> Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.

Sort of?

If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.

Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.

Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs.

Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently.

Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.

Edge cases are hard is not a bad rule of thumb.

High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.

Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.

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I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.

> I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit.

I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.

You don’t really need it but it is nice when downloads are really fast. Though most services cap downloads at 2 - 3 Gbit/s.

If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.

Just dealt with this. I'm square in suburb America. AT&T in my community can't run lines into established neighborhoods because they can't use existing conduits. They have to dig their own, but local regulations make it difficult and a lengthy process. Easier for companies to just give up and move on. Who's fault does your smell test point to?

I just commented this elsewhere. It does exist and is where the good internet is. Good internet being a few g, but still better than i've had downtown or rurally

Nah it's BS. It's American-flavored capitalism that's the issue, and it's crushing the free-market.

I live in SF - the densest US city on the west coast, and the densest US city after NYC. We have city-owned "dark fiber" run through (most?) every street. Any ISP can offer service by renting the connection to my house, as long as they service "the last hundred feet" from pole to door and the billing.

I have about half-dozen ISPs that will give me from 1G-5G of service, all under $100/mo - (a great price in America). I pay for redundant >1g fiber connections to my house for less than the price of my parent's 50 mbps bill.

The issue is capitalism. In much of the US, the ISPs have lobbied and enforced "monopolies" by exclusive fiat of the jurisdiction, in some shape or form. 16 US states have laws that prevent the local government from maintaining or providing internet infrastructure like fiber lines, requiring private companies to maintain it all. Any free-market enthusiast will readily tell you that competition brings prices down, but capitalism is crushing the free-market, reducing competition for the benefit of the wealthy.

I've lived dense city to rural in the US, and it's suburbia that has the best internet. Can rip up the street for days no problem, but still a relatively dense population.

Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.

In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.

It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.