Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/the-free-market-lie/

by talonx • 20 days ago

546 435 20 days ago

stefan.schueller.net

esseph3• 20 days ago

Ziply fiber has 50Gbps service

Their service area is >15x the size of Switzerland.

(16k sq miles vs 250k square miles)

The overbuilding is a very annoying problem though, I agree.

fc417fc802• 20 days ago

TBF Ziply is very much an outlier. Most urban and suburban places in the US have middling to poor connectivity provided by a monopoly or duopoly that overcharges while engaging in various underhanded tactics.

Weirdly enough some of the most reasonable offerings in the US can be had in the few rural counties that have built out municipal fiber networks alongside the electric grid. Unfortunately that is once again very much the exception rather than the norm.

michelsedgh• 20 days ago

Why Switzerland doesnt have its own Starlink?

initramfs7• 20 days ago

Why would Switzerland want Starlink when they can get 25Gbps fiber?

rmunn4• 20 days ago

Starlink's best value proposition is competing with other satellite services, or DSL over copper wire, in remote areas where those are the only feasible choices. Which describes much of rural America, as well as many other locations... but not most of Switzerland.

kyralis• 20 days ago

The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does.

I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.

Xirdus• 20 days ago

There are cities in the US that have 2.5x the population density that Zurich does. Rural Texas might have this excuse, but New York City absolutely does not.

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population.

As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.

cogman103• 20 days ago

Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas.

You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines.

It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.

lmz• 20 days ago

Surely there are cities with the same density in the USA?

nixon_why69• 20 days ago

The vast, vast majority of Americans live in more dense areas.

A naive average national density obscures more than it reveals.

rmunn4• 20 days ago

It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state. I heard about one German auto engineer who was visiting Los Angeles. He looked at a map and thought it would be a fun drive to go to Portland and back on a Saturday. He was shocked when his American colleagues told him to look at the map's scale more closely, and that it would be more than 24 hours of driving just to get there and come back.

So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.

SXX2• 20 days ago

There are big countries with a good internet. Russia was one before it started turning back into totalitarian shithole.

lefra• 20 days ago

European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.

GolfPopper• 20 days ago

The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there. The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.

Nursie3• 20 days ago

In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state

Which US states can you do this in? You can drive across Texas from El Paso to Port Arthur in 12 AFAICT. Alaska maybe?

Now Western Australia where I live ... 36 hours from Cape Leeuwin to Kununurra, and we only have 10% the population of Texas.

kamranjon• 20 days ago

It takes longer to drive the length of Sweden than it does the length of California.

carlosjobim• 20 days ago

In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state.

I used to have a car like that also.

yxhuvud• 20 days ago

If you can manage to have plumbing and electricity, you can manage to have proper broadband.

rurban2• 20 days ago

The higher the density, the more problematic to dig up the streets to bury the fibre lines. And US streets are much wider to dig the lines.

I've seen city-level street works in the US and they are incredibly slow compared to national highway work, or street work in Europe. Like 10x slower. And getting the permissions? Impossible

quickthrowman2• 20 days ago

You don’t need to dig up streets to install fiber underground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_boring

Root_Denied• 20 days ago

Is that 2.5x number the average of the whole of the US compared to Switzerland? Because NYC probably has higher density than Switzerland, but Oklahoma probably has much lower than even that 2.5x number, and it doesn't make sense to put them under the same umbrella.

wisty• 20 days ago

As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).

moi2388• 20 days ago

Whenever I hear the density problem for internet cables, I think about all the cables in the ocean and how few people actually live on the bottom of it.

Waterluvian2• 20 days ago

Actually curious what you can get in NYC.

I’m getting 5/5gbps for $100 CAD in what qualifies as “rural Canada” for tax reasons. But in Toronto there was 10/10gbps for $30.

Scoundreller• 20 days ago

But in Toronto there was 10/10gbps for $30

Who? What? Where? When?

thewanderer1983• 20 days ago

Yes the complete lack of geography in the article should of raised red flags for people.

cogman103• 20 days ago

Density doesn't really make the sort of difference you might think.

Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.

In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).

US regulations actually give telecoms a leg up in a lot of ways to expand services. These private companies have utility access to power polls and easement access to common lines. About the only regulation that can get in the way is some cities and states have minimum service requirements before you can start burying in a new territory. That is a give away to the ISPs to tamp down competition.

The reason internet is so crap is because utility lines are all private. For example, in the UK BT owns all the lines and British law allows for line rental from 3rd party ISPs. That's what allows you to get a wide variety of ISPs without having to plow in a brand new line to your location. That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere. Without that, ISPs have no incentive to increase speeds as new competition is very hard to create or come by.

ethersteeds• 20 days ago

I agree with you about the effects of regulation and privatization. The installation challenges of dense urban environments are no joke either. But:

Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem.

Plumbing yes, but it might not leave the property. About 25% of US homes have septic systems, and some states are as high as 50%. For water, 15% of homes use private wells, which goes to 72% for rural households.

It's not everything, but density absolutely matters for rural households. The US is vast and contains many areas where you are your water and sewer company because there's no municipal option.

That said, your electricity example shows the way. That got to every home through massive public infrastructure projects. And internet could too, far easier than water or sewer.

bigstrat20032• 20 days ago

Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.

Those utilities are also far older than the Internet, so they should be expected to have more penetration. Also, the fair comparison here wouldn't be "how many American homes have a super fast Internet connection", but rather "how many American homes have the Internet at all".

steve1977• 20 days ago

In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).

If endpoints are spread too far out, it's not hard technically to connect them, but it might be very expensive and not feasible economically.

If density is too high on the other hand (say NYC), it's becoming hard to technically connect, because, as you mentioned, there's already a lot of "stuff" there that you have to be careful about. But it might be much more interesting economically.

I think Switzerland just hits a sweet spot between these two. It's dense enough to be profitable but sparse enough to make construction still feasible. So essentially, we're just lucky.

ivell2• 20 days ago

That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere.

In case of India, the government lines had higher costs and lower service standards than the private Jio. So it is not always the case that government infrastructure is better. However, there are regulations that require rural infrastructure development which ensures coverage on low profitability regions.

earth-tattoo• 20 days ago

How do you explain the top comment at this time (about Spectrum in NYC)? It can't get denser than NYC. So I guess it's not the density that's the problem.

xbmcuser• 20 days ago

Why are you using all of US then compare the internet of most US cities and to most cities in Europe and Asia. US has a problem of false advertisement it is portrayed as the free market but reality it is filled with monopolies/duopolies/captured markets in most industries and americans are propagandized to believe stupidly that it is a good thing.

ascorbic3• 20 days ago

This article isn't about coverage, it's about what goes in the duct if there is a connection. If Comcast can run a cable to your house, then they can put four strands and allow other ISPs access to them.

That said, how many of these homes have mains electricity? Landline phone service? If they can do that, then they can do fiber. Sure your cabin in Montana might not have it (though the equivalent in Sweden probably would), but the small town probably does.

AngryData• 20 days ago

Except in my very rural and very poor part of the US we got a fiber co-op that formed a few years ago that provides 1 gig direct to home without a problem.

procaryote• 20 days ago

Every story about how the US has awful internet has a comment like this. I suspect that the refusal to believe the US is worse at anything is part of the reason it never catches up in those areas.

diffeomorphism• 20 days ago

The US has it much easier not harder.

