Slashdot Mirror
Why America Won't Match Sweden's Cheap, Fast, Competitive Internet Services
ashshy writes: Swedish Internet services run both cheaper and faster than American ones. For example, many Swedes can pay about $40 a month for 100/100 mbps, choosing between more than a dozen competing providers. It's all powered by a nationwide web of municipal networks in direct competition with ex-government telecom Telia's fiber backbone. The presence of regional government in the Swedish data stream makes many Americans uncomfortable, to say nothing of the very different histories between these backbone buildouts. The Motley Fool explains how the Swedish model developed, and why the U.S. is unlikely ever to follow suit.
TFA asks the following question in the headline...
How Come My ISP Won't Increase Internet Speed and Lower My Bill, Like They Do in Sweden?
then asks later....
So why isn't America following the municipal path to high-speed bliss? ... it's complicated
is it?
is ***profit*** for Verizon & other teleco's really that complicated?
they don't lower our rates or give us better service b/c they have a *monopoly* and no competition or incentive to give us anything other than the bare minimum ammount of service that we will tolerate!
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's time to make peer-to-peer mesh networking a viable technology.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Profit is king in the US. Providing for your citizens is king in Sweden. Apparently those are unrelated concepts.
Here in SoCal I use Sonic.net as my ISP and get 20/1 mbps + unlimited phone service for $40/month. That's about as good as you can get, if you want a real ISP and not some crap like Comcast, Time-Warner or AT&T.
I'm guessing "anything which would ever smell like socialism and not guarantee the profits of huge corporations simply will not fly".
Sweden made a choice which will benefit all citizens, and uplift them.
There would be political opposition to anything like that, and some will truly believe not having a corporation making obscene profits and being entrenched monopolies would be immoral.
My guess is, the same people who oppose socialized medicine, would disagree on the same premise. Because they somehow feel society is best left to rot as long as they've got their pile of money.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We also have 40x larger GDP, so whose pocket is all of that money going into?
It's already been a decade that I've had fiber to my door here in Romania for about $15/month. Recently the ISP started offering gigabit for only two or three dollars more. And it's really reliable high-speed too: no throttling, even when I torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month of films. Show Americans how it works in Northern Europe and they might chalk it all down to the unusual social harmony there. That even villages in a corrupt Eastern Europe country have better and cheaper internet does more to underscore a deep problem with US broadband.
Most Americans would love to see government with municipal broadband. It would save them money despite typical government waste simply because of how much the incumbent ISPs are gouging with their ridiculous pricing structure. We can't have it because politicians are controlled through lobbying to eliminate new forms of competition and it flies in the face of populist "small government" ideology.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Motley Fool.
I've read their "analyses" on things I actually know about. You might as well get your advice from Yahoo answers.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The population density of Sweden is lower than that of the United States. Of course this is actually a fairly small consideration overall, but I'm only pointing it out due to the inevitable posts saying that the population density of the United States is to blame.
The building I live in in Stockholm has a deal with the ISP Bredbandsbolaget where everyone (ca 200 apartments) pays 15 USD/mo for 100/100. For an additional 10 USD/mo they upgraded my connection to 250/100. My summerhouse in the middle of nowhere has a 100/100 via fiber for about 30 USD/mo.
Sometimes socialist Sweden is nice =)
Everyone talks about download speed but the goal of internet connection shouldn't be how many 4K movies can you stream at a time. For a true Internet, one not dominated by a handful of big name services, we need upload speeds to be close if not symmetric with download. Unfortunately upload speeds are abysmal for even most high-speed lines.
> We're 20x the size of them
That's a lazy excuse rolled out by people who don't want shit done. If "we're 20x the size of them" were really an impediment, people in Montana still wouldn't have phone or electrical service.
The US also rolled out internet services earlier than many other countries, so it has a older infrastructure to 'rebuild'. It not the central issue, but a factor. If we were to start from scratch today, it would be a lot better.
