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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

• amazingamazing 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • sschueller 6mo ago
    Slop? I wrote this myself over the last 4 days. [edit] Since people really hate the AI images, I have removed all of the ones not relevant to the article. As soon as the github action is through it will be deployed.
    • LoganDark 6mo ago
      The AI-generated images really hurt the article. I found myself skipping everything except for the charts/diagrams.
      • sschueller 6mo ago
        Would you prefer a large wall of text? If that is what people rather have I would leave them out next time. I find it easier to read with images in between the text but I agree, it would be better if the images where not AI.
        • LoganDark 6mo ago
          Again like I said, I don't mind the charts and diagrams but I don't like the random extras. First image: extra. "The Paradox" section header: extra. "The Natural Monopoly" section header: sort of helpful. "The German Model" and "The American Model" headers: also sort of helpful. Also, the chart of monopoly territories is definitely helpful. But then after that, the "monopoly power" image is complete slop. "The Swiss Model" header is sort of helpful. The following couple of photos are also helpful! Speedtest result is helpful. But then the image after that is kind of pointless. "The Oversight" header is kind of pointless. The photo after that is kind of helpful. "The Answer" header I can't really make sense of and I'd lean more towards not helpful.
          • sschueller 6mo ago
            Thank you for your feedback. I have adjust the article now.
            • LoganDark 6mo ago
              Thank you, this is a lot better!
    • mfi 6mo ago
      The article was well written, really enjoyed it and I learned something as a Swiss citizen using this outlet every day! But I agree with the other commenters, I would replace the AI generated images with something else, they drag drown the articles credibility IMO
      • LoganDark 6mo ago
        I would get rid of just the irrelevant images and leave the others. There are a few that are actually helpful.
    • raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
      Your article has so many bad premises it might have gone better with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841
• deafpolygon 6mo ago
  if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you’d be right!
• poly2it 6mo ago
  This article would be so much better without the generic AI-generated images everywhere.
  • sschueller 6mo ago
    Agreed but I didn't want to just take random images from the web that I don't have the rights too and I my artistic skills are not good enough.
    • LoganDark 6mo ago
      You could just not generate extra images that aren't relevant to the article. I like the charts and diagrams even when they're AI, because they serve a purpose. But the extra images for flair or whatever are completely pointless and even annoying.
      • sschueller 6mo ago
        Ok thanks. I will keep that in mind for my next post.
        • heystefan 6mo ago
          Please ignore them, the images definitely helped understand the issue better. Don't anchor on a couple of grouchy hn posters.
          • LoganDark 6mo ago
            Hey there were a lot more before the feedback, the irrelevant ones have been removed[0]. The remaining images in the article are good :) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652734
      • Svip 6mo ago
        I would go a little further (and apologies for being rather blunt): but I find the over-use of irrelevant images to be rather insulting, as if I am unable to maintain focus on an article, without the frequent shiny object.
• cjs_ac 6mo ago
  Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course). The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
  • twelvedogs 6mo ago
    Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
    • 0xy 6mo ago
      They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband. Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago! Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others. TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
      • FireBeyond 6mo ago
        > Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago! Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap. And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
• ttul 6mo ago
  In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either terrible option. Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling). Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island. A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
  • bestouff 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • littlestymaar 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      • hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
        As Peter Theil literally said, "Competition is for losers."
      • youainti 6mo ago
        This is a perfect example of competition in microeconomics. If you've only been exposed to an introductory economics, you've missed out on a lot. This type of situation sounds like an amalgamation of a few exam questions from my first year of an econ PhD. "Cheap talk in a Bertrand market with entry costs and capacity constraints" or something. No I haven't worked it out but my intuition is that it would predict exactly what was observed: the threat of a new entrant with enough capacity risks loosing your entire business so you invest to expand your capacity to prevent that entry.
• ma2kx 6mo ago
  Init7 has on its blog another amazing write up https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/ https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/
  • jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
    Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US which demanded network unbundling, splitting up the fiber/connections versus the internet service, demanding wholesale rate access to infrastructure. It was good. Then the courts decided, meh, we just don't like it. We are going to tell the FCC otherwise. It all went away. The incumbent local carriers have now had monopoly power over huge swarths of the infrastructure. No access to dark fiber. https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerates-tro-fccs-une-rules https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Association_v._FCC_(2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Associat... Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling. But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah, well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down congress's law because "innovation" sounds better. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/11-1355/11-1355-2014-01-14.html https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1... It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition. These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything they want! Bah!! I think it was a other case,
    • frmersdog 6mo ago
      And this is almost certainly the direct cause of the Dot Com Bubble bursting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4 We were bamboozled on a massive scale.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
• bethekidyouwant 6mo ago
  Why isn’t france your European example? Its larger and better served than switzerland
  • lava_pidgeon 6mo ago
    Any sources?
• joe_the_user 6mo ago
  Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like natural monopoly. And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists. The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.
  • underlipton 6mo ago
    The ultimate irony being that these people are the most likely to vote against social safety nets. "No free lunches" and such.
  • raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    It’s not a good article at all… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• tickerticker 6mo ago
  I wish this kind of perspective (international comparison) could be applied to several areas of the USA economy: tax compliance, campaign finance, and banking regulation. Good work, OP. In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber. As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle. My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target. Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states. If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up. Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.
• burnt-resistor 6mo ago
  Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans, replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with various residential housing developments scattered around. What was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20 Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not high prices compared to Australia.
• chrismcb 6mo ago
  Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free market
  • littlestymaar 6mo ago
    Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.
    • emtel 6mo ago
      Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help. Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
      • intalentive 6mo ago
        That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal. “Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!
    • 0x3f 6mo ago
      Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?
