The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't
1mon 8h ago by reddthat.com/u/lemmydividebyzero in technology from sschueller.github.io
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.
Some right libertarians actually believe the bullshit that free markets magically pop up out of the ground like weeds if you just don't regulate anything. This is obviously untrue. You need the right type of regulation to have a free market. Otherwise you end up with cartels and monopolies.
Those that operate the cartels and monopolies know this, but continue to feed the propaganda machine that spouts the opposite.
Libertarian police
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
The American dream!
Fantastic BTW.
Not that I am one, but I believe true libertarians should be rabidly pro anti-trust legislation, letting corporations fail, and a 100% inheritance tax above a threshold.
True libertarians are. Companies shouldn't get tax payer bailouts.
Exactly. Free Market is a term that’s poorly understood by both the left and the right.
It's so stupid in Germany. It was state-owned. Then, privatization and Telekom expanded into other nations. In Germany, it violates net-neutrality, and sends repeated lying, misleading, and pressuring door-to-door marketing. For a premium cost, you don't get a premium service. Worse, it's still so big that it affects infrastructure over the whole of Germany. Insane.
But some wealthy pockets with strong political connections got filled along the way during privatization and that's all they cared about.
What a terrific summary. Thank you
so capitalism good when done right - couldn't agree more
You don’t even need capitalism for a free market. It can be worker owned cooperatives competing.
The author misses a few key points about the American model:
First, in exchange for the local territorial monopoly, the providers are supposed to be heavily regulated by the local (or State) government, with controls in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly and promote the interests of its residents. Of course, we all know how business interests influence government to make business- friendly regulations. Governments have the ability to enforce more user-friendly practices, if they choose to do so.
But the more important point is that in the US, we hand out different monopolies based on the connection type. For instance, where I live we have one company that owns the twisted-pair POTS landlines, a different company that owns the coaxial cable TV service, and another company that owns the direct fiber to the home. Three companies, three connections to each home, all three (theoretically) capable of delivering the same services, since there is no longer any real differentiation between voice, video, and data service: it's all just bits.
We just got our FTTH provider only recently. Before that, our choices were only the cable company or the telco's astonishingly show DSL. So I subscribed to the Cable company, and their pricing model tried to force you into a bundle for the other services. Their speeds were also quite slow for broadband, until the Fiber company started digging. Then I got all sorts of emails saying "we're increasing your speed -- for free!" And sure enough, I was getting better bandwidth. But all that did was piss me off. These losers could have given me that better service all along, but didn't bother until they were forced to.
So I'm on the fiber now. But I know how it works, this service will be awesome at first, but once this company finishes building out they won't sign on any new capacity and it will gradually get shittier over time. It's the American Way!
(And I still pay the local telco way too much money for a POTS landline. What can I say, I'm an old.)
Thanks. I just woke up, and now I’m several different kinds of angry instead of just one kind of angry.
Why bother with coffee?
Would it help if you knew we paid providers billions of dollars in the 90s for fiber and they ran off with the profits, and we got nothing? So it took almost 2 decades after we paid them, to finally get gigabit speeds, on top of paying them again to do it for reals this time.
They didn't respond due to aneurysm
Especially no, mostly because I actually finally got fiber when I lived in New York City, but, due to a family emergency, I recently had to move to Florida, where… Well… Florida…
Have you considered porting your landline to a VoIP provider?
Yes, I have. But when I noted I was old, I should have added I am also lazy.
😂 Haha, well I can't help you there on account of my own!
Benefit of pots is it doesn't go out when the Internet does (unless your provider has a VOIP backend, but usually those would be more robust than your home.)
It also is a second source of electricity coming into the house should there be a power outage.
I kind of wish I could have an old school pots line, even though I run my own VOIP system.
All those benefits mattered a lot more before everyone had a phone in their pocket. A power outage that takes out cell towers is also likely to take out the Telco central office.
Yep. Infrastructure shouldn't be privately owned.
Note This article is written by me and spell checked with AI. Many of the images are generated by AI. They are mostly to explain certain points and break up the wall of text.
Well FUCK YOU!
Use your word processor to spell check, and buy stock photos taken by humans, which have probably been ripped off to train that AI.
Your disclaimer doesn't legitimize anything.
Yep I saw that it had AI slop and immediately closed the window.
