[triyambakam]

> we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size.

What is it about Europe that makes it more difficult? That internet in Europe isn't as good? Actually, I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet. My grandson's elementary school in rural California (population <10k) had internet as far back as 1998.

[_kidlike]

Let's pretend you didn't write the last 2 sentences...

first of all "internet in Europe" makes close to zero sense to argue about. The article just uses it as a shortcut to not start listing countries.

I live in a country where I have 10Gbps full-duplex and I pay 50$ / month, in "Europe".

The issue is that some countries have telecom lobbies which are still milking their copper networks. Then the "competition committees" in most of these countries are actually working AGAINST the benefit of the public, because they don't allow 1 single company to start offering fiber, because that would be a competition advantage. So the whole system is kinda in a deadlock. In order to unblock, at least 2 telecoms have to agree to release fiber deals together. It has happened in some countries.

[0points]

What european countries still dont have fiber?

//Confused swede with 10G fiber all over the place. Writing from literally the countryside next to nowhere.

[zelphirkalt]

If you really need it pointed out, take it from a German neighbor: Telekom is running some extortion scheme or so here. Oh we could have gotten fiber to our house already ... if we paid them 800+ Euro! So we rather stick with our 100MBits or so connection that is not fiber but copper. If the German state does not intervene here, or the practices of ISPs and whoever has the power to build fiber changes, we will for the foreseeable future still be on copper.

Then there are villages, which were promised fiber connections, but somehow after switching to the fiber connection made them have unstable Internet and ofter no Internet. Saw some documentary about that, could be fixed by now.

Putting fiber into the ground also requires a whole lot of effort opening up roads and replacing what's there. Those costs they try to push to the consumers with their 800+ Euro extortion scheme.

But to be honest, I am also OK with my current connection. All I worry about is it being stable, no package loss, and no ping spikes. A consistently good connection stability is more important than throughout. Sadly, I cannot buy any of those guarantees from any ISP.

[0points]

FWIW, Sweden subsidized fiber digging but we still had to pay 2000 EUR to get it connected.

Government will pay the extra fees, which can easily end up close to 10000 EUR due to large distances.

If all you need to pay is 800 EUR, then I don't understand what is your issue? Just pay it.

[singron]

Is 800 euros that bad? In the US, we were quoted $10k a few years back. Even if fiber is already at the road, $800 is probably a fair price just to trench the line from the road to your home and install an entry point. If they provide free installation, then they have to make up the cost by raising your rates.

[zelphirkalt]

I think private households paying 800 Euro for what should be public infrastructure, being milked by ISPs is pretty bad.

[holowoodman]

Germany.

Deutsche Telekom is the former monopoly that was half-privatized around 1995 or something. The state still owns quite a large stake of it.

They milk their ancient copper crap for everything they can while keeping prices high.

They are refusing useful backbone interconnects to monopolize access to their customers (Actually they are not allowed to refuse. They just offer interconnections only in their data centers in the middle of nowhere, where you need to rent their (outrageously priced) rackspace and fibres because there is nothing else. They are refusing for decades to do anything useful at the big exchanges like DECIX).

And if there should ever be a small competitor that on their own tries to lay fibre somewhere, they quickly lay their own fibre into the open ditches (they are allowed to do that) and offer just enough rebates for their former copper customers to switch to their fibre that the competitor cannot recoup the invest and goes bankrupt. Since that dance is now known to everyone, even the announcement of Telekom laying their own fibres kills the competitors' projects there. So after a competitor's announcement of fibre rollout, Telekom does the same, project dead, no fibre rollout at all.

Oh, and since it is a partially-state-owned former monopoly/ministry, the state and competition authorities turn a blind eye to all that, when not actively promoting them...

Then there is the problem of "5G reception" vs. "5G reception with usable bandwidth". A lot of overbooking goes on, many cells don't have sufficient capacity allocated, so there are reports of 4G actually being faster in many places.

And also, yes, you can get 5G in a lot of actually populated areas. But you certainly will pay through the nose for that, usually you get a low-GB amount of traffic included, so maybe a tenth of the Microsoft monorepo in question. The rest is pay-10Eur-per-GB or something.

[ahartmetz]

It is almost as bad as you say, except that I recently noticed several instances of competitors offering cheaper fiber than Telekom and surviving. Still, overall fiber buildout is low, like... I looked it up, reportedly 36% now.

[immibis]

Wait, I live in that area. Does that mean I'm allowed to lay my own fiber into their open ditches too, or do they have special rights no one else has?