• dlcarrier 6mo ago
  tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers. The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators. A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google. Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at. Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules. Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement. Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans. The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)
• dmix 6mo ago
  In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better customer support when the government allowed competition from smaller players. Telecom also got better when they allowed a foreign competitor to compete against the government mandated oligopoly. But the market is still heavily regulated in a way that benefits the existing monopolies.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • skeeter2020 6mo ago
    I think Canada is a great example of how not to do it, despite some price decreases in recent years. We seem to have (near) the worst of all worlds: huge geography, little competition, and government regulation that props up the oligopoly without driving prices down like Europe. Mobile data is even worse.
    • xethos 6mo ago
      I'm running out my contract with TekSavvy (~$80 CAD for gigabit) before switching to Novus (~$60 CAD for 2.5), and my partner and I just switched to Fido (~$30 CAD for 80gig and international calls/SMS). Considering the geography and all the per-capita math (and pain), I don't think we're doing too bad as a country any more.
      • gnabgib 6mo ago
        That last one is a phone plan.. not exactly apples to apples (it's good, but an 80GB/mo cap is rarely enough for home.. and nothing like a 2.5gbps internet plan).
        • xethos 6mo ago
          Because grandparent (that I was replying to) stated "Mobile data is even worse". You're right that it doesn't compare to a 2.5G pipe, but that wasn't my point
    • 6mo ago
• jeffrallen 6mo ago
  This is about urban Switzerland. Way out in the country, we still have crap copper up on poles, which maxes out at 25 Mbits. But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.
  • sschueller 6mo ago
    Yes, that is sadly still the case but the expansion of the fiber build out is now rapidly moving forward. By 2030 +90% will have fiber https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kupfer-mehr-glasfaser.html https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kup...
    • martinald 6mo ago
      That's actually terrible. The UK (which has been a laggard in FTTH in Europe until very recently) is at 84% FTTH coverage already.
  • abc03 6mo ago
    Currently also have copper and Sunrise cable. Just got the cables to the house two weeks ago. I’m now waiting for the local electricity company to get in-house installation. Everything at no costs. So yes, it’s progressing fast.
  • rettichschnidi 6mo ago
    Swisscom has to do better, as regulated by the government. One can get 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month: https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/landline-subscription/basic-service-provision.html https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/landline-subscription...
    • drnick1 6mo ago
      > 80/8 Mbit/s for CHF 65/month This is a terrible value, and good luck uploading anything at 8Mbps...
• clcaev 6mo ago
  This factoring of a market to enable competition by centralizing minimal infrastructure seems the bedrock of best governmental practice. Are there other examples to lean on? How do we turn this into common knowledge?
• gigatexal 6mo ago
  what a well written article. makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo. I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it. I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution. One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.
• comrade1234 6mo ago
  I'm in Zurich and I have 1Gb. My provider is offering higher for no additional cost - I'd have to put in a new modem/fiber-to-Ethernet adapter. However my home network is cat-5e and my switch is also 1Gb so I don't bother - it's pointless.
  • strictnein 6mo ago
    Unless your house is gigantic, cat-5e can handle 2.5Gbps just fine.
  • dmoy 6mo ago
    I get 1G (in the US) and am in a similar boat - I could pay for 8G, and my house is even wired for 10G. But..... all my network equipment is 1G, we rarely saturate it, and I don't want to shell out like a thousand dollars to replace my router, three managed switches, and three AP. Actually $1k might not even do it all, but I could probably get the switches and router for just under $1k and leave the WiFi at 1G. I suspect my 1G costs a bit more than yours though
  • toast0 6mo ago
    I run 10G on cat-5e, so don't let that be a blocker. Your switch and your devices and your router not doing more than 1G would still be an issue though. Of course, my internet is only 1g/1g unless I want to pay to upgrade the munifiber's equipment, and they use good telecom grade equipment, so I don't.
• userbinator 6mo ago
  All connections to the Internet are at some level "shared", except perhaps if you get a direct connection to one of the core routers. As others have mentioned, this is in a dense area and much closer to being in a LAN environment. The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched. Care to give a rebuttal?
  • userbinator 6mo ago
    Apparently this discussion is full of people who don't even know how the Internet actually works. Not surprising for an article that is basically ragebait.
• andy99 6mo ago
  What does one achieve with 25 GB internet? Are speeds actually usefully faster, or is there some other bottleneck that makes the practical speed the same as in the US? Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available? Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?
  • hparadiz 6mo ago
    I can actually get 7 gbit but have no idea what I'd use with it. I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it.
    • simoncion 6mo ago
      > I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it. If the concern is cost (rather than recabling the house) Mikrotik sells solid, inexpensive gear. Its management UIs take a bit of getting used to, but are fine once you've figured them out. You can also find two-port Intel 10gbit NICs on the Newegg "Marketplace" for ~40USD [0], and -while most already come with modules (and you will be informed if they don't)- if the X520s you're sold don't permit non-Intel transcievers, the NIC's firmware can usually be easily modified to change that. [1] [0] <https://www.newegg.com/intel-e10g42bfsr/p/N82E16833106041 https://www.newegg.com/intel-e10g42bfsr/p/N82E16833106041> [1] <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fpatching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634%2F https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fpatching...>
    • db48x 6mo ago
      It’s not official, but you don’t always need to replace Cat5 cable with Cat6 to support 10Gbps Ethernet. Cat5 might only get you a quarter of the range of Cat6 on a good day, but since the range of Ethernet is 300 feet you would need a really big house to have cables that were too long. But generally the real question is how often the extra speed would give you a real measurable advantage. If it’s only a few times per month then it’s probably not worth the extra subscription cost.
• zokier 6mo ago
  Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick google.
  • jmalicki 6mo ago
    While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole, the Bay Area in California does have comparable median household income. In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts. I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to a GPU, etc.
    • kalleboo 6mo ago
      > crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet Is that so crazy? If 10G was the default, you could just plop a cheap NAS at home and nobody would need to pay monthly subscriptions for cloud services.