Frankly idgaf what an AI user has to say.
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.
And then there's germany: I pay 43 Euros a month for only 100 MBit/s via cable. Nice to see how fckn far behind we are lol.
Pro tip: move to Schleswig-Holstein, where every village has fiber lol. 86% availability vs the german average of 12%
But do they also have reasonable prices? When Telekom finally put fiber at our street their offers were so stupid, that basically everybody kept cable.
For starters they limit upload for no reason. Then they capped at 1 GB and wanted like 130€ for that. At the time I had the very same on cable for only 45 € or such, so I basically told them "give me prices and speed like in Switzerland and you have a deal". The sales guy only asked me "why do you want that much upload?". Like, because there's no reason for you to limit it at all, only greed.
Lot's of places have local ISPs wth very reasonable pricing. Unfortunately the scamlords from Telekom also own some of the regions.
I don't think that's too bad, sounds like Germany has come a long way.
My 1Gbps would be around 50 in Denmark (if I didn't work for an isp lol)
1Gb/s symmetrical fibre 9eur/month here in Romania... And happy to say it's rock solid/advertised speed.
Alas, Digi's 10Gb/s product seems to be mostly vapourware (the installer asked if I wanted it - for an extra eur/month IIRC - but any mention has disappeared from the website.) That said, I said no anyway because the thought of upgrading all my equipment to actually do anything with it doesn't make me at all happy...
Our economy is a bit different, no offense, and that pricing seems fair to me :)
I can download whatever I need in <5 minutes and that's totally sufficient for me.
Of course; that's why PPP is the only sensible way to compare economies when you're discussing individual experience.
There are much more interesting reasons than "ugh, me big rich western man, proud overpay not europoor" why Romanian internet is cheaper than western though; after all, GDP PP PPP in Romania is 60% of Denmark or half of Switzerland (and only a shade off the EU average these days), but fibre internet is between one fifth and one eighth of the price apparently. Particularly surprising when you consider that Denmark must be the easiest country to wire up in the world (very small and geographically unremarkable.) I would think a curious mind would want to know why...
geographically unremarkable
True, but ouch
Don't sweat it to much. That's almost the same pricing and speed I have in Finland, but it's no fiber and there is just 1 internet service provider for the physical cable.
I pay that much for 500 Mbit on cable Internet. Sadly it has carrier grade NAT.
But here in merica cable internet providers have done everything they can to stop fiber from happening.
They do this through legal injunction. They don't play fair they have the courts stop compilation for them.
because America keeps giving money to broadband companies, who promise to improve internet speeds and access.. give the money to executives as bonuses, do shit all with speeds or access, and their reward is another dumptruck of money to expand access and speeds.. Which they 20 return to 10 and give it all out as executive bonuses again and do fuck all for the customer/citizens
oh, and when municipalities try to run their own broadband, they force them to shut down because its not fair for them to compete with the monopolistic internet companies. 🙄
I wish this was just in the USA but numerous countries in the EU handed out billions upon billions to private companies to roll out VDSL and then fibre connections (GPON) and the public owns none of what has been made despite paying for it all and the bonuses on top. Now the higher speeds are grossly more expensive than the old DSL lines used to be and they are turning those all off and getting to pocket the increased prices.
corporatism is a plague all over the world.
Lmao. I have 25 Mbps. Let alone 25 Gbps. Thanks Malcolm turnballs
I have fttp and it goes airtight but I pay for the best I can get and still only get 850mbs on a good day.
But 3 years ago I only got 18Mbps so my jump on speed is amazing
What does airtight mean in this context? I've only heard that term in a much different way...
Ah my bad, meant to be "Alright"
Probably slang.
In Breaking Bad one Tuco said "Tight, tight" while snorting the meth.
So I'll assume this is the next higher level of "tight".
Oh airtight is the next higher level of tight all right lol
Also curious because I understand airtight to mean something vastly different
Because America is a Banana Republic with nukes and wall street.
This isn't particularly unique. India, Pakistan, France, UK, Israel and Russia would match that description. Many of the listed countries are better at doing internet than the states.
And fweedum!
fweedumb*
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.
I live in a big city in the US and the best internet option I have is 1Gb through Verizon, and my apartment complex is making a deal with Comcast so that’s going to go away leaving only 100Mb. I have a homelab setup which is why I was willing to pay more for the 1Gb.
