Im very into the idea of the state competing to create accessible affordable baselines, and letting everyone else compete openly in trying to make money.

If government wants to do that by contacting out a bunch of the effort, ok!

Government trying to insure good baselines, not just regulatorily, but actually doing the work & owning the system (again even if contacted) feels like it's ever more necessary step to keep a healthy society.

India's Unified Payment Gateway (UPI) is also created and managed by government. Private players are free to use the service and build products around it. It worked really well. Though I am more inclined to give more credit to people who built and maintaining it rather than to some model. Like ISRO and Delhi Metro, its a miracle since India's stultifying beurocracy has a well deserved reputation.

> India's Unified Payment Gateway (UPI) is also created and managed by government

No it isn't. NPCI is owned by a consortium of banks.

The question is, where does the government get the capital? If it's from taxpayers, their service has an asymmetric advantage and can drive out private competitors even if it's poorly managed, which is highly inefficient and results in a de facto government monopoly.

But it could work pretty well if it's funded by bonds it has to pay back out of subscription fees and a default causes everyone involved to be fired.

Your first thought is completely right.

Your second thought sounds like a good idea. Let's have another competitor (government) funded by private entities via debt equity (bonds) which is paid back by customer receipts (profits) where failure equals unemployment. Actually, this is starting to sound like a business, but with more steps and the power to pass laws affecting its own operating environment. What's the advantage to having the government be the competitor?

> What's the advantage to having the government be the competitor?

Voters choose management instead of shareholders. Maybe they'd make different choices. Diversity is good.

It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.

Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.

If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.

> It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.

They're two independent things. If a different management style would produce a public benefit then do it without access to the taxing power. If using tax money to subsidize some service is in the public interest (spoiler alert: it rarely is) then the subsidy should go to anyone providing that service.

> Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.

Which is the problem -- because then they're no longer competing, and it's the competition on equal terms that keeps them honest. If they're actually helping people then people should have no trouble voluntarily choosing their unsubsidized offering. Without that they're just an unregulated monopoly susceptible to inefficiency and corruption.

> If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.

Charters where funding only goes to the politically connected are effectively corruption, and whoever is getting fat off the cash will exert their influence to make sure no one capable of doing it more efficiently can get access to the funding. Charters where funding goes to anyone who signs up to provide the service are effectively tax credits.

It seems like new zealand has slower internet speeds than the US, though. It ranks 19th versus 8th for the US.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed

Other rankings seem to more or less agree on that too.

Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth.

Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.

I don't disagree with your point! But it seems like the same pattern is true for average speeds too (sort by average):

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

It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps.

Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.

Median, mean and mode are all going to be pretty misleading if you're trying to work out if people outside of densely populated areas can get decent speeds.

You probably need to measure lower percentiles to get an idea of how bad it can get.

Why is it meaningless to look at the most common deployment?

The numbers got high enough the differences don’t really matter much.

Suppose you were looking at countries median car top speed. Fining one countries median is 150 MPH vs 156 just don’t tell you much when you can’t drive that speed on public roads. Or in internet terms Netflix etc isn’t sending 8k stream let alone multiple 8k streams.

On the other hand many internet connections can’t handle a single 4k or even 1080p so percentage of connections over X threshold is more impactful.

Now if people where measuring say the median miles per gallon or in internet terms say latency or bandwidth caps then the median actually matters more.

Netflix often uses local caches hosted by large ISPs, making it even more difficult to talk about Internet "speed".

I think that's a bad metric because it does not measure the actually speed of the network i.e I could get 2000 down but I only pay for 50.

Yeah - to get a decent idea you'd need to measure $/mbps as well as measuring average speed. And measure best available rather than what people have opted for personally.

E.g.

* Country/ISP A has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $50/month.

* Country/ISP B has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $90/month.

In country A a lot more people are going to opt for 1 gigabit - it's way cheaper and still good enough - therefore their average speed stat is going to be lower even though the actual options are strictly better than in country B.

Not everyone signs up to the highest speed tiers, but generally speaking 90% of the country has access to 1 gigabit fibre and some areas also have 4 or 8 gigabit fibre infrastructure.

You would not know if when you visit there. I stayed a month there and travelled all over. Internet was trash everywhere I went. I visited places that had time limits and data caps under 1gb. Even staying in AirBnBs that share internet with the owners, almost nobody had a good connection. I had one good place in an apartment in the core of Wellington where the internet was fine.