      • jmalicki 6mo ago
        For cloud services, I only need to match the bandwidth my cellphone has for my home NAS, so 1Gbps would be fine. 10Gbps is like.... my /home on my desktop could be served via NFS from somewhere else and it would probably be barely noticeable. That's just another level of crazy.
      • cbg0 6mo ago
        How is 1G insufficient for running a NAS over the internet?
        • jmalicki 6mo ago
          1Gbps is even slower than a SATA SSD that can saturate a 6Gbps SATA link. 10Gbps gets you speeds only a few times slower than a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. Except you can run that over the Internet!
• mft_ 6mo ago
  I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but consistently and constantly don't.
  • ceejayoz 6mo ago
    I have a gentle rule, which is "if you can do it in one place, it is probably possible to do it in a second". The Swiss are not a separate species.
    • mft_ 6mo ago
      So one would think. And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK. I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct experience to adequately judge.)
      • ceejayoz 6mo ago
        I don't doubt there are differences. I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be changed. I see Americans talk about how impossible universal healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't largely figured it out.
        • whereistejas 6mo ago
          Nothing is insurmountable; however each one of us must play within the practical constraints of our local geographies (political, social, financial and physical). The parent comment probably means that Switzerland is in a positive on all axes unlike the rest of the world.
• harrall 6mo ago
  This article gets ahead of itself. The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it. I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities. We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles. It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.
  • martinald 6mo ago
    I'ts almost certainly shared. 99% of FTTH is (X)G(S)-PON which shares the fibre over a few properties. Usually something like 32 max. The Swiss use point to point fibre (there are a few small pockets of this elsewhere). But in reality it is very hard to saturate. XGSPON has 10G/10G shared between the node. GPON has 2.4gbit down/1.2gbit up shared across the node. In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with). And if it is a problem there is now 50G-PON which can run side by side, so you just add more bandwidth that way.
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      Residential 2.5gb equipment is just starting to appear as a “default” and 10gb is still pretty rare, though accessible if you want it. I don’t even have 25gb and I’ve a home lab!
      • ido 6mo ago
        I had 600mbps down/200 up (I could have upgraded to 1GB) and I downgraded to 175 down/50 up (to switch to a more reliable provider) and didn’t notice any difference (family of 4).
      • manarth 6mo ago
• raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  This article is technically incorrect on so many levels I didn’t even bother to finish it. 1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber 2. Everyone on the internet is using a “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream. If your ISP doesn’t provision enough upstream capacity, the last mile doesn’t matter. 3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile. 4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland 5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day. Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M
  • ragall 6mo ago
    > But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. Yes there is: the cost. > Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile. It is in Switzerland. That's the whole point of this setup. > Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland It is in the big cities. Elsewhere the same arrangement is true, but on a lower scale.
    • raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
      You know being shared at the last mile is exactly what you don’t want? The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps - thst isn’t true.
      • ragall 6mo ago
        The last mile is owned by the local monopoly and can be switched over to any provider. In that sense it's shareable, but the physical medium is not shared. This is very good. > The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps Lack of reading comprehension skills.
        • raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
• jmyeet 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• oceanplexian 6mo ago
  We already have this in Utah with Utopia with 53% coverage across the state (A state 5 times the size of Switzerland) so kind of weird the post is acting like Europe is special or something. And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on both ends if you are super determined.
  • sbrother 6mo ago
    Ooo, does everywhere in Sugarhouse have access to this now? We've been up in Park City relying on wireless point-to-point but are about to move back down to the valley and that is very exciting.
• perching_aix 6mo ago
  The author keeps repeating this idea of a "dedicated internet connection" (DIA), and it kind of just irks me. Not because the author is wrong in how they use it, but because the term itself I find misleading, and I hate to see it continue to poison the common discourse. A dedicated last-mile connection gives you a dedicated link to your ISP’s edge network, not a dedicated path across the internet. You won’t compete with your immediate neighbors on a shared access network anymore, sure, but you’re still sharing the ISP core, peering links, and transit links with the rest of their customers. In practice this usually works well enough, because ISPs engineer their core and peering capacity with low over-subscription, especially for business and DIA customers. So you can often push near line rate anyway, but not because you have a truly reserved slice of the internet. A Switzerland-sized country would need like petabit-scale connectivity to provide actually dedicated 25G links (or even just 1G links) to everyone.
  • userbinator 6mo ago
    Very true. The bottleneck isn't going to be the last mile nearly all the time. In any case, it's clear we're arguing with a ragebait article and a bunch of others who have basically no understanding of how the Internet (or networks in general) works.
• ekropotin 6mo ago
  Im genuinely curious what is a use-case for 25GB Internet in a typical Switzerland household?
  • Anamon 6mo ago
    It's true that few servers even provide that kind of bandwidth. That's why I personally stick to 1 Gbps and save a few bucks. But I have friends who use the 25 Gbps e.g. for off-site backups (a NAS at the office for home backups, one at home for office backups). Stuff like game downloads or uploading large media are also sometimes mentioned. And you can really benefit from the parallel connections in P2P stuff.
• ExpertAdvisor01 6mo ago
  Very misleading article. There is only one provider init7 and coverage is definitely not good in rural areas. Here is an map : https://ftth.init7.net/ https://ftth.init7.net/
  • Anamon 6mo ago
    Only one provider? What gave you that idea? Even TFA mentions four providers, and those are just the most popular, nation-wide ones. I live in Zürich and have a choice between 10 providers (going by the list of the local infrastructure provider[1] -- I don't know if that list is even complete). Rural coverage is challenging, true. And Switzerland has some challenging terrain in places. But FTTH coverage is currently at around 60% of the population, and Swisscom's strategy is to reach 90% by 2035. That doesn't sound so bad, especially when comparing internationally. [1] https://www.ewz.ch/en/private-customers/fibre-optic/fibre-optic-network/ewz-zuerinet.html https://www.ewz.ch/en/private-customers/fibre-optic/fibre-op...