The average population density is pretty irrelevant here. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.pn...

Lots of high density cluster and much easier geography (Switzerland famously has lots of mountains in the way).

So the question is "Why do US metropolitan areas not have 25gbit fiber for about $60/month?".

DiogenesKynikos4• 20 days ago

Switzerland is half as dense as New Jersey.

It's around the same density as Delaware and Maryland. And it's full of giant mountains, which neither Delaware nor Maryland have.

panick21_3• 20 days ago

People only using aggregate density calculation is so overly simplistic. Inside of each country there are patterns.

Imagine a country with two huge cities and a very long empty desert in the middle. Density can be low but its still easy to connect.

I not totally skeptical that some places are harder to connect then others but given we live in the modern world with algorithms and satellites we should be able to do a better job than top level density.

And I'm not saying this to convince you that Switzerland is easier. Frankly I do think it easier. But because I am actually interested if anybody knows if such work and estimations exist.

Like lets assume all fiber, cable and old phone connections are gone. How hard much would it cost to get every person to some very high speed.

trynumber9• 20 days ago

I guess they don't bother using Speedtest in Switzerland, as the average speed seems about the same as the US: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

Must be a sampling bias or something.

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

I ran speed tests a lot more when I had internet that varied from 5-20MB depending on the day/weather/etc. Now I'm on >1GB it's so rarely a concern that I don't bother. I suspect this skews the data significantly.

SXX2• 20 days ago

Most people use Speedtest when something going terrible wrong and they have packet loss, extreme latency or something similar. Or before renting out their appartment on AirBnB.

not_your_vase2• 20 days ago

You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true.

Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.

arthurofbabylon7• 20 days ago

There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.

(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)

earth_tattoo• 20 days ago

I wish my country India was like that, because we are totally opposite. Anything made in India is considered very bad quality and will not fetch a good price even if better than imported goods.

initramfs7• 20 days ago

I've noticed a similar thing when buying products online. Overseas sellers from Asia will package their product as "Designed in Germany" or include a red cross to indicate Swiss design, but may not actually be designed or manufactured in Switzerland. Nice packaging though :)

LeonM• 20 days ago

in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality

That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.

For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.

And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.

userbinator3• 20 days ago

For me, the positive connotation of "Swiss" only applies to mechanical watches.

riccardomc• 20 days ago

It's nationalism mixed up with marketing.

Nationalism works for domestic markets.

The association with quality manufacturing and precision helps abroad.

Very similar thing happens for "Made in Italy".

Foobar85683• 20 days ago

Especially that behind Salt was/is a French company, ohhh the horror.

prmoustache2• 20 days ago

Also a large fraction of the swiss population is old, and the older portion of the population:

- do not like changes

- value loyalty much more than younger people

- consider that bar an important change in income, there is no reason they shouldn't pay x if they agreed on it 10 years before.

If it works and continue working the same as it ever been and at the same price, they don't see a reason to look for something else.

mike_hearn• 20 days ago

Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.

The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!

I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.

The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.

This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.

So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.

Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.

I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.

At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.

In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.

What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.

Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.

ks2048• 20 days ago

Brazil is surprisingly good. What are they doing right?

dheera• 20 days ago

I did an internship in Switzerland in 2007 and mobile data was 14 USD/MB while I had unlimited data in the US. The place I was staying in Zurich had only 128 kbps ISDN while I had a symmetric gigabit line in my US dorm room. At that time I thought Switzerland was the most backward country ever.

Things change, I guess.

hahahaa2• 20 days ago

Or like your apples is what people have chosen and the oranges is what is available to buy if you want it.

I upgaded to 1000mbps as it is the same price now as slower but only time itll make a difference is downloading a model or huge installer.

microtonal2• 20 days ago

That says as much about socioeconomics (price sensitivity, laws that prohibit calling for upselling, etc.) as actual speed. E.g. in my country, the last time I looked over 95% had a fiber connection to home and the major providers offer 1Gbit (for connections still on AON) or 4 to 8Gbit (on XGS-PON).

Yet, our average is still a mid 230Mbit. Why? People sticking with cable internet out of inertia, people sticking with cable because they have more attractive TV packages. People choosing 100 or 200 Mbit because it's cheaper (e.g. my parents just stick to 200Mbit because they don't need more for web browsing and some streaming).

Same for cellular. My country is only in the 17th position, yet I have 1Gbit 5G cellular with unlimited data for ~25 Euro per month. Most people just don't want to spend more than 10 per month and go for cheap plans/providers.

But such price sensitivity differs a lot per country.

Aurornis3• 20 days ago

You're not missing anything. The article is trying to imply that 25G is everywhere in Switzerland, but it's not. They just picked the fastest available speed and ignored the fact that some places in the United States also have 25G internet available.

slopinthebag4• 20 days ago

The funny thing is, it works on people outside of Switzerland too. There are actual Americans fooled by this blatant marketing in this very thread.

jkarni• 20 days ago

The limiting factor on speed-tests when you have 10-25 Gbps internet is WiFi. That’s what this is more likely showing.

Youden3• 20 days ago

25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps.

25Gbps requires pretty unusual hardware to use (see [0] for example) and you need to pay a couple hundred francs for installation so even among the geeks and nerds, it's not common.

I have it myself but recommend to friends and colleagues to use Init7 but 10Gbps instead.

[0] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-07-10-linux-25gbit-...

Hikikomori9• 20 days ago

Since its 2026 now we have easier alternatives.

https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/cloud-gateways/efg?subcategor...

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq

user3939382• 20 days ago

I talked to someone laying fiber in Manhattan circa 2020 he said it was $25k / ft. That the permitting process took so long by the time it got approved the people on the city council had changed. That the conduits are so packed you can’t fit another fiber line in it and almost all of them are undocumented. All kinds of union circumvention BS from Verizon aka Empire City Subway who’s supposed to be maintaining this stuff per contract. It’s a shit show.

initramfs7• 20 days ago

The fact that some in Switzerland wanted to cap population at 10 million says a lot about their free market. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/14/switzerland-re...

Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.

I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).

ivell2• 20 days ago

It was a referendum. Anyone can trigger a referendum if they have 100k signatures. This was not the government position.

vixen99• 20 days ago

I'm not sure what economic migration is. Economic for whom? I'm not taking a side by asking, merely wondering.

danielheath• 20 days ago

"Economic migration" is a (usually derogatory) term for moving into a country to earn more money, with no desire to adapt to the culture of your new home.

initramfs7• 20 days ago

see my response to danielheath.

Stevvo• 20 days ago

Switzerland is a democracy, another concept foreign to Americans. People vote on all sorts of things all the time.

phendrenad22• 20 days ago

Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line

Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP.

In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?

lxgr4• 20 days ago

Are you arguing that a country as large and wealthy as the US can only solve one problem at a time or that fast, affordable Internet access is somehow a luxury problem?

phendrenad22• 19 days ago

I'm saying that if it's 8x as costly to run fibre to every American house, then it requires 8x the political willpower.

Hikikomori9• 19 days ago

Are all Americans living in single person houses spread out evenly over the entire land area?

defrost3• 19 days ago

Is there any other way to ranch spherical cows?

yawnxyz• 20 days ago

should really look at the Australian system... it's not really a free market there and the internet is awful

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

The Australian system is much better than the US system, even with 1/10th the country-level density. The internet here is generally faster and cheaper than the suburban US, with a similar system to Switzerland.