Man, all I want is square speeds. I'd be happier with 100Mbps square than I am with my current 400/40Mbps down/up, even if it was the same price. I'm a video creator and self-hoster, 40Mbps up is not enough.
Any fiber internet is generally symmetrical. I have yet to see any that isn’t
Oh wow not going to lie I'm kind of jealous. I'd pull the trigger on 10 gbps in a heartbeat. I'm in CA and crapcast offered me overpriced 1 gbps down & 40 mbps up. Yes, you read that right, 40 mbps up in 2026. Didn't have much of a choice so I bought it. I have my own homelab, download a lot of 4k linux isos, and completely saturate my both download & upload bandwidth around the clock
To make you even more jealous, the 100Mbps I pay for tests as that, both up and down. For $48/month, no billing shenanigans. I had 1Gbps for a bit and it was testing near gigabit ethernet's theoretical maximum, both up and down. Fiber to the rack is kind of awesome. Oh and when I call for tech support, I get somebody local. I've actually gotten one of the owners before. And they do a yearly Halloween party/customer appreciation day. Talking with one of the owners, it's like he practically expects that people are going to be downloading those 4k Linux isos.
You'd probably like what I had before - awful DSL. I was near the maximum limit for DSL. The technician said the line could do 15Mbps. I usually ended up around 12. And I was the lucky one. Some of my neighbors were like 1.5. So glad to dump Centurylink.
I would be happy to have any fiber at all. The only options here are satellite and DSL. The DSL is basically unusable and only available to existing customers. I'm pretty sure the ISP wants to make everyone cancel so they don't have to maintain the copper lines anymore.
They do. Copper lines are all converted to digital and fiber upstream, but the government says they have to maintain the copper for now because some people still rely on it.
Same here. I have 80-90 Mbps download with up to 20 Mbps upload max at best conditions. Still better than no internet.
Lol mine is 9M/1M and that's an improvement from the 500k/500k I use to pay CenturyLink $60/month for
That sucks, honestly.
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.
ISP name?
the ISP name is [redacted to maintain anonymity]
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.
Now we just need some decentralised stuff so that we can communicate directly with one and another.
Interesting!
Do you know where people discuss things like this? ( I have my own similar protocol.)
Unfortunately I don't. I've only seen a couple youtube videos covering it and other similar mesh networks (LoRa). I'm getting more and more tempted to buy some hardware and find out how it actually works though.
I sifted through the site and checked out the git repo but the only real information I found is that it's made by some Mark Qvist. The search goes on, I'm very curious about how they do the "DNS"/address propagation.
Lemmy is so volatile, I'd love some old forum where information like this piles up 😁.
On a side note, here's my shameless plug for my "P2P" sharing protocol Tenfingers if you would like to check it out ☺️.
Cries in German
So?
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, warum???? Warummmm????"
Kohl
I suppose there's a long German word that describes that feeling.
Yeah but the Swiss say it wrong.
Neuland
1Gbit for 40€ per month here in Germany, the US is much worse afaik.
For me 1 Gbit fiber is 70 €, only copper is cheaper with 45 €
I'm paying for fiber, copper here would be more expensive for less speed lol.
They put it in a few years ago in the whole neighnorhood.
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 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
Lol $1500 a month. JFC.
Right? I'd rather get 3x10gbit and bond them together.
Just for reference Init7 offers 25 Gbit/s for 65 CHF a month. Thats about 83 USD.
They have the same monthly price for 1 Gbit/s 10 Gbit/s and 25 Gbit/s. Only the initial install for the higher speed optics costs 77 CHF or 222 CHF more respectively.
I'm still on their 1Gbit/s service because I'm too lazy and cheap to replace my router and LAN with 10 Gbit/s equipment.
Most hardware does 2.5Gbps out of the box these days.
I've had 1Gbps for 13 years now (in Denmark) and can comfortably say: it's plenty
True most motherboards, even the normal ones, now come with 2.5G included. But upgrading to 2.5 G feels like a wasted middle step if the next tier of external connectivity is at 10G, so I've not done that either haha
Those are insane prices. I live in Brazil and I have gigabit internet for 32-ish dollars.