    • ExpertAdvisor01 6mo ago
      I meant the only provider providing 25 gigs .
• grg0 6mo ago
  Ho-lee smokes is that Speedtest screenshot even real? Have some mercy for those of us in third-world infrastructure (US).
• aetherspawn 6mo ago
  Australia copied the Swiss model and in a very short period of time we went from 2Mbps flaky copper to now you can upgrade most properties to 2Gbps fiber for around $300 one-off fee. I hear 10Gbps is coming soon. The only annoying thing is that ours, despite being terminated the Swiss way, isn’t symmetrical, I think due to congestion on the sea cables?
  • shell0x 6mo ago
    I highly doubt that. As a German who lived in Asia and now Australia, this is the most incompetent country. They can't get anything right. I live in the city of Sydney and can only get 1 Gbps down and 200 mbps up for 109 AUD a month. I lived in 2017 in Singapore and the internet was already better than that for 1/3 of the price. Australia seems to be pretty backwards in general though.
    • suslik 6mo ago
      In Belgium you get 500/100 for 65 euro, which is even worse.
    • cbg0 6mo ago
      What a time to be alive to see people put "only" in front of "1gbps". We've come very far.
    • aetherspawn 6mo ago
      You can upgrade that to 2Gbps if you pay the network upgrade fee (basically you pay for the NTD and house-side wiring), after that it costs around AUD 150 per month, which is kind of reasonable…
• FpUser 6mo ago
  Switzerland - self hosting paradise.
• anonymousiam 6mo ago
  So the author's proposed solution is more government control. Pass.
  • adrian_b 6mo ago
    According to you, having public roads is an example of government control? The "author's proposed solution" is the equivalent for communication of what public roads are for transportation.
    • anonymousiam 6mo ago
      I could cite dozens of examples that I've personally witnessed, of governments abusing their position wrt developing and maintaining roads. Projects consume orders of magnitude more money and time than would be required by a private contractor to complete. In a sense, this is similar to the problem with ISPs in the US, because they must overcome the roadblocks put up by Federal, State, and Local governments (often at the behest of lobbyists from competing businesses). There's another angle on this that is even more disturbing, and it's not just limited to the US. Governments like to surveil users of telecom systems. Surveillance becomes more challenging as speeds increase. Keeping speeds down is in the interest of the IC.
• some_furry 6mo ago
  Another thing that I think Europeans often fail to take into consideration is scale. USA: 9,147,590 km^2 Switzerland: 41,295 km^2 That's a factor of 221.5 to 1.
  • martinald 6mo ago
    Yes but if you compare urban areas (where 80% of people live in both continents) in US and Europe it's not massively different (Europe maybe 2-4 more dense depending on the country/city). Obviously you're not going to lay fibre to the last 1% of population in the US (for the most part).
    • slackfan 6mo ago
      As one of the last 1% of population with fiber, your take on population stats in the US is wildly off.
• longislandguido 6mo ago
  Because Switzerland is the size of Maryland. Imagine pouring all federal resources into one cramped state. I thought spamming your own blog was not allowed here.
  • kube-system 6mo ago
    Switzerland and the US have almost identical government expenditure per capita. Maryland still doesn't have 25 Gbps home internet.
    • strictnein 6mo ago
      That's kind of their point. A lot of those government expenditures go to things that citizens of Maryland may not want or benefit from.
      • kube-system 6mo ago
        More federal spending goes to Maryland per capita than the US average per capita. This isn't an an issue of people in Maryland not getting money -- they get robust federal spending and have a robust state budget of their own. This is simply: Americans getting what they vote for, which is notoriously not public infrastructure.
  • Havoc 6mo ago
    >Imagine pouring all federal resources into one cramped state. Bit silly to compare the size of countries but not scaling resources correspondingly.
  • Hikikomori 6mo ago
    Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere. Size of California, quite urban, but you'll still have fiber in the rural parts or even your cabin in the woods.
  • sumedh 6mo ago
    Australia was able to do the same. It had the same US crony capitalism where private companies didnt approve the national broadband fibre network so had to use ADSL for 10 more years but finally a different govt party implemented the fibre network.
• lamnbt 6mo ago
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• exabrial 6mo ago
  What? There is no free market with wired internet. State, federal, and municipalities entrenched local monopolies through "tax breaks", subsidies, over regulation, piles of permits, and many more. The cable/fiber providers played all areas of government like a fiddle.
  • strictnein 6mo ago
    The amount of people here who think any market failure in the US is due to it being a "free market" is kind of astounding. There are exactly zero "free markets" in the US.
    • db48x 6mo ago
      I don’t know if there are zero free markets, but there are an awful lot of thumbs on the scale.
• thelastgallon 6mo ago
  Most states in America ban municipal fiber. They saw EPB (Chattanooga) and said, no, we must make sure that doesn't ever happen again. That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the rules are to make sure the richest people become richer.
  • db48x 6mo ago
    Stop calling it a free market! These stupid rules keep it from being free.
    • jjice 6mo ago
      I believe that was the parent's point in surrounding "free" in quotes.
  • bigstrat2003 6mo ago
    I agree that's a scourge. But of course, it would be very disingenuous to call that a free market. It's not free due to corporate interference, which is why the situation is so bad for consumers.
    • tombert 6mo ago
      I think that's why they had 'free' in scare quotes.
  • carefree-bob 6mo ago
    woah, I didn't know this. How many states have laws banning municipal fiber?
    • jdeibele 6mo ago
      https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks-2023 https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... It’s from 2023 but says 16 to 19 states.
      • 6mo ago
• 3yr-i-frew-up 6mo ago
  [dead]
• btorretta 6mo ago
  why is it a lie? a natural monopoly doesn't bar other entrance, it's just naturally difficult, like space travel. also, unpopular comment but who cares? my Internet does everything I want it to and I'd wager that the price from the swiss government is highly subsidized. A market means a meeting of supply and demand, it's possible that currently the swiss speed is overboard for most users.