RachelF• 20 days ago

Yes, Australia destroys his whole argument. They went the Swiss way with a single provider (NBN).

But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.

mjmas• 20 days ago

We have our NBN fibre here in Australia and it works fine. We can get 1000 down / 400 up for ~100USD.

avalys• 20 days ago

Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.

waetsch• 20 days ago

There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages.

Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.

Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.

I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.

fransje264• 20 days ago

That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.

Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..

Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.

In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..

panick21_3• 20 days ago

Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization.

Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.

That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.

Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.

mmaunder• 20 days ago

25 gig is still expensive for consumers to configure end to end.

loeg• 20 days ago

Right. US consumers don't want 25 gig.

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

But the article does point out that 1G plans are very widely available at low prices. US consumers would love that but it's not available anywhere near as widely as in Switzerland.

gregsadetsky• 20 days ago

Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating.

Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.

Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).

Truly embarrassing and sad.

initramfs7• 20 days ago

I'm guessing you saw this SNL sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM

ritcgab• 19 days ago

It's a documentary.

vlovich1232• 20 days ago

No one is forcing you to use their modem or router.

Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.

saghm2• 20 days ago

At the apartment I lived at until last year, Spectrum only offered up to half a gig down unless you used their modem (which of course meant an extra $15 per month on top of the plan for a full gig already being more expensive). Of course, neither of these were symmetric, with the connection listed as "mixed" between copper and fiber. I stuck with the half gig since it was the best option without paying them for the "privilege" of using their equipment.

At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.

lxgr4• 20 days ago

If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you? In my experience, it's one of the best ISPs I've ever had.

Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.

They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.

Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.

CarVac• 20 days ago

At my past place Fios was excellent but I've had mixed results recently, with ping spikes and a lot of suspected traffic shaping of things like Youtube.

Service is pretty good though.

jmalicki• 20 days ago

If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you?

Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.

Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.

Alex4386• 20 days ago

cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.

lxgr4• 20 days ago

Smaller territory is an often-repeated claim for why any particular infrastructure strategy doesn't transfer to the US, but that makes no sense to me as most numbers can just be scaled up and still make sense.

Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.

lxgr4• 20 days ago

What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that.

Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?

doublepg23• 20 days ago

The point is "America Bad. Upvotes to the left."

ChuckMcM• 20 days ago

Yeah, that was kind of my take on it.

efitz• 20 days ago

“Anecdotally, X works better in another country than it does in the USA- the free market is a lie!”

Nursie3• 20 days ago

That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up.

According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.

The free market does work, when given the right rails.

db48x3• 20 days ago

False! Ziply Fiber offers speeds up to 50Gbps. https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

I can also get 400Gbit in my office, that doesn't mean it's a useful benchmark for the country. The article seems to represent the state of the 3 countries compared pretty well.

Where exactly is Ziply available? Their website is vague, but it seems to be at most a small corner of the North West, and it seems like their 50G plan is not as widely available as their 2G plan.

db48x3• 20 days ago

Ziply is a regional ISP. They serve the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Here’s a map showing their backbone links: https://ziplyfiber.com/~/media/Residential/modules/Columns--...

I can also get 400Gbit in my office…

Sure, but remember that we’re talking about _residential_ services here. Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps to all residential fiber customers. They also sell IP Transit services to businesses at higher speeds, but we’re not talking about those.

alex1138• 20 days ago

cries in canada

Yes, fine - 'land mass'. (ditto US) But land mass doesn't make corporations lobby and collude

oceanplexian3• 20 days ago

We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.

If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).

bhhaskin• 20 days ago

That's great for Utah, but most other places in the US don't have a system like that and are stuck with one maybe two ISPs.

oceanplexian3• 20 days ago

Switzerland is 1/5th the size of Utah, seems like a fair comparison to me.

BugsJustFindMe• 20 days ago

in Utah

What percentage of the US population does that cover?

pottertheotter• 20 days ago

I don’t think Utopia lets you buy it now? In the past you could.

frollogaston• 20 days ago

WEF says you aren't allowed to own things, -999 KYC points for you

UltraSane• 20 days ago

I can get 1Gbps up/down for $50. It is a PON fiber connection. This seems fast enough for everything a computer professional needs to do. I'm not sure what 25 Gbps internet access would actually be needed for.

fl4regun• 20 days ago

I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.

jerf• 20 days ago

At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.

danpalmer6• 20 days ago

At some point these things become cheap enough that you might as well. The price difference between 500MB and 1GB for me is very little, and so for the peak usage time improvements and few times a month that I download a steam game or movie, it's worth it. I pay significantly less than 70 USD a month for my 1GB connection.

kevin_thibedeau• 20 days ago

I had an apartment once with both 300Mb cable and 1Gb fiber available. Cable was $40 and reliable with all the bandwidth I needed. The fiber sales reps would stop by a few times a year perplexed that I didn't want to pay through the nose for a bigger number. Moving away to a different location, I had to put up with a dodgy cable provider until cheap fiber was deployed and still don't need the extra bandwidth.

computerdork4• 20 days ago

Actually, think all the devs here should know this too (and am surprised people on HN are making such a big deal about this). Agreed, 500Mb is what most households need because, yeah, 90% of the time 4k video is the most demanding thing we do (which is only 25Mb/s per person in the household).

Having been telling this to my family and friends whenever they want to upgrade to 1Gb/s, but to noavail. They rarely ever take the suggestion (ah well, to each their own).

NoPicklez2• 20 days ago

Yep completely agree.

I lived with about 5 people and our internet was 500mbps and it was more than enough.

Looking at the network monitor the only need for anything really above 100mbps was when people wanted to download something. For daily needs, surfing, browsing, the odd download you don't need a lot. And that's with everyone streaming, scrolling, gaming etc concurrently.

computerdork4• 20 days ago

Totally agree - having been telling this to friends for years, to no avail.

Btw, what network monitor are you using? Was it just a diagnostic tool in your router's admin page? Or is it something special like dd-wrt? Because seems like it's kind of hit or miss if a router's stock admin includes a reliable network monitor.

cortesoft• 20 days ago

There are a few things that support it, at least in my experience… I get close to line rate for steam downloads for large games, and other content with a good CDN.

The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.

SCdF• 20 days ago

The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.

That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.

up2isomorphism• 20 days ago

Who told you US telco sector is a free market?

lyu072824• 20 days ago

I think the people who think "free market" will fix any problem are the same exact people who think that it would be a great idea if companies are allowed to own their own fiber or put thousands of satellites into orbit. They will see it as a problem of regulations that it is too cumbersome to put fiber into the ground as a company, and advocate for deregulation, "micro trenching" and privatization, that in order to "let the market do its thing" you need to deregulate the ISPs, get rid of net neutrality, get rid of the FCC, privatize all publicly owned infrastructure not yet privatized. Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.

parineum5• 20 days ago

Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.

The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture.

Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.

bigstrat20032• 20 days ago

The problem here is, unironically, caused by the government getting involved. Many of these companies are granted legal monopoles in their service areas. If someone dares to start a competitor, the incumbent harasses them with lawsuits to try to shut them out. The free market isn't all sunshine and rainbows (and natural monopolies like infrastructure are a place where it frequently fails), but the market is not particularly free in this case.

varun_ch• 20 days ago

on the topic of Swiss Internet: everyone I know in Zurich’s home internet gets a mostly-static IPv4. It’s not a promised feature or anything, but my IP didn’t rotate for years. This is super handy for self hosting.

Cider9986• 20 days ago

692 comments 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400

arthurofbabylon7• 20 days ago

I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article.

The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.

Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.

The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.

jraby3• 20 days ago

Population of Switzerland is around 9 million people. Slightly larger than NYC.

Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.

arthurofbabylon7• 20 days ago

I'll briefly reiterate the essay's primary point, for your convenience, which is agnostic to population size: when a natural monopoly exists, the best solution – regardless of ideology – is to make the underlying infrastructure at once singular and public while fostering competition at the level of servicing that infrastructure. That is how Switzerland accomplished its highly functional fiber-optic network, a system that is at once cheaper, more reliable, and more performant than its US and German peers.

This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.

oceanplexian3• 20 days ago

The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.

The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.

arthurofbabylon7• 20 days ago

Look, as mentioned in the prior comment there are varying spreads of performance across geography (including in Switzerland), and while you might be experiencing one expression of that variance (good internet connection in Utah) you need to look beyond that anecdote to trace the bigger picture and observe performance/cost/reliability beyond your narrow environment.

"That's not a capitalism problem"

It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.

(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)

lava_pidgeon3• 20 days ago

It is an essay not a scientific paper. As such it's more an opinion peace. The first question in my head why it does not compare with Rumania and South Korea.

It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g.

The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the German speaking world and to the US as Americans are very loud on HN , Internet so you need to canter this audience.

That's why I don't like this essay. This very specific sound from "we know it better". This essay doesn't want to find the best way for this type of infrastructure. Ironically I know this sound only from Germany.

arthurofbabylon7• 20 days ago

The author is Swiss – your ad hominem attach fails twice. And again, I'll direct you to original point of my above comment and a point made in the essay: if you want to be effective you'll need to look past ideology to see the actually working dynamics of the system. There is no doubt that the Swiss internet service provision system is superior to the US and Germany – no doubt. The essay explains why, an essay you are welcome to read.

foobarbecue• 20 days ago

"This article is ... spellchecked with AI" ???

Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???

OscarCunningham• 20 days ago

The AI understands context so it's able to spot typos even when they coincidentally make reel words.

snowl• 20 days ago

I mean it feels like it was just straight written with AI: "Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways."

al_borland• 20 days ago

Switzerland is smaller than West Virginia. Less than 1% of the US. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one.

Symbiote• 20 days ago

Is West Virginia wired up?

rags2riches• 20 days ago

Just above your comment is one lamenting the situation in New York City. That's roughly the same population as Switzerland in a not quite as massive area.

ascorbic3• 20 days ago

That's not what the article is about. It's about what goes in the ducts when they are connected, and who has access to the infra.

robocat• 20 days ago

It is usually silly to compare any country with the whole US.

Instead search for the most similar state to compare with: for example Colorado has similarities with Switzerland.

Does Colorado have similarly affordable 25 Gbit fiber?

much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one

If your theory makes any sense at all, then Vermont with 60% of the size and 7% of the population should have amazing internet... does it?

I'm in New Zealand: Our internet isn't like Switzerlands (~1/2 the population in 6x the size). I use Oregon for our benchmark state.

dirtikiti2• 20 days ago

Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.

I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially.

When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed.

Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe.

The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.

The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.

And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.

Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.

US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.

It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.

_fizz_buzz_• 20 days ago

Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.

I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc.

Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.

dirtikiti2• 19 days ago

What part about that is puzzling?

A population 30-40x the size, split out over 50 states, with different laws and regulations, different political governance, different geographical and economic considerations...

Why wasn't Switzerland compared to the rest of Europe?

Comparing the whole of Europe to the whole of the US is a closer comparison.

freitasm• 20 days ago

This is the New Zealand model. Multiple ISPs but only a few fibre providers - the largest one is Chorus, with a few that are very localised, but follow the same rules.

The ONT is accessible to all ISPs, and you can provision both available ports with different ISPs if wanted. Usually, a change from one ISP to another happens within the day, like number portability.

PeterHolzwarth3• 20 days ago

I don't know that this is an easy comparison to make. Switzerland is 16k square miles in size (and about 9.1 million people). Taking a random, low-density American state as a comparison - say, the innocuous and sparsely-populated western state of Idaho - I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people).

I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.

A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to.

<edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!)

<second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>.

Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major.

Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.

rullelito• 20 days ago

Now do Sweden.

swiftcoder• 20 days ago

Or Spain.

We're one of the most spread out populations in Europe, and yet we have ubiquitous gigabit fibre to even the smallest of villages (I have it in a village of ~12 houses, an hour's drive from the nearest population hub), with a broad selection of providers.

Why? Because Movistar, the former national telecom, is required by law to connect the entire population to fibre, and then rent access to all their smaller competitors.

PeterHolzwarth3• 20 days ago

Well I get your point, but Sweden has a GDP of just under a trillion. The example US state of Idaho has a GDP of about 100 billion. It really is just a quiet, no-frills, rural kind of state.

timc3• 20 days ago

Well in the area of Sweden I live in a particular company seems to own the fibre, and then they have to allow access to resell it. The company owning the fibre has been finding interesting extra ways of charging me extra fees over the years and I don't have a choice of moving away from them (except paying for commercial fibre or using slower 5G with quotas)

callmeal2• 20 days ago

I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.

That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.

zdragnar• 20 days ago

it's very easy to provide electricity

America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.

The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.

charcircuit• 20 days ago

but somehow internet is not.

Look up DSL.

ipdashc2• 20 days ago

In fairness, the phone network practically took a century to get fully set up, was quite expensive in its time, and it's pretty easy to run a dinky little wire pair to a house (sometimes they'd literally use barbed wire fences). And labor costs were a lot lower when the phone network was built out.

Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.

Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.

ssivark• 20 days ago

If density is the primary factor, why doesn't an American city like NYC have faster/cheaper internet than Switzerland?

lowbloodsugar2• 20 days ago

He’s talking about natural monopolies. Those exist in most US cities and towns. Simple rule of thumb: if you don’t have municipal water, this doesn’t apply to you either. If you do, you should have dedicated fibers.

ascorbic3• 20 days ago

The regulations here aren't about forcing companies to lay fiber to every home, it's enforcing a standard that when a company does lay fiber it lays four strands that any ISP can use.

microtonal2• 20 days ago

Except that the people that I know in the US also say that internet is also overpriced and expensive with limited competition in many cities.

adgjlsfhk1• 20 days ago

none of that explains why the dense states (e.g. ma, ny, ca, tx) have this solved

mieses• 20 days ago

It is a stupid comparison with a stupid anti capitalist agenda. All infrastructure in Switzerland is high quality and highly maintained because they are a tiny and wealthy country. Their wealth has something to do with banking. Maybe the author of the stupid blog post can ponder the relationship between free markets, banking, and wealth.

PeterHolzwarth3• 20 days ago

You appear to be sponsored by the word "stupid."

ipdashc2• 20 days ago

I feel like this argument doesn't work in all cases, because of course there are densely populated parts of America. Massachusetts is 7,800 sq miles of land and 7 million people. New Jersey is 7,354 sq miles and over 9 million people, so almost double the density of Switzerland!