It costs me $120 for internet after discount for 2 gig Xfinity, and the upload isn't symmetric. America is a ripoff.
Are those converted to USD?
How much do you make in salary after taxes?
Because as far as I read everywhere about US and salaries, it's not that unusual for regular skilled jobs to achieve 6-figure yearly salaries.
it's not that unusual for regular skilled jobs to achieve 6-figure yearly salaries.
This is a... very messy and complicated area to talk about and there are plenty of stats and data setsyou can cherry pick to make things sound better than they are. Consider things like median vs average, whether or not you excluded retired folks, etc.
This graphic is a decent toe in the water:
That's daylight robbery, how is that one of the best in the world ?
Dang I pay $900 for 5gbit
$30/mo for 10 Gbit here in Japan. They just started offering 25 Gbit in parts of Tokyo this month for $200/mo
I really am hoping to leave the US in the next year or so, unfortunately Japan wasn't on my list but...maybe for that...
Your casually picking a country to move to based on internet speed is nuts lol.
Why do you want a 25 gbps speed if you're not running a data centre?
Nice. Used to live in chat. Miss epb internet.
Well you just have to make everyone rich first! Then when everyone's rich they can solve the problem all by themselves! (Jordan Peterson's argument for climate change.)
Google tried to break regional US monopolies with Google Fiber, which to my surprise is still going despite Google's best efforts to kill off projects that aren't immediately successful and is active in 19 US states or around 40 different cities.
The only way I can see this catastrophe ending is one of three ways:
- Satellite internet - Elon Musk would need to massively drop the price of Starlink to encourage others to switch, or a competitor would need to pop up and offer similar service at a lower price point, likely through Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
- The US collectively vote the Republicans out of office by a landslide and bring in a left-wing Democrat leader. Won't happen for so many reasons.
- Mesh networks. Something like Freifunk but on a much bigger scale.
Not only is Google Fiber still going, it actually has begun expanding service again after being stuck in limbo for a while.
It's a strange one, to be sure, but I guess they see a benefit to the infrastructure they built.
Google Fiber unfortunately got sold to a private equity company and merged with Astound.
Interesting. So ultimately Google is divesting itself of the responsibility and cost of the network.
Given that the pricing is already pretty high compared to what it used to be, I won't be surprised if it begins to creep up again in due time.
Fuck comcast. Fuck 2tb bandwidth limit unless you get their fuckass router. Fuck them.
Not that it absolves them of their bullshit, but you can set their router to bridge mode and use your own. It still removes the bandwidth limit.
It is a PITA to set up bridging though, thanks to their fuckery with the software. Fuck comcast
Because it’s more profitable to charge people without upgrading the infrastructure. That’s how privatized systems work. It used to be about building a better product to attract consumers, now it’s about squeezing consumers for the most profit and minimizing costs.
It's only more profitable if there isn't competition. He lays it out quite well in his blog post. It's not like the Swiss ISPs are all publicly owned.
Uh, most don't. But 1 Gb is common in cities, while the many villages have at least 100 Mb.
Yes but even then the advertised speed is much lower or variable dependent on local loads. Even in cities it's usually regional cartels and downtime and service issues are not taken seriously.
Also bit vs. Byte.
Western & south Europe (not exactly all countries) has fibre in like remote villages.
My inlaws live in a small village (pop. 60) just outside of a small town (pop. 2793) in central Portugal, and have a good fiber connection.
And ever since DIGI came into the portuguese market last year, I have had a 1 gigabit fiber connection at home and 2 cellphones with unlimited data plans for €20/month. And it's going down to €19 this month :)
Yay for fibre!
I can hardly imagine the last few decades without it.
Reading horror stories on the internet about downloading games for a day feels like reading about a starving village without roads.
Same with GSM data (we had GPRS, UMTS, etc about when they came out). Or the price of an SMS in late 90s/early 2000. Imagine not having unlimited SMS as a teen.
It's wild that rich, developed countries lacked basic infrastructure, and then they overpaid sooo much for it.
At 1Gbps, I think ours is one of the fastest in this part of Germany...
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.
You know I wanted to defend America and be like no way of course there is 25 gbit...