• ukd1 6mo ago
  I get 10g symmetric in Austin for $150/m. I had Cox before, and it was $180ish for 1g down and ~50mb up. Things are improving!
  • dmix 6mo ago
    You can get 8gb fibre for around $65/usd a month in Toronto.
  • piperswe 6mo ago
    What provider has 10G? Highest I've seen is 5. Genuine question - I'll keep them in mind next time I move across town!
  • nunez 6mo ago
    Because Google Fiber HQed there. Come to Houston, where you'll pay >$200/mo for 5Gbit if AT&T covers your area or MUCH LESS if Ezee is an option.
• dangus 6mo ago
  Before I start with my real comment I'll point out that the AI slop images really detract from this article and the author should stop. To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing even better than that. Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be ahead of most places, although they certainly pay for it. (Even that has gotten way, way better. I'm getting really nice MVNO service with unlimited data and even a decent unlimited tethering plan for less than $30/month) 25 Gigabit is nice but that's so expensive on the client device side to the point where it's basically unattainable for any consumer. Your average consumer primarily uses the Internet via WiFi devices that might max out at 300Mbps practical speeds or lower depending on when they purchased their devices and WiFi access point and their distance from it. Then you've got the problem of the speed on the other end. 25Gb fiber is great until you realize that the server you are downloading from is only going to give you 1/100th a lot of the times. I haven't even mentioned the fact that you're now adding CPU and SSD bottlenecks to the equation. I'm pretty sure 25Gb/s is higher than the maximum write speed on my SSD. I have gigabit fiber at home and the ability to buy faster speeds from my ISP but I find the idea totally pointless when that means I would have to buy $500 in networking equipment (if not more) and possibly rewire my home (currently sketchy Cat 5e that seems to be installed poorly and I'm lucky to have that). I even have the latest WiFi 7 from a highly reputable prosumer brand along with very new WiFi 7 and 6E 6Ghz client devices but the highest speed I see using those devices where I want to use them is around 600Mbps.
  • Karuma 6mo ago
    Only the images? The entire article is pure AI slop. But no one even cares anymore... People seem to love this kind of empty text, or no one even reads anymore, or everyone here is a bot already... Who knows.
    • sschueller 6mo ago
      The article is not AI slop. I spent 4 days on it and the video I made to go along with it with me speaking every word. The video has no AI, it is all stock video and audio footage which I pain stackenly stiched together in DaVinci Resolve. I used AI to spell check and fix my ESL grammer in the article. Initially I also generated a number of unnecessary AI images which I removed again. I only left the ones that explain certain things like the p2p model.
• IFC_LLC 6mo ago
  Good take, and most of the data in the article is quite correct. The problem is a total mix up of cause and effect. The US has had a decent communication network since way back. We had telegraph, telephone and telex. Bell and AT&T and all that stuff. We've invented and piloted modems, T1 and cable TV. Our infrastructure at times goes back 200 years old. We have rules and words in today's networking linguo that go back 70 years old. You can't just go and tell that it would have been better this way. It absolutely would. And I'm happy for Swiss people who can have 25gpbs at a fraction of the cost. But you can't do that with an emerging tech that is trying to replace existing architecture. Swiss guys built all that after the tech was wide-spread in the world, and they have built it over a very outdated infrastructure. It was a breeze. US just unable to use this approach. We can't. Should we come up with a new one? Yes. Should we look at the Swiss solution and try to replicate it. Yes. Is it awesome? Yes. Would it work here? No.
  • lava_pidgeon 6mo ago
    Ehm, Do you seriously think 70 years ago Swiss had no telephon net so they create a new one? Or is this argument that US is just too special to change?
• danielmarkbruce 6mo ago
  Path dependence is a thing.
• lava_pidgeon 6mo ago
  While on surface scratch level this might be a good entry analysis it lacks deeper comparisons to other great networks nations Like Romania or South Korea. Is it cheaper there? What about coverage? Uptimes? Why is the service "better"? Why is it by the way a free market "lie"? ( For me a lie means a wrong information by purpose)
• shell0x 6mo ago
  Regardless if it's Switzerland, Germany or the USA. Everyone has better than we have in Australia. I can't wait to go back to Asia after citizenship to join the developed world again.
• dlenski 6mo ago
  I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home. I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade; maybe we won't for that reason. What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!
  • denkmoon 6mo ago
    I don't want to wait 6hrs to download a game patch that's 40gb or whatever because that's sadly the norm. With 1gbit I can do anything and it doesn't induce latency or cause connection quality issues with anything else because no one thing can come close to saturating it really, with a few exceptions (Steam being the main one). I can also seed at high speed to private trackers. It'd be an effort to max out a 25gbit connection at home that's for sure.
  • timschmidt 6mo ago
    I have gigabit synchronous fiber at home thanks to a group of local tech folk who built out the network. The biggest change for me is that I rely more on my NAS at home over a Wireguard tunnel for things I would have used the cloud or a hosting service for before. Going to work? No worries about forgetting a USB stick or portable SSD. I can always just fire up Wireguard and grab it from home. Sharing Jellyfin access with family and friends has also been fun.
  • gdubs 6mo ago
    Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS updates, etc, etc, etc.
  • neonstatic 6mo ago
    An example from someone who has lived at a condo in Asia. Around 8 PM the internet becomes unusable. Everyone's back home and they want to watch their favorite series. If you need to work at that time, e.g. if you work US hours, you are screwed. P.S. I experienced this at different condos in different countries in South East Asia.
