 maartenaElmoPremium
join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA
kudos:1
 ·AT&T U-Verse
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| reply to S_engineer
Re: Sad said by S_engineer:Where's ours?????????????????????????  I am originally from the Netherlands, now living in California. The Dutch telecom operators have - in the past, not anymore - gotten big government subsidies to implement data networks and cable TV.
The Netherlands is roughly half the size of Maine, or twice the size of New Hampshire, to give you an idea of size, and currently 98% of the country can get DSL and CableTV, and as much as 5% can get municipal fiber or commercial fiber.
It is a dense market, as there are 16 million people living there, and connectivity between cities is a lot easier to manage. For instance, the Dutch railway system connects pretty much every city that has more then 50.000 people, and many cities smaller then that, and telecom companies are allowed to use the state-owned rail property to connect cities to fiber networks. Along the railways, you will often find a concrete "canal" (compare it sorta to square sewerpipes that are a foot in diameter) with concrete covers every few kilometers or so which makes it very easy to add fiber lines between cities.
Many major telecom companies have datacenters not far from a railway line to tap into the big fiber rings going through the "randstad" area in western Holland.
Basically, due to existing infrastructure such as railways, government subsidies in the past, government allowing telcos to use the railway data-canals to cheaply add huge amounts of bandwidth to innner-city and inter-city networks, has made it a lot more affordable to connect big fat pipes to the common man.
The AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) is the largest internet hub of the world:
From wikipedia:
"As of September 11, 2008 AMS-IX connected 301 members on 562 ports[5] and the all time peak of incoming traffic was 444.725 Gbit/s and of outgoing traffic 442.073 Gbit/s.[6] This makes the Amsterdam Internet Exchange the largest internet exchange in the world, when measured by number of connected members and by internet traffic, before the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange[7] and the London Internet Exchange.[8]"
Here in the United States, telco companies have to pay for everything. They don't get government subsidies, they don't get to use the countries Amtrak infrastructure to deploy city-to-city fiber, and another big issue is the distance between cities here in the US. It is significantly more expensive to bring a big fat pipe to a city, and thus more expensive to bring it to homes. |