So sure, nationwide policies in America have to account for all the empty space, but there's also wide swaths of the country that have relatively normal (if still overall low) levels of density. What's stopping MA or NJ from starting a similar scheme to the one in the article? Probably a lack of funding, state capacity, and political will.

If anything, the comparison probably falls apart because Switzerland is filthy rich. Apparently their GDPPC is $126k vs America's $94k, and crucially, I suspect the former is much more evenly distributed. All I have to go off of is visiting once, but it's certainly a very expensive and well-maintained country.

andriamanitra2• 20 days ago

That argument might be valid if there were no urban areas in America. However it fails to explain why, for example, New Jersey does not have affordable 25 Gbit residential internet either. It is half the size of Switzerland but has similar population and much more favorable geography. And even if you wanted to only look at a place like Idaho, the explanation (and solutions!) provided by the article is even more applicable to places where building infrastructure is hard/costly.

Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]

We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyPHGZCmNE&t=17m17s

hahahaa2• 20 days ago

Isn't it better to compare Switzerland with say NYC? Or compare US to EU as a whole.

tom9103• 20 days ago

The Free Market Lie

Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.

catlikesshrimp• 20 days ago

Free market doesn't sort itself out. It has to be streamed through proper regulation.

Cantinflas• 20 days ago

That is not what the article is saying, at all.

diordiderot• 20 days ago

Hence why the EU is competing so well against the US

sschueller2• 20 days ago

I don't know why you are getting down voted. I wrote the article and that is the point of the article. A free market requires proper and smart regulation to work for all the people to get the best product.

mewse-hn• 20 days ago

The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism.

What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's anti-capitalism in the guise of capitalism.

slopinthebag4• 20 days ago

Why would fiber to the house be a natural monopoly?

mdavid6264• 20 days ago

The article didn’t say free market is bad in general, it said it doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.

ragazzina• 20 days ago

low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.

All I see on the Internet is Americans complaining about high prices and enshittification of every product. Is your market not free enough?

tom9103• 19 days ago

I just checked Init7 price for 1gig internet in Zurich and the price is higher than I'm paing for 1gig in Seattle and payed in Bay Area. So, free market kinda works.

But even in this case, the article doesn't provide motivations for companies spent a lot money for building common infrastructure in rural places which usually have an issue with bad internet options

lowbloodsugar2• 20 days ago

I’ll help out everyone who is having trouble: the claim is that if you have municipal water then you should have municipal fiber.

marcus_holmes• 20 days ago

Every Aussie techie reading this curses Murdoch and Abbott for screwing up the NBN, which would have given us what Switzerland has.

modeless• 20 days ago

Meh. I have gigabit fiber and it's enough for me right now. I could pay for 5 gigabit, but why? The last mile is almost never the bottleneck in my connection. 99% of the time it's upstream somewhere, with the only real exception being Steam game downloads. And my home network is gigabit ethernet so to actually get any benefit I'd have to upgrade a ton of my own hardware, the router and the switches and the NICs and even all the way down to the cables.

userbinator3• 20 days ago

* Up to 25Gbps...

All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors.

Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared.

"dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link.

Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?

hnav• 20 days ago

We're all going to caching appliances deployed on the ISP's network these days anyway.

realityking• 20 days ago

Your post is unnecessarily pedantic. The point the article makes is that they have a dedicated line to the next router unlike cable (DOCSIS) or GPON fiber where already the bandwidth of the last mile is shared among subscribers.

It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.

Hikikomori9• 19 days ago

Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?

They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first few phone lines.

userbinator3• 19 days ago

to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated

You basically just showed how stupid the "but it's dEdIcAtEd!!11" argument is.

ironbound3• 20 days ago

Some in Poland have 2.5Gbit+ fiber, while other friends in Berlin have ADSL.

Sweden has good fiber to, off the top of my head.

numlock862• 20 days ago

Some in <country> have X, while other friends in <city> have Y

Cool. What's your message here, though?

I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently.

Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.

mstaoru• 20 days ago

AFAIK _most_ of German personal customers are still only covered by DSL.

- Happy Vodafone customer having 40 Mbps on a good day.

ironbound3• 20 days ago

The point is your main city is holding back having faster internet for average citizens

nextlevelwizard• 20 days ago

I have often wondered why my country does not have fast Internet and my own hypothesis is that our phone companies push so hard for mobile data plans that most people just use their phone's Internet for everything. I have seen many people always connecting their laptop and TV and even security cameras to the hotspot provided by their phone, with only mild complaining about how annoying it can be. When I suggest they get a proper home connection they just shrug it off as an extra pointless expense and something only nerds like me care.

We could have so much better connectivity, but average people are happy as long as they can watch <streaming-service>.

Aurornis3• 20 days ago

This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title.

Some important points that they leave out:

- 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations.

- The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.

- 25G internet is also available in some locations in the United States.

- As another commenter discovered, the average speed test results of US and Swiss internet connections are pretty similar. The average Swiss person isn't connected to the internet faster than the average United States person.

atoav• 20 days ago

Now let's do trains.

johnsmith1840• 20 days ago

US has the largest railway on earth by a large margin

badgersnake• 20 days ago

It also assumes the US broadband market is free, which it effectively isn’t. There’s a huge moat of hard-lobbied for “regulations” put in place by the established players.

guiambros2• 20 days ago

I live in NYC, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet Verizon Fios 1 Gbps is my only option. I tried to upgrade to Fios 2 Gbps, but it's not available. Spectrum only goes to 200Mbps; no other providers in my area.

I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

porknubbins• 20 days ago

Its not how bad must other areas be when NYC is this bad- its bad because its NYC. Corruption, aging infrastructure, enormous construction costs, diverse building types and complex ownership interests etc etc. The fastest and most competitive internet is in places like wealthy suburbs where you just roll it out without any issues.

Aurornis3• 20 days ago

I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling".

Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation.

I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere.

Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.

ra• 20 days ago

Sydney, Australia - the most I can get is 500mbps from our government owned nbn. I have a 1Gb plan, but in reality it's half that.

Gasp0de• 20 days ago

It is harder to install fiber in densely populated areas than in some backcountry farm. Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber vs. digging a trench in the dirt next to the farm road. Which one do you think costs more? For which do you think you need to jump through 1001 bureaucratic hoops?

esseph3• 20 days ago

If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

It's actually easier in some ways. I can build tons of infrastructure to cover tens of thousands of people in fiber for what it would cost to dig up one NYC street for a few days.

ricardobayes2• 20 days ago

Exactly why starlink's business was viable.

dzhiurgis3• 20 days ago

I live in NZ, but work with mostly US SaaS'es. Got 1 gpbs fiber but I'm torn between downgrading to something like 500mbps which also downgrades your upload and upgrading to 6gbps so I get better international speeds (right now it's something like 100mbps tops).

Nnnes• 20 days ago

imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet.

https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2...

Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly).

Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one

apexalpha• 20 days ago

but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.

PowerElectronix• 20 days ago

There are issues everywhere. Companies that had their cables deployed made sure that any regulation that would eliminate that moat heavily favor them, either by forbidding other companies to deploy and forcing them to lease the already deployed infra or by forbidding them digging ir whatever bullshit.