• wespiser_2018 6mo ago
  The comparison feels off because it treats Switzerland and the United States as interchangeable test cases for “free market vs. not,” when they operate under completely different constraints. Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous populations. At that scale, you’re not comparing “policy choices,” you’re comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in Switzerland don’t fail in the U.S. because they’re bad, they fail because they don’t scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-autonomous states. So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market dynamics isn’t really isolating “free markets” as a variable, it’s bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion, then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair dunk and very much "punching down".
  • Hikikomori 6mo ago
    Many states prohibit municipalities to do fiber. Regulatory capture and monopolies are your problem. Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere and are much more like some of your states.
    • mexicocitinluez 6mo ago
      How much bigger is the US than Switzerland? Its like 200x the size of it. Do you think that it's size and division of 50 distinct states might make that task a bit tougher?
      • Hikikomori 6mo ago
        Was talking about Sweden. But it's ok, I know Americans find geography challenging.
        • mexicocitinluez 6mo ago
          My bad, I originally said Sweden, but then edited to say Switzerland after seeing the title and doubted myself. It's okay, you don't have to argue with the point being made or anything.
• renewiltord 6mo ago
  I think there’s quite a little bit missing here. As an example, Switzerland’s road/rail lines and US road:rail lines are both treated in this way and the outcomes are different. So I think the dominant effect isn’t in this form of building. In addition, requiring fiber to each new home would expand housing costs in the US substantially because many are not located close by to existing fiber networks. I’m not familiar with Swiss government policy but their government construction efforts are frequently far more successful for lower costs than ours. I cannot say whether Switzerland does it differently but usually in the US if there is surplus to be captured it is captured. As an example, if the Swiss system were to be implemented with US tools it would look like a government project would here: private companies would be invited to build the fiber to each home, and eventually one would win the contract and if the economic benefit would be $1b, they would charge $0.99b to construct it. M If the government itself attempts to build it, it is constrained by its pension obligations and its desire to remain solvent to not actually have employees on staff. It therefore will use contractors in order to do things and we’re back in situation 1. Governments originally formed for this kind of shared task and to enforce no free riding on it. But whatever factors drive US politics, US government purposes are to extract maximally from economically productive classes and redirect it to politically productive classes - through the use of selective government contracts and populist giveaways.
• Aurornis 6mo ago
  This article is hard to take seriously when it presents 25 Gbps internet like it's available everywhere in Switzerland. Even the page you click on has an "Up to" and requires you to enter your address to check availability. That's on top of the usual problems with comparing small European countries to all of America. Switzerland's entire population is barely larger than the population of New York City. There are several metro areas in the US with more people than Switzerland. Switzerland is also very, very small. It's lands mass is equal to about 0.5% of the United States. We only have a handful of states smaller than Switzerland. There are valid geopolitical discussions to be had, but it's hard to read these articles that single out tiny little European countries and compare them to the sprawling United States and ignore the elephant in the room.
• kylehotchkiss 6mo ago
  How many Switzerlands is USA again
• ksec 6mo ago
  Even in Wireless / Mobile Carrier they have company like American Tower / China Tower that shares infrastructure cost. So none of this is new, I always thought the reason it is not done is because of company interest and politics. Internet should be treated just like Electricity and Water. There are other things we could do without completely changing the dynamics or policy. We could mandate all home leasing and selling to have Internet Speed labeled. Giving consumer the knowledge and choice. And all future new home to have at least 1Gbps Internet and upgradable to 10Gbps or higher as standard. The market will sort itself out. And give government some space and room to further negotiate terms with companies. Now the technical question, why no sharing? why point to point? why 4 fibre and not 2 or 8? And the no sharing is a little bit of gimmick, because at the end of the day everything is shared. The backbone has 100Gbps and you cant have 10 labours all using 25Gbps. I also dont think P2P make sense in a metropolitan city like Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong, especially in high rise, ultra high density buildings with limited space. When 50G-PON barely meet demands we are looking at 100G or 200G-PON. Individual fibre is simple not feasible in those settings.
• limagnolia 6mo ago
  1) Switzerland is tiny compared to the US. 2) FTTH is only available to about 60% of the population right now. It is not clear what percentage of those homes have access to 25 Gbit service. While I think the model of having the government own the Fiber lines and selling access to providers has a lot of potential, it would be very expensive to build this out to even 60% of the US.
• alex_suzuki 6mo ago
  Swiss here. Just a minor clarification on the article: fibre is not available everywhere in Switzerland. Actually the rollout has been quite slow, and chances are that if you live in a rural or suburban area (like me) or in an older building then you might not have fibre, and are limited to (fairly decent) copper.
  • nextstep 6mo ago
    Can confirm this guy is Swiss Has arguably the best infrastructure and system in the world and will still find issue with it. A real Swiss hardly knows the horror show that is the rest of the non-Switzerland world. yeah, fiber rollout is slow outside of the cities. It’s still better than 95% of the developed world. All perspective.
    • panick21_ 6mo ago
      People endlessly complain that the SBB is 'always' late.
      • kuboble 6mo ago
        Like if you have a semi-important meeting in Zurich at 9am It's perfectly fine to take a train which arrives in Zurich at 8:53. And in an unlikely scenario that the train is late, everyone will agree that it's a valid circumstance.
        • kshacker 6mo ago
          Assuming zero time to walk into office (just saying), one day they will start scheduling meetings at 8:53 because we all do get here at 8:53.
      • projektfu 6mo ago
        Better to arrive (a couple minutes) late than to leave one minute early.
    • alex_suzuki 6mo ago
• LeonTing1010 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• lclc 6mo ago
  It's definitely because of the free markets. Only because Init7, the provider who actually provides the 25 Gbit/s, is constantly fighting Swisscom, the government-owned provider.
• cycomanic 6mo ago
  I would argue that the Scandinavian countries are a much better example to use than Switzerland. In contrast to Switzerland Sweden leads the world in fibre access build out (while being geographically much larger). While I haven't seen 25 G internet 10G is relatively common and 1G is the default (at around 40-50 euro per month). The model has is quite similar to Switzerland though, open access fibre infrastructure with competition over providing the data, either using equipment of the main provider or using their own equipment.