While politics and profit, lack of competition all are major factors in our crappy broadband options, we have to keep in mind that the US is vastly greater, and far more spread out then many countries we are being compared against. The cost to wire up rural areas, hell even some of teh suburbs of major metro areas is significantly more that it is to wire up more densely populated areas. These are businesses after all, they are out to make a profit, and honestly, I do not have an issue with that. What I do have an issue with is companies lobbying for anti competitive laws that prevent local governments from doing what the for profit companies won't do. Trying to wring every last cent out of us. They make billions, yet refuse to upgrade because that will eat into their profits, and the lack of competition between what is essentially a duopoly. And while there is no concrete proof (ie written documentation), it appears that collusion between those duopolies is the name of the game, prices never come down, only go up. Then there are the un fees, below the line fees made to look like regulatory and gov fees, but really are just a way of jacking up the price, without actually having to hike the base price. Almost 30% of my bill is just fees. I could go on, but you can go peruse dslreports/broadbandreports if you really want to know more.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Define "it". The Internet service may be better, but that's because it is subsidized by Sweden's considerable taxes.
Which means, the costs are (much?) higher than the bill says — and TFA cites — the difference is paid to the tax-authorities instead of going directly to the service-provider.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
To start with, I have no idea what the answer to this question is with regards to the Swedish system, but I've found that in many cases of solutions like this the "cost" paid by end users is heavily subsidized in other areas (in the US it's so common it can almost be assumed). So if the $40 / month pays for all of the capital costs, maintenance, depreciation, etc. then wonderful. Otherwise it's just accounting slight-of-hand - put a happy number out for the public, and if somebody digs and puts together real costs then they find that the real number is horrific.
On the other hand, in the US most major metropolitan areas (there are exceptions) have sold monopoly or duopoly franchises on internet service, which also distorts prices horribly and in other directions. I live in one of these areas, as do most of the people I know (I get to chose between mostly tolerable but pricey Cox, and utterly abhorrent AT&T - for practical purposes just one choice). In many cases these "utilities" are limited to certain profit levels, so they just adjust their costs up. Competition isn't magic; it just incentivizes aggressive pursuit of the best cost / quality tradeoffs (which are usually subjective and may vary significantly between individuals, eliminating the possibility of a good "one-size-fits-all" solution).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
If profit is king, you would see more companies seeking that profit. Where there is an abnormal amount of profit, that is a signal to the market that there is ample reason to enter that market to get a share of that profit. As such, service improves and price decreases... as is noted by Sweden having 10+ service providers.
So ask yourself... why do we NOT have competition? It's not because of greed and profit... it's because of government restrictions.
Just because two systems are structured differently doesn't mean they both can't be efficient. The world is full of many different ways of doing things. And many of them are competitive with each other.
The primary problem in the US is regional monopolies. They don't expand because they have no competition. And they don't lower prices because they have no competition.
So in OUR system the solution would be to increase competition by removing artificial barriers to new competitors which should drive down prices and improve services.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
arguing about definitions is a red herring...aka trolling...
TFA talks explicitly about how teleco's compete on the Fiber backbone
it is in no way the same as a "government monopoly" like AT&T had here in the US
Thank you Dave Raggett
There is also a hell of a lot more involved.
yes...for a laymen i understand it would seem that way, but for anyone who has been trained in IT or network engineering or telecommunication engineering would see this as just another day at work
are you saying that teleco's litterally do not know how to make a nation-wide network? b/c that's insane...it's workaday t-com engineering
it's not about lack of knowledge or money...it's about Verizon & Co wanting to keep their gravy train running at our expense
Thank you Dave Raggett
Apparently Motley Fool is a Stock Pumping organization, and here I though they were just some folks that showed up on NPR once a week
OK, let's watch the video. Turn off the sound; it's a powerpoint anyhow...
Oh my fsm it's still going on will you get to the fscking point! Geez, I give up. Google for it. It's Sierra Wireless (SWIR).
Apparently they make those little yellow balls-on-a-stick that Howard Tayler puts on all the smart devices over at schlockmercenary.com
Oh, and when I try to leave the page, a script asks me "do you really want to...".
Holy crap this reeks of scam. Never again click on motleyfool.com
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
http://www.economist.com/news/...
not the original poster but since you asked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
Sweden 8.02
United States 7.38
Boy, that was hard...
We also have 40x larger GDP, so whose pocket is all of that money going into?
If you live here and have a job, It partly goes to you.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Now, what's left is to determine, that the 7.38 vs. 8.02 difference is thanks to, rather than despite of their taxes being higher — rather than, say, those demography, social and cultural characteristics. They do "celebrate diversity" there too nowadays, but the bulk of the population remains of "original" stock.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
the citation would cost you a flight to Stockholm!
1. topology and infrastructure across sweden and 6 million swedes vs 350 million americans and many times the sq mileage.