Very few companies wanna get into deploying their own network (both in the states and europe), but the few that do make money out of it. I would be really surprised if Switzerland is any different.

dlcarrier2• 20 days ago

Everyone's mocking you for using more than 1 Gbps of internet bandwidth, but I honestly want to know how you are able to saturate it. I've found on even the fastest internet connections, it's difficult to get more than a few hundred Mbps, from any given sever. Do you have a bunch of people on the network downloading large files simultaneously, or are you connected to servers able to saturate your connection? I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch.

jjav3• 20 days ago

but the US situation in 2026 is appalling

appalling?

What exactly, in detail, can't you do with a 1 Gpbps connection?!

My home ISP delivers ~22 Mbps and it is totally fine for all use cases.

glimshe• 20 days ago

I have 5 Gbps available in a near-rural area in the southern US.

It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest.

Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.

mlrtime3• 19 days ago

Funny, I used to live in NYC and I was a few blocks from the Verizon datacenter downtown and one of the first to get direct fiber, FIOS. It was amazing.

Fast forward 10 years , FIOS still only has 1gbps in this area but my rural town will give me 10gbps fiber no problem. I just can't afford the router right now :)

trashface• 19 days ago

1 Gbps is still pretty good if you can get it for a reasonable price. Just did a speed test at my parents place in Philly suburbs, they only get 50Mbps down. They pay A LOT of money to comcast, every month.

qingcharles• 15 days ago

When I was living in the city of Chicago only a couple of years ago the best wired connection I could get was 1.5Mbps AT&T (the tech said it might push 3Mbps if I was lucky, but would only guarantee the slower speed).

Comcast said they'd run a cable for $71,000 as long as I agreed to a multi-year $800/month contract on top.

Ended up with a $40/month T-Mobile 5G hub which got me ~800Mbps.

arjie• 20 days ago

If the geographic factors are dominant then we should expect New Jersey to have 25 Gbps internet.

kvam• 20 days ago

Average and median is not the same. Listed speed and actual speed is not the same (as mentioned in the article).

Also, about the size of the countries. The underlying model scales, that’s the point. Unless you were talking about political willingness to back large commitments. That’s a another question.

pheggs• 20 days ago

for those curious, regarding your first point, as far as I know any home that is dark red on this map has access to it, and any light red is planned to get access: https://ftth.init7.net/

monksy• 20 days ago

Chicago here, 2gbps via coax (so probably 40 or 60 down) is the max I can get.

kovariantenkak• 20 days ago

25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations.

It is available everywhere where fiber internet is available. As of May 2026 this is ~50% of all households in Switzerland.

Youden3• 20 days ago

Not quite. There are some homes where P2MP was installed before the court order that are still P2MP. These still have fiber but only 10Gbps shared, not 25Gbps dedicated.

Also, the only ISP that offers 25Gbps is Init7 and they need to have their equipment at the other end of the fiber to offer 25Gbps. I don't think they quite have 100% coverage yet.

rdiddly• 20 days ago

The area of just the contiguous US is almost 200 times as big as Switzerland. Where did the 85 come from? Did you divide square miles by square kilometers?

sixothree3• 20 days ago

That's exactly what he did. At least he didn't include any of the 300,000 square miles of water.

This argument somehow appears every time there is an article comparing American internet to another country's, regardless of the country. And it's such a lazy argument, you wouldn't expect them to even get the match correct.

Turskarama3• 20 days ago

- The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.

I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_.

What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.

The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.

colechristensen2• 20 days ago

Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?

AnthonyMouse7• 20 days ago

Population density is the thing people are talking about when they say that. It's 6 times higher in Switzerland than in the US.

mrheosuper• 20 days ago

A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal

It will never be both objectively and subjectively equal. Even the geographic is already difference, the weather, then there is people, wealth, etc.

dlcarrier2• 20 days ago

If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.

If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.

hkt• 20 days ago

Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.

I don't think anyone is suggesting the US be covered with broadband, just the bits where people live. That then becomes a comparable problem, insofar as Switzerland has comparable size communities (with the exception of the very largest end of US cities whose population exceeds that of Switzerland)

khalic• 20 days ago

- Swiss here, you’re coping, 25G is available almost anywhere,

- the size doesn’t matter that much, you also have considerably more money and urban density comparable to us or higher. If you want to start counting reasons it’s harder here: we have mountains to go over, strong environmental regulations, can’t build at night in cities, must stop working on Sunday… no cheap labor, etc.

whizzter• 20 days ago

The United States might be 85 times larger than Switzerland but it still has a higher population density than Sweden, and even in rural Sweden (similar population density to Wyoming) where my father lives he has a similar ability to pick providers at will as the Swiss.

rdsubhas• 20 days ago

Yeah, what a biased piece of reporting.

Switzerland has one of the highest Internet prices in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...

And don't talk to me about mobile data prices, it's out of the planet.

DiogenesKynikos4• 20 days ago

Switzerland has some of the highest prices in the world for everything. This isn't unique to the Internet.

fransje264• 20 days ago

As posted above, for information. In Switzerland, fresh from their website:

- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222

- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)

swissdom2• 20 days ago

Hi, that statistic probably looked at the full price of the various plans before discounts. The reality is different, all providers offer significant discounts, and you’ll hardly find anyone paying more than 50 CHF a month for 10 Gbps (including streaming TV channels). Personally, I’ve never paid more than 45 CHF a month for 10 Gbps and TV and I currently pay 38 CHF, but I know people with even better deals.

The same goes for mobile service. The expensive plans are the “standard” ones from Swisscom or Sunrise, the two major carriers, but most people use low-cost digital providers that offer excellent plans for less than 20 CHF a month. Mobile prices, however, remain high compared to the rest of Europe and the world. Still, fiber-optic internet is available in virtually every city, with the exception of very small, remote mountain villages.

I’m an Italian who’s lived in Switzerland for years, and fiber-optic prices here aren’t that much higher than in Italy, especially when you consider speed and reliability.

You can find 25 Gbps plans for less than 70 CHF a month.

dijit• 20 days ago

The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland.

All other things being equal; it's a lot easier to dig huge amounts of fibre runs (following roads) where there isn't a heavy density of people.

Distance is practically meaningless for fibre optic cabling, but digging up historic cities, digging through mountain ranges, avoiding subways, plumbing and ensuring you have enough cables for the density of humans is hard.

Much harder than running cables between buildings that house 10 people which are 50ft away from each other.

freak42• 20 days ago

All your points completely miss the point of the article, no?

DiogenesKynikos4• 20 days ago

Switzerland is small but mountainous.

And just for reference:

  * Delaware: 200 people / km^2
  * Switzerland: 230 people / km^2
  * Massachusetts: 350 people / km^2
  * New Jersey: 490 people / km^2

So you can think of Switzerland as Delaware, but landlocked and full of 4,000-meter peaks.

hdgvhicv• 20 days ago

Switzerland is larger than New Jersey and with a lower population and higher per capita gdp. I assume therefore New Jersey is better than Switzerland in all these metrics, from public transport to internet.

jjav3• 20 days ago

Other than running a commercial CDN at home or something.. what possible need is there for a 25 Gbit home connection?