  • brabel 6mo ago
    I live in Sweden, and I don’t see a fiber plan available from Telia, the biggest provider, faster than 1Gb!? https://www.telia.se/bredband/fiber https://www.telia.se/bredband/fiber And I have the 600M plan since it’s less than half the cost of 1G but still plenty fast for my needs. Where do you even find 10G??
    • cycomanic 6mo ago
      I think Telia openfiber only does 1G but Bahnhof villafiber offers 10G, not sure about others.
• vbernat 6mo ago
  France has 90% FTTH coverage in 2025, with 60% of households over 1 Gbps. One of the incumbents, Free (my employer), deployed P2P fibers in very dense areas but is switching to P2MP for economic reasons (and because this was not a competitive advantage). It's unclear to me if Switzerland plans to achieve this coverage with P2P. What looks great in Switzerland is not that each household has four dedicated fibers to the CO, but that Swisscom has responsibility for these fibers. In France, we have competition between operators for both services and infrastructure. In very dense areas, each building can have its own infrastructure operator (with an obligation to share); in less dense areas, this is by district (with an obligation to share); and in rural areas, this is a subsidized network (with an obligation to share). The downside is that there are "mutualisation points" where each ISP can go to plug or unplug subscribers, and they become a mess (https://img.lemde.fr/2020/06/04/300/0/900/600/1440/960/60/0/2005399_BSRUJTqyG5Uu__r6rHTrzVSF.jpg https://img.lemde.fr/2020/06/04/300/0/900/600/1440/960/60/0/...). BTW, I am also disturbed by AI-generated images. The ones with the three workers laying cables look highly unrealistic and made me pause for a couple of minutes, wondering if they lay cables that way in Germany. The ones about how households are connected to CO look like you get multiple 720-fiber cables to the same household.
  • jdeibele 6mo ago
    I took the image to be showing how inefficient it was to run that much fiber three times instead of just once. It’s unlikely that they’d do it at the same time but it seems very difficult to show buried fiber and a backhoe ripping up the street.
    • vbernat 6mo ago
      In reality, this does not happen that way. If a path already exists, you can pay to use the same duct (unless it's full) to install your own fibers. At least, it works this way in France.
      • lachiflippi 6mo ago
        It absolutely does happen that way in Germany. We had Fiber Company A rip up the entire city a year ago, and Fiber Company B ripped up the streets again just a few weeks ago. ETA from my ISP to actually get any of those lines into my apartment is still 2028.
• ivraatiems 6mo ago
  It's absolutely true that ISPs in the US are horrifically anti-competitive, and also that they should be treated as utility carriers, like electricity companies, not as "optional" services. But that said, it took more than forty years to electrify the entire United States[0]. "The internet", as we think of it, hasn't even existed for 35 years yet. (Yes, I know there were networks before that that the current system arose from, but that's hair-splitting. I don't think the kind of Internet the average person might even consider using existed before, generously, ~1995-1996.) Yet, 95% of US adults use the Internet, implying a penetration at least as high[1]. The median Internet speed in the US is around 250mbps down and is in the top 10 in the world[3]. The problem is that access and speeds are not evenly distributed, not that we can't get 22gbps symmetric down/up. We don't need to give people in cities faster Internet; truly, you do not need that speed to do day-to-day tasks. You don't even need the 1gbps down/150mbps up that I have. What we need to do is make sure people in rural areas can access at least the median speed. That said, I think we could give it another 15-20 years and see where our country with around 36 times the population and 238 times the landmass is at in terms of speeds. [0] https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/how-the-history-of-electrification-in-the-united-states-can-help-the-world-banks-ambitious-plan-to-electrify-africa/ https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/how-the-history-of... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... [2] https://tachus.com/internet-speeds-usa-vs-the-rest-of-the-world/ https://tachus.com/internet-speeds-usa-vs-the-rest-of-the-wo...
• black_13 6mo ago
  [dead]
• oyebenny 6mo ago
  I'm jealous.
• mirekrusin 6mo ago
  There should be more of shared infrastructure / government / law patterns, something like wikipedia but for running countries. People all over the world seem to be fighting same little battles and falling into same traps all the time. There are many known gems that present structure in ecosystems with correct incentives that do work, they should be known/discoverable and they should be consulted when making decisions.
• qq66 6mo ago
  What is the benefit of 25Gbps home internet?
  • Podrod 6mo ago
    You literally cannot think of a single benefit for having fast Internet?
    • qq66 6mo ago
      I can think of a benefit of having 1Gbps. I can't think of anything that a home user would benefit from 25Gbps that is something a government should actually care about (watching 10 different 8K Netflix streams at the same time is not a human rights issue)
• bob1029 6mo ago
  I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods) and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had 3 competing FTTH providers when I left. I don't think the story is what it used to be anymore. I don't know of a single suburban development in the state that doesn't have fiber today. The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house while the water and electricity were gone. I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments. You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these materials. With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30 days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the disruption is worth it. I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now. Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.
  • nunez 6mo ago
    There are plenty of rural/exurban/suburban cities where Xfinity "10G" DOCSIS coax, HughesNet/DirecTV or Starlink are your only realistic options.
• cowmix 6mo ago
  My favorite example is here in the Phoenix metro area. We had DSL and cable internet pretty early compared to the rest of the country (mid/late 90s), but then things stagnated. Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, and the incumbents slowed their roll too. It was a on-the-nose reminder that these companies can move fast when they think a real competitor might show up.
  • senorrib 6mo ago
    Weirdly, I live in a somewhat rural part of Brazil, and all providers are small players. They’re all offering 1Gi FTTH and are now competing on price. Meanwhile, the closest metro area still suffers with cable internet topping at 600M and low availability. Some big cities have seen a surge of small providers too, which has been great for consumers. That said, I dont buy the “natural monopoly” argument at all, especially trying to compare it to water supply.