2. The swedish government subsidizes a lot of it. I prefer to not pay for what I'm not using and keep the state out of my internet (too bad we're far from that goal). If you include the tax money paid into the subsidy it doesn't look so cheap anymore. Fuck high taxes.
The summary almost reads like a "see? your society should be more like swedens" shaming session. The swedes can keep their high income and vat taxes.
Sweden is about the size of Texas. Multiply their rates by 50, nifty, united states, and get a real number. Hey look, a country 1/50th the size of the US can be way more competitive with infrastructure changes, news at 11.
Lower crime rates, mandatory health insurance, larger middle class.
Government owned utilities using tax dollars to massively build out last-mile solutions do not have a "..Fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value."
The Swedish internet model used taxpayer money to build out a massive national network providing excellent last-mile broadband, which all private competitors are now entitled to ride over.
I remember the first time I visited Gothenburg in 2001, and people had full Video On Demand, digital cable and bundled services. Thirteen years ago.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
that like to scapegoat all of their problems on minorities and foreigners too.
We're 20x the size of them, have a completely different political setup and most people won't think to compare one arbitrary country to another?
Sweden is a unitary state, population 9.7 million, divided into twenty-one counties. Each county further divides into a number of municipalities or kommuner, with a total of 290 municipalities in 2004.
Sweden
The U.S. is a federal union of fifty states, population 316 million, with roughly 3,100 counties, parishes or the equivalent, 39,000 local governments and 50,000 or so special districts, for schools, water, sewage disposal, and so on. [based on census reports from scattered sources]
Local governing bodies in the U.S, are wholly the creation of state governments --- and can only can only do what their state permits them to do --- only a bare handful, for example, are permitted to tax income. City Income Taxes - U.S. Cities That Levy Income Taxes
"Municipal Internet" can look a lot like an upper middle class entitlement.
Which means that your proposal may not be economically or politically viable unless it is inclusive --- bringing affordable broadband Internet deep into the inner city and far out into the suburbs and perhaps beyond.
those demography, social and cultural characteristics
Like a superior educational system (free public universities), a healthcare system where people don't go bankrupt, better transit, and free childcare?
You get what you pay for -- divorcing higher taxes from the services those taxes provide is moronic at best.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Clearly it does not. Even while the GDP has grown by a factor of 6 in the U.S. real income is down for the majority.
So let's do that!
Sweden effectively did exactly that and it worked well.
I just want to vomit. Seriously, it's a nation with a tiny population and a gigantic amount of crude petroleum wealth.
Did you just confuse Norway with Sweden, or are you just trolling?
Sweden is a small country with few poor people. If we ever had good service in the US the government would demand even slightly better FREE service for poor people otherwise it's racism.
Another reason is that cable companies pay large kickbacks to cities for exclusive access. They call it an 'access fee' and it can reach 15% of the net profit. In exchange the cities don't allow competition and don't care what kind of shitty service or non serve the cable companies provide.
Six times bigger? Since when? Not in my lifetime. GDP growth has been pretty steady at 2-3% over the last few years I believe. I'll have to look up the numbers but in dollars GDP growth has been just over the inflation rate of late, which means it's pretty much flat.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Look at it per capita and with adjusted dollars since 1960.
Consider that since the early 1960's, women have entered the workforce en masse. Many households went from a single breadwinner to two incomes.
Going back further, consider that at one time, that spreadsheet on a desktop PC was computed by a room full of people.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck.... Shoot it!
But it's fiddler crab season.
No. Sweden has decent oil exports considering their population. It's not like all the oil in that area is only on the west coast, and the central and east is barren.
"Decent oil exports" doesn't necessarily mean "a gigantic amount of crude petroleum wealth". As far as I know, Sweden isn't a petro-state; the CIA World Factbook entry for Norway says that the petroleum sector "accounts for the largest portion of export revenue and about 30% of government revenue", whereas the entry for Sweden says that "the engineering sector accounts for about 50% of output and exports".
a healthcare system where people don't go bankrupt
That a person who chose to not buy health insurance goes bankrupt when he gets sick, is hardly grounds for mandating such insurance for everyone.
Hmm yes.
Because in civil society we will pick up those unable to pay for their healthcare and thus they become a burden on society.
So I prefer a mandated health insurance where everyone pays at least part of the bill.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Why do you consider it a marking of civil society, that requires people to pay for other people's mistakes? Not encourages, mind you, but requires?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That a person who chose to not buy health insurance goes bankrupt when he gets sick, is hardly grounds for mandating such insurance for everyone.
