced offerings for FTTH many areas were left out from "fast" Internet for a while, while having the, in theory, superior net.

My guess it was the asymmetry that was the attraction of the DSL. If everyone has equal access to bandwidth the message is harder to control.

That's conspiracy. It's more like they could sell SDSL for more money to business customers, as people who need more upload bandwidth gotta pay more, while being able to sell huge numbers in downstream. Plain simple capitalism.

I admit it could be conspiracy but I don't understand why you think the ability to sell a subscription for more money has an effect on the transport medium of the service. They could invent any service they want and run it over fiber.

Do you consider it a conspiracy theory that cable companies sell asymmetric bandwidth? Anytime I see asymmetric bandwidth I see it as an assault against the Hunan right to publish.

That is my reasoning for thinking such conspiratorial thoughts.

The ISP absolutely doesn't care if you publish ... they just don't want somebody to host stuff without paying a premium, since people are willing to pay more for it.

Sounds like a disincentive to publish to me. Remember when all bandwidth was synchronous in the USA. The telecoms were indifferent to which direction the packets went. The cable companies either through technical limitations were the first to offer asynchronous bandwidth as a product to the masses.

Cables companies distribute content and the business model relies on scarcity of access to the content. Their content evolved to leverage centralized advertising model and scarcity of access to content.

This was completely different in the USA during the T1, ISDN, and eventually SDSL.

I always associate the xDSL with the eternal September of the web and it's content.

How one classifies a conspiracy is actually a whole different topic. I would call this more market manipulation.

"Neighbouring Finland offered an analogue telephone exchange as a gift and the Estonian government declined, [...]"

In 1997 even to think about an "upgrade" to an analogue system is a negligence. Estonia already had 3 GSM networks in a country with a population of 1,400,000.

At the time [May 1997] of Ritabell's entering the Estonian market, there were about 64,500 GSM subscribers in the country. 53,000 belonged to EMT and 11,500 to Radiolinja, [...] [0]

EMT (Eesti Mobiiltelefon) claims even bigger numbers:

By 1996, EMT had 100,000 subscribers. [1]

[0] https://books.google.lt/books?id=SrFXo6qDRjcC&pg=PA152

[1] https://www.telia.ee/en/uudised/celebrating-25-years-of-mobi...

Estonia and other baltics will eventually have their power grid merged into the EU’s https://general.energy/en/news/hitachi-energy-enhances-estli...

(Sorry, kinda replying to the below as well)

Great for the SF6 to supercritical CO2 transition (which hitachi is already helping china with) https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/02/1103398/greenhou...

> Uses in magnesium, aluminium, and electronics manufacturing also hastened atmospheric growth.[10] The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005, is supposed to limit emissions of this gas. In a somewhat nebulous way it has been included as part of the carbon emission trading scheme. In some countries this has led to the defunction of entire industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride

I could go on about what the long term solution is but who wants to hear rants from a kiddo ;)

There's also a lot of replacing copper cabling with fiber due to copper cables being frequently stolen.

It was a surprise to me, moving from London to Brno in Czechia, to find that both mobile and fixed/home internet was both quicker and much cheaper in this former Communist country. The first house I lived didn't even have a POTS landline installed at all; they skipped that tech being rolled out.

It was a bigger surprise to me, moving to work for a German company in Prague a few years later and thus visiting Germany for work regularly, that German telecomms was much poorer: weaker mobile coverage, slower and much more expensive Internet, and relatively, very few public wifi hotspots.

(I am told that the latter is because of onerous legal restrictions on content that may be downloaded; businesses are liable for anything downloaded by customers on their premises. In comparison, in Czech law it's legal to download copyright material, it's sharing it that's illegal.)

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