My home ISP connection (in Silicon Valley) is ~22 Mbit. That is enough for just about everything I can think of. We can run 3 zoom calls simultaneously (3 people in the house), stream movies, play online games, etc, all works fine.

The only time I wish for a bit more is for huge downloads, but that is so rare (once a month? probably not even) that it's just a footnote.

And at my personal office I have ~150Mbit connection and that is overkill for everything I can think of.

msh• 19 days ago

25 gigabit might be overkill for now as there is not a lot of end user equipment supporting it but 22 megabit would be painful for me.

My family have a number of gaming PC's and a playstation, downloading a game is easily 40-60 gigabytes so the difference between 22 megabit and a gigabit makes a huge change in usability.

22 megabit is also not really enough for 4K streaming (netflix 4K is 15-25 megabits, the better ones is even more).

InsideOutSanta• 20 days ago

It's just the fastest tier available in some locations

It's available where I live, and I live in some backwater little town. I think around 60% of the population currently has 25G, and that's expected to reach 80% by 2030.

bulbar• 20 days ago

Any data available regarding the median or how many with no connection at all?

chaz6• 19 days ago

On a similar note, there is 50G internet available in the UK, but there is only a single customer to my knowledge (on the Youfibre/Netomnia network). Another difference is that I believe Switzerland is using 25GBASE-X as the transport, whereas in the UK it is 50G-PON (alongside the regular XGS-PON service which most customers have).

insane_dreamer• 19 days ago

Two important points you leave out:

1G is the max available in many large cities in the US, if that. I live in one and that's the best I can get (residential).

My "1G" (fiber) is definitely _not_ 1G most of the time, because it's shared (as the article points out).

sharts• 19 days ago

Average is the wrong metric.

US may be larger but also wealthier, more powerful. All the heavy hitting innovation is there.

Broadband isn’t hard. Decision makers simply don’t care.

ironbound3• 20 days ago

Don't look up the 40+ Billion spent trying to get every American service.

https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equ...

fransje264• 20 days ago

Don't look up!

avhception• 20 days ago

While the article does have its shortcomings, it drives me crazy that we'd have to build 3 or 4 fiber lines to each house individually here in Germany. Imagine we'd have done it that way with water or electricity. It's completely braindead. Just one town over, there are houses that had the street dug up 3 times to lay fiber. But only to connect the neighborhood 2km down the valley. No internet for them. It's absolutely stupid.

slopinthebag4• 20 days ago

Switzerland has a freer market than America. Free market keep winning, stay mad commies!

CalRobert3• 20 days ago

Crazy idea but...

Do I _need_ 25 Gb internet? Even when I had 1 Gb I never saturated the connection.

mdavid6264• 20 days ago

…and 640kb RAM is more than enough.

CalRobert3• 20 days ago

I get that but in all seriousness if they're saying "the free market" doesn't provide what people want it's worth asking if most people (remember, not HN readers) actually want 25 Gbit internet.

dopadelic• 20 days ago

People really don't have a clue how fast 25Gbps is, no personal device can come close to taking advantage of it. SSDs barely will transfer that fast on the best case scenarios (buffered large blocks). Most wifi won't even clear 0.5Gbps. If you have the latest and greatest wifi7 where both your PC and router supports it, you can get up to 2.5Gbps if you're sitting next to the router. If you're wired, few people have 10Gbps ethernet. You have to get a dedicated adapter for it since practically no PCs come with it. And that's just for 10Gbps. For 25Gbps, there's nothing available for the consumer market. That's enterprise level stuff. A single 25Gbps ethernet card costs $500.

protocolture• 20 days ago

Not Pictured:

The Mad Australian NBN model. The absolute worst method possible.

Switzerland looks like the Singapore ULL model. Glass to the house, with competition for the terminating device. Absolute perfection. Its not anti market really so its a weird place to crow about free markets.

That said, the US is still in a much better position than Aus with local power companies forming coops with ISPs to deliver glass via power conduit. It really is the next best thing. Of course, Australia has power monopolies that make this super awkward.

That said there's nothing wrong with something like Germany, except instead of multiple pits, you just have common pit and pipe. Providers apply for access to the pits and run their own cabling. Australia does this already, but Telstra still owns a large part of the pit and pipe, making it costly, and NBNCo is allowed to police residential competition (The charge being more points than importing drugs) so it never helped us.

Hey this is a great place to look at how many times Australia has fucked its own internet supply.

1. We had ULL with Telstra but tossed that out with NBNCo. 2. We had a small number of PoI's, but the ACCC agreed with the big 4 that this was somehow anticompetitive. 3. We have pit and pipe asset that could be gifted to local government to maintain for service providers. But we leave it owned by monopolies. 4. We could have more ISPs negotiating access to lead ins, but we have power monopolies that make it impossible.

Effectively, stupid nonsense prevents us from picking up anyones good last mile internet scheme.

mdavid6264• 20 days ago

“America is best country in the world” thinking is very visible from the comments.

Yeah, it has super bad internet, but because it’s too big, Europe installed copper wires later, 25Gbit is not really that much in Switzerland, etc.

Millions of reasons, but understanding that the current capitalist system doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.

maxignol• 20 days ago

Thus the prices in switzerland are higher than anywhere else. I don’t know about you, but I’d have no use of 25gbits/s

silisili• 20 days ago

Hate to sound like a cable company, but same. I have 8/8 available to me for barely more money, but I just don't need it. Sites don't load faster, movies don't play clearer, and I don't have a huge family. 1/1 suits me fine.

greggoB• 20 days ago

These sound like two entitely disconnected points, also sans facts?

I could get 25 gbps in Switzerland for CHF 69 pm right now through init7. From what I've seen, this would be considered quite competitive in other countries. In Switzerland this is actually very affordable when compared to salaries.

The article goes to some efforts to show how the Swiss model drives competition which has given us these relatively competitive prices. I'm not seeing how your personal lack of utility for 25 Gbps addresses that, let alone refutes it.

bob1029• 20 days ago

In the United States, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber, you might get 1 Gigabit. But often it’s shared with your neighbors. And you usually have exactly one choice of provider.

I've got 5gbps symmetric right now and I can barely use it. Steam is the only app that can get close to saturating the connection. There is another fiber provider and a docsis provider available. I live in a fairly rural area. There's more options than I care to evaluate at this point.

This article sounds like it was written pre-2020. Times have changed. At least in Texas ISP markets. Maybe others are still stuck in the old ways.

landgenoot2• 20 days ago

I don't care about fancy numbers, I care about high quality peering.

I'd rather have a stable 50Mbit than 1Gbit and 0.5Mbit international peering with packet loss.

inemesitaffia4• 20 days ago

Don't sign up with a Tier 1 or aspiring one

landgenoot2• 20 days ago

How do I compare the peering capabilities of different ISP's? Assuming tier 1 ISP's are not available in my geographic location.

Youden3• 20 days ago

Init7 (the ISP in question) is pretty fantastic for peering. They're good to start with but there have been times I've just written them an email and said "hey, I know you and ASABCD have a presence at BLAH-IX, could you peer directly" and it ends up working.

I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe.

Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.

antirez• 20 days ago

In Catania 10 gbit Internet costs 35 euros/month and is available everywhere in the city and even in a big slice of the small towns around Catania. And indeed public incentives played a big role. But what I believe it is more interesting is that 1 gigabit was common like 10 years ago or even more. Infrastructure is a bit too important to be left to what the market believes will be profitable.