Since you clearly have no idea how hospitals the rest of the world work, allow me to explain. You get sick. You go to the doctor. You go home. There is no "copay" or "insurance you choose to buy into".
I know it's hard for you to understand that "not dying from preventable illness" is considered a basic human right in most other countries or how you can have a healthcare system that works efficiently without the invisible hand jerking off a group of plutocratic shareholders. The US has the highest healthcare costs as a % of GDP and the a life expectancy between Qatar and Cuba -- and there's the reason for that: it turns out people will pay a lot of money not to die if you force them to.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I thought they had the best and cheapest Internet services. :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Even without the historic spaghetti of regulations and the lobbyists for the big players there is a fundamental difference that makes Sweden much easier to layout: geography. Many of the USA homes are simply further away from nodes and the USA is a far bigger country.
There are many places in the USA, even in backwoods Vermont, where they have 100Mbps. But those places are more localized because there are large areas between them without good connectivity. The result is that because many people live further from those high speed notes we just don't have the more urbanish resources. That's life.
There are also plenty of spots in Sweden that don't have cheap, fast competitive internet service. This doesn't tend to get mentioned. It is not universal.
It is to be noted how comparisons like this are made to selectively targeted countries who have good connections. In other words, this is spin, not science.
I heard this interesting interview over the weekend on NPR (transcript in link). In it, the interviewee has this gem:
I was meeting with the vice president of the Communist Party in Shanghai, and I said, well, you know, what's your plan, sir? And he said, well, our five-year plan is to ensure that every man, woman and child in China has, at the very least, five megs of connectivity. And in all the top 10 cities, everyone's going to have one gig a second of connectivity. So I said, you know, sir have you thought about, you know, the unexpected side effects of giving 1.3 or 1.4 billion people a gig a second? And he says OK, I know what you're saying, I know where you're going, but here's the thing - the future of the human race, at least in this century, is ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi everywhere all the time. And it's going to happen whether you or I don't want it to happen or not. And because it's inevitable, we might as well get there first.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, and my only viable choices for internet connectivity are 3mbps DSL or Cable internet which is supposedly much faster, but capped at 250GB/month. The cheapest option of the two is $50/month. There are no signs of this changing in the next few years. At the current rate we're going, the US is pretty much doomed to be at the back of the line when it comes to internet connectivity. Think of the effects this will have on our economy in the medium to long term and gnash your teeth.
Actually you can go bankrupt even with Health Insurance in the US, any idea what a 20% co-pay on a bone marrow stem cell transplant runs?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Sweden subsidizes their Internet access with high taxes: it's cheaper in Sweden than the US.
US subsidizes gas prices and/or has unusually low gas taxes: gasoline in US is $3.50/gallon vs $8.00 in Sweden. Not to mention the cars themselves are 25%-100% more depending on tariffs/luxury taxes.
Also, the average 6-pack is $12+ in Sweden! Oh, the humanity...
(1) The open city networks in Sweden are generally expected to pay for themselves through the small fees they charge ISPs when they sell their services on them.
Here is a report (in swedish) from The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (somewhat equivalent of FCC) on the cost/price calculations commonly done:
If I understand it correctly, they calculate a return on investment of different periods for these categories:
Canalization: 15-50 years (recommended 20-40 years*)
Fiber: 10-30 years (recommended 20-30 years*)
Active equipment: 3-10 years (recommended 3-5 years*)
Equipment at customer: 0-3 years
*recommended by the Swedish City Network Association, a non-profit organization comprising the municipalities and municipality-owned companies who have city networks.
(2) The networks are often built for a much lower cost than you might think. Since it's the municipalities and local utilities building them, they have been taking the opportunity for years whenever there is road/construction work for other purposes to just lay down empty ducts everywhere and later using Cable jetting to build the actual fiberoptic network.
I was told by the CTO of the municipality-owned utility company where I used to live that doing it that way brought down that part of the costs from ~$5M to ~$0.4M versus digging just to lay fiber.
(3) Even if the municipality has a monopoly over the city network infrastructure, there is always competition from xDSL, cable-tv and a handful of different 4G networks, all of which are also available pretty much everywhere.
I happen to live in one of the few municipalities with a privately owned city networks, but i still have a choice from more than a dozen different ISPs, two of which offer gigabit connections at just over $100/month.
