[ErrantX]

Just for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical.

Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.

(We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )

[martinald]

Not true re Openreach monopoly - openreach ftth is approx 51% premises covered, altnets cover 40% of the country (https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/uk), so not much in it at the moment.

On top of that, Virgin Media is upgrading their existing 18m home DOCSIS network to FTTH plus their nexfibre build will take them to probably 25m+ homes.

So by the end of the decade the average UK household is going to have access to at least 3 separate FTTH networks.

Only OR FTTH is not symmetrical btw. Everyone else offers symmetrical and YouFibre offers 8/8gig.

[ErrantX]

Fair but apart from Virgin, many of those Altnets rely on (and pay for) OR ducts & poles.

Am surprised to see Gb coverage that low!

Edit: that link is super interesting but I think they need to break it down a bit more. E.g. CityFibre, YouFibre and LightSpeed all seem to be counted under Altnets but all are very different setups.

[kalleboo]

Another global comparison point - in Japan, 1 Gbps fiber is available pretty much nationwide (I just checked the address of my in-laws' rural ancestral home in the middle of the rice fields)

10 Gbps is available in increasingly smaller cities (e.g. it was recently made available in a city of 100,000 near me).

Both priced at about $30/mo

[jonathantf2]

Even if OR roll out symmetrical I doubt that many retail ISPs will sell it because that's one of the main selling points for Ethernet/"leased line" circuits for businesses

[znkynz]

Fibre in NZ - 1Gbps $55USD 2Gbps $74USD 4Gbps $82USD

[zipy124]

I can't even get it in zone 2 in London :(

[rsynnott]

This seems to be A Thing; city centers get bad internet. In Dublin if you look at coverage maps, the whole central area is an island of VDSL and DOCSIS in a sea of FTTH.

Not totally sure why.

[astrange]

It probably needs you to tear up the street and that's hard to get approved.

(And while all Anglo countries are NIMBY, Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s.)

[rsynnott]

> which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s

I'm not sure that that's correct; modern planning permission as a concept was only really introduced around 1970, at which point the population was 3 million. The population is now 5.2 million. Ireland's depopulation was down to, initially, the famine, followed by almost constant economic crisis from the 19th century to the 1990s. We tend to emigrate very enthusiastically (this is particularly visible in the 1980s, when population actually _dropped_ for much of the decade).

(I do think that clearly with more sensible planning the population would now be somewhat higher, but you're probably talking an extra couple of hundred thousand.)

Interestingly, though, expectations about population did contribute to our current housing and infrastructure crisis. Around 2010, a lot of long-range planning was done on the basis that the population would reach something like 4.8 million by 2040; of course, this turned out to be wildly incorrect.

The estimate seems to have been based on the theory that, after the financial crisis, Ireland would go back to our historical pattern of decades-long recessions and mass emigration, now that that has failed to happen, well, all that planning is dramatically wrong. Ireland now completes more housing units per capita per year than any other OECD country, and it's still not enough. There's a massive housing deficit, the railways are over capacity with no relief until at least 2026, electricity and water infrastructure are under tremendous pressure, and so on. All of this is essentially a consequence of assumptions made 15 years ago that we'd just go back to mass emigration, and thus it was reasonable to have a decade where ~nothing got built.

[inejge]

Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s

Uh, are you sure that you haven't disregarded the Great Libertarian Sociological Experiment of 1847 in your reasoning?

[defrost]

  “[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.”

  “The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.”

~ Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1847 (Knighted, 1848, for overseeing famine relief)

https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=526

[rsynnott]

I mean, I suppose when you make a really _catastrophic_ fuckup at work, saying "God did it" is... an option?

[astrange]

That was a long time ago. Also, it only recently recovered to the level from 1851.

[ErrantX]

Ah the one upside to rural Lincolnshire I guess?!