But there isn't. None. Not even in business offerings.
the photorealistic AI image model that they use looks scarily realistic
Init7 mentioned 💪
Look, I could have fibre... to my apartment. The problem is the underlying connection is copper, so there's no point. I live in Switzerland.
my goodness - I saw this pretty pretty long back.
thats just switzerland. I remember it was insane how great korean internet was in the aughts.
The only use for such speeds in the home is offloading all your data and computing to cloud services. Yay? Symmetrical gigabit is already about 5 times faster than I would ever need. Most people are too lazy to even run a LAN cable to get better than 150-300 mbps.
Yeah I honestly can’t think of why one needs more than 1 gigabit other than what you mentioned (or torrenting). Even 1 gig feels like overkill for us and I do much more internetting than the average person.
Or hosting your own services. 25 gbit/s is a lot of potential to scale up to a pretty decent sized web business before you need to get dedicated hosting.
I host video streaming for personal use and gigabit doesn’t even flinch.
How many people do you serve concurrently?
Probably 2 or 3 at most
Doubt. Also how much are you paying for it?
Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Honestly, fuck American ISPs, but what on earth would you need 25 gig fiber in your home for? We have a gig line that actually runs at a gig 99% of the time, and I can be downloading a steam game while 3 separate videos are being streamed and I won't have stuttering. 25 gig sounds cool, but also utterly pointless
It saves time. You cannot buy more time, only preserve what you have left.
000000
Also, depending on where AI goes, those gigs might become filled with activity. For example, every house having at least one AI server that works for the residents. That would decentralize the AI infrastructure and authority, which serves both the personal and national interests. Harder for a data center to be destroyed, when it doesn't exist in the first place. The people also get to decide to whom the spare time of the AI can be lent to, which helps diffuse the power of corporations and government.
Look, I hate these data centers, but the vast, vast majority of them won't be using residential lines. They'll be running their own lines in order to not have their traffic be tied up by slow downs during peak hours. And with how expensive and difficult it is to run a model that's worth the half a fuck the bullshit machines we have now are, an AI server running in every home is not only unlikely, but with how central these big companies want to keep everything, simply not happening. Hell, the vast majority of people who have been forced to use these chat bots in everyday work hate them. Plus, most people barely know how to install apps to their iPad let alone how to run a local server
Edit: also, you need specific computer equipment to run that fast. You can't just plug in your computer to an Ethernet line and get the full 25 gigs
I can run a 35b-3a AI model, on a single videocard, and have it translate a Japanese game within a day. A year ago, that would have required much more hardware, and would have taken longer. Your position is bad, because it doesn't acknowledge a developing reality, and more importantly, surrenders the future to jerks by default.
It's only around $100 for a pcie 25gb Ethernet card. Not particularly a huge hurdle.
Networking researcher here. Your bottleneck wouldn't be the NIC, but memory bandwidth, CPU compute (for TCP), PCIe bandwidth, and Storage bandwidth, also the bandwidth of the server you're connecting to. You'll also need some sort of fiber SFP connection for your entire house, and those have firmware that usually makes them vendor locked. Most networking issues are also latency related, so increasing your throughput to 25Gbps wouldn't help.
So yeah, not a good time for home use.
I'm pretty sure that nic cards for those speeds would really need more hardware offloading and dma to stand a chance of those speeds. With those it should be possible. With the right hardware handling there shouldn't be a problem, ssds connected to pci manage a lot more.
In real terms, right now who needs it aside from to post speed test results?
I have gigabit symmetric and can upgrade to 2.5. But, I cannot imagine we'd need 2.5 let alone 10 or 25. And I'm a fairly heavy user.
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All NICs already work off of DMA to access/copy packets into/from memory. Yes, even your $10 ones. So "would need DMA to stand a chance" doesn't have any technical meaning other than putting a bunch of words together.
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The bottleneck for TCP is sequence number processing, which must be done on a single core (for each flow) and cannot be parallelized. You also cannot offload sequence number processing without making major sacrifices that result in corrupted data in several edge cases (see TCP chimney offload, which cannot handle the required TCP extensions needed to run TCP at 1Gbps). So no, "more offloading" is easy to say but not feasible.
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Who needs it: data centers trying to scale legacy software, or dealing with multi region data replication (rocev2 is terrible for long distance links). But no, no home user would need it
Well I was thinking more home users since this was what the post was about. Pretty sure data centres have solutions for this already with price tags that would make us cry.