[holowoodman]

Afaik the special right is granted to everyone providing fibre services to the public to be informed about any ditches on public ground being dug and getting the opportunity to throw their fibre in before the ditch is closed again.

[SSLy]

Germany, GP's situation smells like their policies.

[ahoka]

I pay 42USD for 250Mbit in a larger Swedish city. What is that magic ISP I should be using?

[0points]

Change landlord. I used to pay about 100 SEK for bahnhof in svenska bostäder before I moved away. It came with public IP and everything.

[BenjiWiebe]

Sounds like you are already using a magic ISP (rural USA here).

[yashap]

They’re probably downloading from a server in the states, being much further away makes a big difference with a massive download.

[jonathancreamer]

This.

[nyanpasu64]

I've experienced interruptions mid-clone (with no apparent way to resume them) when trying to clone repos on unreliable connections, and perhaps a similar issue is happening with connections between continents.

[joshvm]

The only reliable route I’ve found is to use SSH clone. HTTPS is lousy and as you mention, is not resumable. Works fine in Antarctica even over our slower satellite. Doesn’t help if you actually drop, but you can clone to a remote and then rsync everything over time.

[p_l]

It's issues cloning super huge repo over crappy protocols across ocean especially when VPNs get included in the problem

[59nadir]

Most european countries have connections with more bandwith and less base latency for cheaper than the US, it's not a connection issue. If there was an issue it's that the repo itself is hosted on the other side of the world, but even so the sidenote itself is odd.

[tom_]

I wouldn't say it's odd at all - it's basically what's justifying actually trying to solve the problem rather than just going "huh... that's weird..." then putting it on the backlog due to it not being a showstopper.

This sort of thing has been a problem on every project I've worked on that's involved people in America. (I'm in the UK.) Throughput is inconsistent, latency is inconsistent, and long-running downloads aren't reliable. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but I always figured the problem was fairly obvious: it's a lot of miles from America to Europe, west coast America especially, and a lot of them are underwater, and your're sharing the conduit with everybody else in Europe. Many ways for packets to get lost (or get held up long enough to count), and frankly it's quite surprising more of them don't.

(Usual thing for Perforce is to leave it running overnight/weekend with a retry count of 1 million. I'm not sure what you'd do with Git, though? it seems to do the whole transfer as one big non-retryable lump. There must be something though.)

[gnrlst]

In most EU countries we have multi-gigabit internet (for cheap too). Current offers are around ~5 GBIT speeds for 20 bucks a month.

[jillesvangurp]

Sadly, I'm in Germany. Which is a third world country when it comes to decent connectivity. They are rolling out some fiber now in Berlin. Finally. But very slowly and not to my building any time soon. Most of the country is limited to DSL speeds. Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities. Germany has borders with nine countries. Each of those have better connectivity than Germany.

I'm from the Netherlands where over 90% of households now have fiber connections, for example. Here in Berlin it's very hard to get that. They are starting to roll it out in some areas but it's taking very long and each building has to then get connected, which is up to the building owners.

[aniviacat]

> Mobile coverage is getting better but still non existent outside of cities.

According to the Bundesnetzagentur over 90% [1] of Germany has 5G coverage (and almost all of the rest has 4G [2]).

[1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

[2] https://gigabitgrundbuch.bund.de/GIGA/DE/MobilfunkMonitoring...

[holowoodman]

Those statistics are a half-truth at best.

The "coverage" they are reporting is not by area but by population. So all the villages and fields that the train or autobahn goes by won't have 5G, because they are in the other 10% because of their very low population density.

And the reporting comes out of the mobile phone operators' reports and simulations (they don't have to do actual measurements). Since their license depends on meeting a coverage goal, massive over-reporting is rampant. The biggest provider (Deutsche Telekom) is also partially state-owned, so the regulators don't look as closely...

Edit: accidentially posted this in the wrong comment: Then there is the problem of "5G reception" vs. "5G reception with usable bandwidth". A lot of overbooking goes on, many cells don't have sufficient capacity allocated, so there are reports of 4G actually being faster in many places.

And also, yes, you can get 5G in a lot of actually populated areas. But you certainly will pay through the nose for that, usually you get a low-GB amount of traffic included, so maybe a tenth of the Microsoft monorepo in question. The rest is pay-10Eur-per-GB or something.

[jillesvangurp]

I usually lose connectivity on train journeys across Germany. I'm offline most of the way. Even the in train wifi gets quite bad in remote areas. Because they depend on the same shitty mobile networks. There's a stark difference as soon as you cross the borders with other countries. Suddenly stuff works again. Things stop timing out.

