Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.
Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2
You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!"
People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.
If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live).
Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.
Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.
I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually.
Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.
At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.
I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.
What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.
What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?
EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.
Stokab is a municipal and non-profit carrier and almost all cities have one of those, competing with the private carriers. The municipal often requires 70% + coverage, witch is very hard to get in a small non tech village with old people. Stokab is a bit different because they have about 1.5 million people living in their area witch is dense compared to the rest of Sweden.
The private carriers don't even bother if they can't get a few hundred subscribers in the area. So if you live in a small village, but not small enough to get a government grant it can be though.
When you start digging up the streets you must allow competitors to also join, so when one carrier has decided to start digging, you often get offers from other Carriers too, with a slightly lower price. So there's usually many carriers in the same area.
There's probably a reasonable market doing this at $10-20k/house. There's clearly a market for multi-family dwellings like condos/apartment buildings (webpass, condointernet, etc. have shown), but maybe the next step will be neighborhoods pre-wired with fiber to some kind of switchbox with your choice of carrier coming in.
Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.
Not it does not, that is the "Tri-State" area. I have never heard anyone use the term "NYC Urban area." What you are saying makes it sounds as if those places are suburbs of New York City and none of them are. New York City is 5 boroughs.
Also I think you are confusing Manhattan and New York City. Half the daily population of Manhattan are commuters:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearl...
The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.
There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.
Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.
Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.
By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.
Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with?
> You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.
Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110...
Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also covering much of the road network.
Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.
There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.
That's a fair point.
> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.
While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).
Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.
> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level
This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.
These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.
The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.
Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizo...
"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."
Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.
There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.
You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree.
Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people.
So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.
I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale.
If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true.
Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.
First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions.
Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo.
It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.
Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?
While it's hard to hear much about policy plans over the personal, historical, and character attacks this cycle, yes, I've heard Clinton promoting her "broadband for all" plan, as well as seen some criticism of and debate about it in the press, etc.
Here's an article from earlier this month: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/hillary-clinton-v...
Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.
Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.
Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.
...depending on your provider. try driving around in the sticks of Maryland just 20 minutes outside Baltimore, good luck getting EDGE on tmo!
Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.
This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.
Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.
But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.
As an absurd example, you can serve 40% of the population of Alaska by establishing service in Anchorage, which is roughly 0.1% of Alaska by area.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...
But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task?
The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.
This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.
I live on the east coast, and was irked to watch neighbors complain about bad cell service and about a new cell tower going up in the same breath.
Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.
The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.
Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access.
It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.
I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds.
The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance).
Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military.
Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces.
The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles.
Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.
The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.
The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.
The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays.
If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.
Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).
So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.
We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.