At home I can see only edge cases where even going to 2.5 would be useful for us here anyway. Let alone more.
Now I'm sure as time passes demands will continue to increase and we'll need more speed. But for now running 2.5/10 internally and 1gbit to the Internet is more than enough.
Home e-business and you run your own servers. Or cohousing, one building where multiple families live under one address.
A bluray remux of a whole series can run in the hundreds or thousands of gigabytes. I want to be able to download and watch it the same day I decide to do so.
Blueray bitrate is lower than even 1gbps so even full remux is downloadable at a speed you could begin to watch it the same day while later episodes continue to download. You wouldn't need the full series downloaded up front.
This is true, but then I am running my FTP software all day downloading from my seedbox and having to deal with queueing episodes so it's still just not as ergonomic as downloading and being done with it
The us internet situation sucks but the author has a complete misunderstanding why. I dont k ow if they are very young or no from the united states but there is big misunderstanding of whats wrong. Its all bad but you need to go back to wwii. You need to talk about the nsa. You need to talk about 9/11.
Also we have fiber, its not shared and they rip up all the roads they want. They are a local company, locally owned.
ITT: Europeans don't understand population density and actually believe they have villages that can be described as "remote".
OK, now explain why you can't find a decent ISP in a major American city. (That's right, it's because of monopolies and enshittification.)
That seems like a large generalization - my friends apt. in a major city has 100 gbps, my house in bumfuck has 1 gig fiber, my neighbor has 5mbps DSL. It's pretty variable and enshittificiation is for sure an issue, but you can still absolutely find good ISPs in major american cities. It's not that dire.
"In the US, 100 years is a long time. In the EU, 100 miles is a long distance."
Old joke, but it really does highlight the largest fundamental cultural difference. Things like trying to explain how grudges that were formed in the 19th century and are indeed still the driving force behind political trends, or how accusing me of political indifference because I'm not in DC protesting is like accusing someone in portugal of not caring about world politics because they didn't drive to eastern Ukraine for a protest...
25 Gbit Internet
Sounds like they overspent massively on infrastructure. This is a waste of taxpayer money. You have to run some top tier industrial service from your home to utilize even 10% of that. There's literally no use case for avg Joe.
Here's how this works in poland: Infrastructure is private, but law mandates that telecoms share with each other. The result is extremely competitive industry that delivers cheap internet over entire state. I'm running 600Mb down/30Mb up at equivalent of $20 a month, 23% VAT included.
It's possible to get 1Gb+ but at that point most common networking hardware and cables are becoming bottleneck.
I know literally noone who needs more than 1Gb symmetric connection.
Market delivers what's mostly in demand, and it isn't 25Gb That needs extreme infrastructure on both sides, provider and user
I can’t imagine when privatised infrastructure is ever a good idea?
Yeah, I have 1Gb fiber but all of my equipment is old and none of it can even utilize the entire Gb. I only keep it because I got a deal on it when they first ran fiber, had issues with someone severing the fiber to my house (like 12 times when "gardening"), and now I'm grandfathered-in to a cheaper price... so I keep it for whenever I do upgrade something. Which should be soon, if I ever get back to setting up my home server
It's not necessarily a waste of tax payer money for a country as small as Switzerland. Switzerland is about twice as large as New Jersey, the 4th smallest US state. It makes sense for them to provide high bandwidth to everyone since their banks and data centers are in the same physical area as their living districts.
I think the size thing is the answer to the question. I'm from Jersey so I googled and yeah, two NJ is one Switzerland, so perhaps that's why America does not have ubiquitous 25Gbit internet, because it is 237 times larger.
And piggybacking of precious comments, completely unnecessary amount of bandwidth. I am fortune, being from Jersey, that as my needs have grown, the service I get has seemingly grown to accommodate my use. I remember using cable back when it came out, and it would bog down hard between 5-7pm, when people got home and used surfed the information highway. Now, I have 300/300 I think, I pay $24.99 a month, I do stuff that utilizes bandwidth, and I never, ever have any issues. I know this isn't everyone's experience, but it certainly exists for plenty of folks. Ubiquitous distribution is probably unlikely, especially considering how much of middle America lives (and I mean rural, not like animals).
is it because Switzerland is like 2% the size of America with like 4000% the GDP because of all the banks with illegal funds there?