I also deal with commercial customers that have companies in areas with either no or poor mobile connectivity and since we sell mobile apps to them, we always need to double check they actually have a good connection. One of our customers is on the edge of a city with very spotty 4G at best. I recently recommended Star Link to another company that is operating in rural areas. They were asking about offline capabilities of our app. Because they deal with poor connectivity all the time. I made the point that you can get internet anywhere you want now for a fairly reasonable price.

[barrkel]

When I travel in Germany I use a Deutsche Telekom pay as you go SIM in a 5G hotspot, and generally get about 200Mbit throughtput, which is far higher than you can expect any place you're staying to provide. It's €7 a day (or €100 a month) but it's worth it to avoid the terrible internet.

[zelphirkalt]

Oh, that is an incentive for them not to improve anything. Wouldn't want customers to stop purchasing mobile Internet for 100 Euro a month.

[n_ary]

Well good for you. On my side of europe, I pay €50/- for a cheap 50Mbps(1 month cancellation notice period). I could get a slightly cheaper 100Mbps from a predator for €20/- for first 6 month but then it goes up to €50/- and they pull bs about not being able to cancel if you even move because your new location is also in their coverage area(over garbage copper) and suffers at least 20 outages per month while there are other providers with much cheaper rates and better service.

Some EU is still suffering from Telekom copper barons.

[badgersnake]

Not in the UK. Still on 80Mbit VDSL here.

[_joel]

You must be unlucky, according to Openreach "fibre broadband is already available in more than 96.59 per cent of the UK."

[mattlondon]

Is that "fibre" or "full fibre".

They lied a lot for a good few years saying "OMG fibre broadband!" When in reality is was still copper for the last mile so that "fibre" connection in reality was some ADSL variant and limited to 80/20mpbs.

Actual full fibre all the way from your home to the internet is I think still quite a way behind. Even in London (London! The capital city with high density) there are places where there are no full fibre options.

[Deathmax]

According to ThinkBroadband's tracking [1], the headline figures are 85.20% of premises are gigabit capable (FTTP/FTTH/Cable [DOCSIS]) with 71.86% being full fibre.

[1]: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10343-85-gigabit-coverag...

[_joel]

Maybe myself and my friends are lucky as we're all on ftth

[mattlondon]

Only a few I know are on ftth. I guess I live in a fairly affluent area in Zone 3 which is lower density than average - zero flats etc, all just individual houses so perhaps not worth their effort rolling out

[badgersnake]

Coming next year apparently. I won’t hold my breath.

[sirsinsalot]

I and many I know have Gb fiber in the UK

[RadiozRadioz]

At least here in Western Europe, in general the internet is great. Though coverage in rural areas varies by country.

[johnisgood]

Some countries in Europe (even Poland) definitely offer faster Internet and for cheaper than the US, and without most of the privacy issues that US ISPs have.

[mattlondon]

I was not sure what this meant either. I know personally I have downloaded and uploaded some very very large files transatlantic (e.g. syncing to cloud storage) with absolutely no issues, so not sure what they are talking about. I guess perhaps there are issues with git cloning such a large amount of data, but that is a problem with git and not the infrastructure.

FWIW every school I've seen (and I recently toured a bunch looking at them for my kids to start at) all had the internet and the kids were using iPads etc for various things.

Anecdotally my secondary school (11-18y in UK) in rural Hertfordshire was online in the 1995 region. It was via I think a 14.4 modem and there actually wasn't that much useful material for kids then to be honest. I remember looking at the "non-professional style" NASA website for instance (the current one is obviously quite fancy in comparison, but it used to be very rustic and at some obscure domain). CD-based encyclopedias we're all the rage instead around that time IIRC - Encarta et al.

[heisenbit]

Effective bandwidth can be influenced by roundtrip time. Fewer IP4 numbers means more NAT with more delay and yet another point where occasionally something can go wrong. Last but not least there are some areas in the EU like the Canary Islands where the internet feels like going over a sat.

[nemetroid]

The problem is probably that the repo is not hosted in Europe.

[o11c]

My knowledge is a bit outdated, but we used to say:

* in America, peering between ISPs is great, but the last-mile connection is terrible

* In Europe, the last-mile connection is great, but peering between the ISPs is terrible (ISPs are at war with each other). Often you could massively improve performance by renting a VPS in the correct city and routing your traffic manually.

[teo_zero]

> > we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size.

> I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet.

Maybe they lack internet but teach their pupils how to write "its".