(4) The customers are normally never in contact with whatever organisation is running the city network, they deal directly with the ISPs offering their services on them.
Sweden has a lower population density than USA: 22.85 people/km compared to 34.2 people/km (both figures from 2010).
Would you be more satisfied if we compared California with its population density of 95 people/kmÂ?
California has "Silicon Valley" where the world's biggest companies in information technology are located.
From all I have heard, the Internet last mile situation for a home in Silicon Valley is not much better than in any other major US urban area.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
There is no "copay" or "insurance you choose to buy into".
I'm sorry, but you also don't know what you're talking about. Even though I wish it wasn't true, such system does exist in more than one country, besides the US. I live in one such country. We had it since the abolition of socialism (20+ years ago) and currently there are a lot of discussions going on that it should be abolished.
Sweden != Norway. You do realise you're the stereotypical "bad geography" American, right? Such a shame.
Sweden's population density is lower, and the US's GDP is larger. If what you say is true, internet in large US cities should be fantastic, when it isn't.
Get a grip - you're hurting the US with that attitude, not to mention making yourself look foolish confusing two countries.
Your personal experiences do not match the actual situation in Sweden or the US, as the available evidence shows. Please get a grip.
Then why does broadband suck in most US cities? If what you say was true, US cities would have some of the best internet in the world, which is patently not true. You making excuses for the sorry state of internet connectivity in the US is only making matters worse.
1. It's larger than many US states (which have higher population densities and far worse internet connectivity)
2. It's not a late adopter - it has been continually updating its infrastructure, instead of giving money to corporations to do the same (who just keep large amounts of it)
Whatever it costs, someone has to pay for it. That someone may be you because you the procedure, some charity out of the goodness of their hearts, or the taxpayers — forced to pay for it at the IRS' implicit gunpoint.
I don't understand, how an otherwise moral and upstanding person can honestly prefer the third option...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not saying that the heavy hand of Government should bitch slap us into subsidizing every loser's bad life choices, I am saying that hiring a third party assisting you in paying your healthcare providers is not going to insulate you from possible catastrophic costs pushing you into bankruptcy. Additionally as someone who actually works in the healthcare field I can assure you that have private insurance in no way means you are avoiding subsidizing others, and very probably the biggest difference between Government Health care and Private Health care is in the title of the clueless Bureaucrat deciding what care you do or don't get based on actuarial tables and this months numbers.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Sure. Some of that subsidizing is enforced by the government, which prohibits insurers from "discriminating" on a variety of factors and mandates coverage of certain elective procedures (like gender changes).
But even besides that there are other things affecting the costs for the insurer, which it may not even know about (drug or alcohol abuse) and thus has to spread the costs evenly among higher and lower insured alike. True.
But, as long as the insurers compete with each other, there is a hope. When the Illiberal's goal of "single payer" insurance is achieved, there will be no competition...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually Carl XVI Gustaf is king in Sweden.
Take that Democracy! jk :)
US has higher population density than Sweden.
Size and population number doesn't matter, it's the density that tells you how much money you have available per square mile.
Now, what's left is to determine, that the 7.38 vs. 8.02 difference is thanks to, rather than despite of their taxes being higher — rather than, say, those demography, social and cultural characteristics
You obviously misunderstand. Their higher taxes are a result of those different social and cultural characteristics, as also is their better quality of life.
A superior education system... for a country which mysteriously produces a tiny fraction of the R&D that the US does? Tell me, why is that that almost all the big and great inventions come from people working the in United States?
Firstly, Sweden has a tiny fraction of the population of the US. Secondly, I note you said people working the in United States, not people educated in the United States.
Just remember that the Healthcare consumer isn't the consumer they are the product; the insurers compete against each others for the companies the "consumers" work for. The employers, and the unions will always over-state their contribution to the workers.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I pay $40 for 500/500 in Sweden via Bredband2. I feel sorry for Americans...must be very frustrating.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
Internet in Sweden is 1.5x more expensive than internet in Siberia, where it costs ~25$ for the same 100/100Mbps for any of 5..10 ISPs available, not counting wireless ones. Downsides: >100ms latency to Europe.
Bulgaria?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Our political situation in the United States of America is totally fucked up. Politicians line their pocketbooks with what the lobbyists pay them, then they pass laws that protect the business . Vote Democrat the Republicans have been on the take way to long.. Get rid of those old white guys. Let's take back control of the United States of America.