Or because the US, the richest country ever to exist, is squandering its wealth on weapons and kleptocracy instead of improving its citizens' lives even a tiny amount?
Por qué no los dos?
top 10 richest countries on the world adjusted per capita.
notice something missing from that list?
oh wait...look who is on the list?
In Ireland I have 5Gb fibre to the home in the small rural town I live in.
And its only about €40 a month.
Is per capita appropriate in this context?
very much so. poor people don't buy things that aren't necessary like internet access.
edit: just to clarify, poor people don't have the expendable income to pay for both home Internet AND a mobile phone.
The poor parts of Eastern Europe like Romania are awash in cheap, fast internet though
you mean the parts that are a part of the EU that directly benefit from support from some of the richest countries in the world?
The EU is still poorer than the US
help me out, the American education system sucks and I can't tell which of these countries are in the EU.
Its probably because they spend billoons on killing young girls and destroying civilian infrastructure instead of investing in their own.
Switzerland is fucking tiny.
That's why.
No that isn’t why.
There is no correlation between population density and broadband speed in the west.
Not relevant to the point but that is a terribly color coded graph, there are multiple indistinguishable pairs
Edit: worse than that, how do you tell New Zealand, Germany, and the Netherlands apart? Norway, Spain, Iceland?
Also throw Switzerland onto this plot and suddenly there’s a massive correlation
I’ll talk to my researcher.
Tbh looking at it now it's not quite as bad as it initially looked, iirc I had like just woken up or smthn lol
But still
Netherlands has highest population density and New Zealand the lowest of those three.
No, read the article
I'm not engaging with someone who wishes other people cancer for correcting them
Me neither... Maybe, the person is drunk... I dunno. Blocked and reported that... Not what we need on Lemmy or anywhere else...
Well, Austria is right next to it. It's tiny, too. So why is it not as good?
Oh, I dunno. 🫨 Why don't you tell me why what applies to a subset doesn't necessarily apply to the superset.
I love how that's always the cop out for any advancement.
How exactly are facts and maths cop outs?
There are states with better fiber deployment than Switzerland.
But generally, think of it as highway design. That's the American way, after all, and it also stinks.
Switzerland: mostly point-to-point where each home gets its own dedicated fiber strand. Upgrading to 25 Gbps can be as simple as swapping optics(multi spectrum) on each end. Some places in USA do this. Some offer 100 gbps, symmetrical.
United States: mostly point-to-multipoint (PON: GPON/XGS-PON) One fiber is split among 32–64 homes. Everyone shares the bandwidth.
And they say Americans don't have socialism. But that's the problem. When there's socialism it's the public subsidizing corporations.
With many mountains and streets, scattered settlements.
That affects latency and throughput how?
Not much.
China has a bigger landmass than the US and China's internet is insanely fast. Just like the 5GA. The US is like dialup compared to China. Especially now only Netgear is allowed in the US compared to the innovate technology from the likes of Huawei.
This is apparently a different China than the one I've worked in for the last decade.
You may have a theoretically fast connection - but even then it's not particularly cheap (I pay less in Romania and Thailand for FTTH,) and the actual qualify of Internet bandwidth is beyond atrocious for any non domestic traffic (i.e. anything crossing the great firewall.)
Which is not to be negative about China, it's got a hell of a lot going for it - I'd live in China before I'd live anywhere in the US - but great Internet is not one of those things.
Maybe you live in a 4rd level city, but here in Shanghai, the speed is fenomal. I download a 4k atmos movie in mere seconds. And outside because most of the city is covered by 5GA, it's crazy fast. Whenever I go back to Europe, I struggle with both the fixed line speed and whatever they claim is 5G.
New Tier 1 actually; Shanghai is very much China for amateurs, of course - but that's irrelevant; you might not realise this but the vast majority of Chinese also don't live in Shanghai.
Lol... Ok...
China has been able to leverage new roll outs while US deals with cost sunk fantasies.
By that logic Tuvalu's internet must be amazing.
If I did that I still wouldnt be as butthurt as you.
That's absolutely logic, certainly.
By which logic do you mean? My guess. You don't know.
Oh, that's where you go dark.
Whatever you say bud.
Enjoy the dial up.