Btw the paradox I have is that my local lan is 1 gbit...

inemesitaffia4• 20 days ago

Once you have 1Gbps Fiber it's not particularly hard to go to 25 if some other entity other than the Telco is covering the costs.

tlamponi• 20 days ago

Interesting to read. I actually did not really looked into the rest of Italy's fibre build out state, but FWIW here in South Tyrol - basically the other end of the country - there's fully build out fibre access into every municipality since 2013. And basically every village (outside the cities most municipalities consist of a handful of villages here) got access a few years too, even the ones with sub 1k population.

ricardobayes2• 20 days ago

Also Spain followed the Swiss model, with a twist. The line was laid by telefonica/movistar, everyone rents from them. You can normally get at least 1Gbps at any residential location (often even rural ones if at least a few houses are clumped together).

kklisura• 20 days ago

Lol I love this thread. It's just pure cope.

gib444• 20 days ago

Cope list:

- Quality matters more than speed

- Average speeds are similar anyway

- US is big

- It would be expensive

- Nobody needs multi gig speed anyway

Those are the kind of excuses a "declining" country like the UK would come out with haha

wisprp• 20 days ago

It's an interesting model, but a few things I can't actually find in the article:

1. Who is initially paying for the physical shared infrastructure?

2. Who is in charge of the maintenance?

plantain• 20 days ago

Australia has the same system. We don't have 25gbit, we have very expensive 1gbit asymmetric, and extremely expensive 1gbit symmetric. What gives?

kalleboo2• 20 days ago

Rupert Murdoch and the Liberal party happened

shevy-java• 20 days ago

The USA is run by a greedy oligarchy. Switzerland is on the other hand closer to a direct democracy. That explains a LOT. (It's not a full direct democracy since they have representatives still, but look at the current orange king and his cronies, they are not going to fix anything but solely to enrich themselves and delay investigations as to who really organised the naughty parties at Epstein islands. Could be called oligarch parties too. They can hire underage people and the "justice" system will not uncover anything.)

crvst2• 20 days ago

Ah yes, the classic gotcha: why doesn’t the world’s largest economy, spanning a continent, look exactly like a country of 9 million that fits inside West Virginia? Truly a mystery. Next up: why doesn’t the US have Monaco’s per capita yacht ownership?

sixothree3• 20 days ago

This argument makes zero sense.

crvst2• 20 days ago

Meanwhile, your counterargument is well supported by data and facts.

ValdikSS• 20 days ago

You know the author has a fast internet connection when the photos are 6 MB PNG each.

ivolimmen• 20 days ago

I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine freezes (I download games to a normal SATA drive and the machine is a Ryzen 9 9900X). I have to option to go to 2Gbit or even 8Gbit but I don't want to buy more expensive switches/routers and network cards for my computers.

Who (not including geeks) would want to go faster than 1Gbit?

dagenleg• 20 days ago

not including geeks

Sir, this is Hackernews

edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers

pshirshov• 20 days ago

Irish model is similar (shared ducts, backbone networks which are mandated to provide connectivity to ISPs, including competitors). But Irish market is shit. All is done over pppoe, hard to get fair dual-stack, assymetric shaping (5gbit down, 50mbit up), hidden 10tb/month limits, etc.

preisschild• 20 days ago

Austria doesn't even have 1gbit/s Internet for private customers in their capital city and it neighbors Switzerland...

burnt-resistor• 20 days ago

GFiber 20 Gbps beta https://gfiber.com/gfiber-labs/20gig/

nickzelei• 19 days ago

I’m fortunate where I’m at in the Bay Area to get 10Gpbs for $50/mo from Sonic. Service has been amazing.

It’s a no brainer at the cost even if it’s not saturated. 10 gig equipment is expensive so majority of my LAN is 1gig. I ended up getting some new network equipment and my WiFi caps at 2.5Gbps.

Steam and Usenet are my primary downloads that can take advantage but even my NAS only has a 1gig card as I haven’t bought the 10gig upgrade card.

Majority of homes are most likely fine with 1 gig, but we also don’t know what the future holds for network bandwidth.

Rochus• 19 days ago

25 gbit internet?

I'm in central Switzerland and I have 15 Mbps internet (just measured with https://www.speedtest.ch/, the cables to the nearest exchange can't handle any more traffic), and I don't know why I would need more.

malteg2• 19 days ago

its not about the size... its aboout the quality...even not available everywhere... fibre optic is threaten as a common good....

malteg2• 19 days ago

It's interesting to see so much nationalism in the context of technological progress at this post... I always thought that people who are interested in progress have a different way of thinking.

abustamam• 19 days ago

I don't get what the fuss is about. I have 2gig internet and it's good enough. I'm not downloading multi gigabyte files often, and even when I do, it's often bottlenecked at the provider, so it wouldn't go faster even if I had 20 gig internet.

cykros• 19 days ago

Switzerland is the only first world country.

LocalH• 19 days ago

The answer is "America is capitalist-first more so than any other country". This is exactly why capitalism isn't the end-all be-all of isms.

I don't mind small capitalism. Open a business, give good service, you deserve to make a few million. But big capitalism? Take back some of the money they hoard for the purpose of the greater good.

As I'm getting older, I'm starting to think that the best possible government would be one that's partially capitalist and partially communist (but without the "state is the proxy" problem of all previous communist states, maybe that's a good use of blockchain)

BobbyTables2• 19 days ago

I have to wonder… is there enough content hosted locally in Europe that having >1Gbps Internet is of actual use?

Sure would suck to have 25Gbps internet if mainly used to fetch files from the other side of the pond…

SamDc73• 19 days ago

Honestly this reads like a badly-written propaganda that relies on no messured statistic.

From okla's Speedtest Global Index:

Fixed broadband (median download): US: #9 306.86 Mbps Switzerland: #10 300.70 Mbps

Mobile: US: #11 205.71 Mbps Switzerland: #42 118.93 Mbps

the "25 Gbit" is top tier prodcut that while avablie in the US (sure not the whole country) it's not sometinhg the avg in both coutnries actully buy/use...

why Switzerland has such fast internet at a reasonable price

also on prices the per 2023 (couldn't find any newer resoruces) [2] 100 Mbps in the US seems a bit cheaper in the US than swizerland (but the diffrnece is honestly neligable to begin with)

Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways.

form a quick serach, this seems to simply be not true, FTTP coverage is 50% in swizerland (comapred to 69% in europe) and 27% in rural areas (compared to 58% in rural europe) per 2024 [3]

The United States prides itself on free markets

boradcam is one of the most regualted/restricted markets in teh U.S (for better or worse) so it really isn't really free market ...

Local governments grant the cable/telecom franchise and levy franchise fees up to 5% of gross revenue (Cable Act 1984, 47 U.S.C. §542). Entrants also need government-controlled pole and right-of-way access; pole/permit fights are what stalled Google Fiber. And ~16–17 states legally restrict or ban municipal broadband.

Section 301 China tariffs (10–25%) since 2018 (Trump) hit optical fiber, routers, and network electronics. Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Act (IIJA) also restriected using some certin chinesse technology when buidling internet infrastructure.

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

[2] https://www.picodi.com/us/bargain-hunting/internet-prices-20...

[3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/57c...

Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

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