    • projektfu 6mo ago
      My wife is from Rio Grande do Norte and I'm always impressed that most of it has 1GB fiber, but roads are generally in poor repair and cell service is lacking outside of cities. The ISPs are not always good at maintaining that raw capacity, though.
• klamann 6mo ago
  But here’s the crucial part. This article didn't start as LLM slop. It didn't happen because the author actually didn't have anything meaningful to say. It happened because the author chose to "spell check [the article] with AI".
• therealdrag0 6mo ago
  Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does the internet provider actually provide?
  • alex_young 6mo ago
    The equipment on both sides of the ‘tube’. Oh, and the backhaul to said equipment.
  • globular-toast 6mo ago
    They provide layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model[0] and usually other related services like DNS, DHCP, email etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
  • db48x 6mo ago
    They give you an IP address, maybe ipv6 or a static ipv4 address if you pay more. They compete on quality of service, network policies, backhaul capacity, price, necessary services like DNS, extras like email or bundled Netflix subscriptions, etc, etc. Some of these qualities are more legible than others.
• db48x 6mo ago
  Actually, Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps symmetrical service in the Northwest of the US: <https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig>. The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.
  • buildbot 6mo ago
    oooooo how did I miss this before
    • db48x 6mo ago
      Probably just because there are so many ISPs in the USA that keeping track of all of them is impossible. I only know about it because I’m a customer (but not sadly of their 50Gbps service; maybe one day).
      • buildbot 6mo ago
        I actually meant their multi gig service in general/this page - I know ziply quite well! The 10G seems like a price/sanity sweet spot, 50G is really massive overkill, as tempting as it would be…
        • db48x 6mo ago
          Ah :) 50Gbps is so very shiny…
• AlecSchueler 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• brailsafe 6mo ago
  It's nice to hear about examples where the incombent duopoly telcos finally get off their ass as soon as there's the threat of someone else coming in and installing fiber. Sadly, in my hometown, the competition must not be so intense, since Bell and Shaw/Rogers literally just lie about having it, by renaming their service to "Fibe" Internet or literally "Shaw Fibre+ Gig Internet" when Bell's coverage area amounts to only brand new builds or neighborhoods, and Shaw (now Rogers) doesn't have a real fiber network at all, it's just marginally faster download ceilings with 15mbps uploads.
• ssivark 6mo ago
  Is the cost of laying fiber (via a public utility) to each household counted as part of the monthly internet bill, or is that funded separately? (eg. as part of property taxes)
• p4bl0 6mo ago
  My sister lives in Switzerland, in a remote place in the mountain from a small town. Even over wifi the bandwidth at her place is so fast it made my BitTorrent client crash repeatedly. The solution was to disconnect my system by deactivating the wifi, relaunch my BitTorrent software, set a rate limit to the download speed at 30MB/s, and then reactivate wifi.
  • seba_dos1 6mo ago
    30MB/s is not a lot. Which client was that? KTorrent can easily deal with more than three times that, which is what I get here in Poland on a plan that's not even the fastest one available.
    • p4bl0 6mo ago
      It was KTorrent! But to be fair I just arbitrarily thought that 30MB/s would be more than enough speed (at my place in France that's probably the fastest my internet connection is capable of), tried that, it worked, in a few seconds the file was there, and that was it. I didn't try to see how fast I could go before a crash, maybe if I would have set it to 100MB/s it would have still been ok.
      • seba_dos1 6mo ago
        Seems like it would be good to move some of the stuff it does to a dedicated thread as I've noticed the UI freezing for some time when downloading a lot of data fast (but I believe it's more about my slow SSD than Internet speed). No crashes though!
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  • manarth 6mo ago
    I've had various pains with QBittorrent (nox) which seem to vary based on the version of the client and the version of libtorrent used. Out-of-memory and resume issues, but varying according to the torrent size, number of simultaneous downloads, and version/configuration specifics. Torrent software (the clients and the libraries) feel a little out-of-sync with prevailing torrent sizes and bandwidth availability.
• kev009 6mo ago
  I'm on a 100mbit fixed wireless connection after moving out of the city where I used to have a GPON connection. The only thing I really miss is the extremely low latency of GPON plus being in a datacenter city. Progress is good, and physical connections are well worth the investment due to how long the stuff will last. But I honestly think VDSL2 and cable are still good enough for most people. The typical family and youth are probably on 5G as much as wifi these days.
• oriettaxx 6mo ago
  italy, a house in the so called 'rich' nord est, where 'Lega' party has been ruling for decades: * no fiber in the neightbour I am * internet on mobile: 10M when lucky * all houses have no city water pipe I'm glad they started to collect blak water (a month ago)
  • Hikikomori 6mo ago
    Currently in Palermo old town. Got fiber and get 200+ mbit over wifi. Even 5g when I go out.
    • oriettaxx 6mo ago
      oh, once you have a real fiber I guess problem is solved: the issue is to be in a building where you can have it. btw: 5G here, too, but speed is slow (wind3). What does your speedtest with palermo says? I have no doubt it's pretty slow :)
      • Hikikomori 6mo ago
        Didn't test 5G, just the wifi over fiber, but didn't perceive any slowness when using it.
        • oriettaxx 6mo ago
          let us know: my personal experience (which includes a winter in downtown Palermo 2 yrs ago) is that speeds is pretty poor: it's much better in Addis Abeba, Kampala, Kigali...
          • Hikikomori 6mo ago
            On the train elsewhere, but can try if there's any 5g there.
• fainpul 6mo ago
  Good article which would be even better without the AI slop images.
• agateau 6mo ago
  I wonder if the spare fiber connections could be use to mesh houses together, in a kind-of decentralized way?
• yard2010 6mo ago
  > This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight. They don’t compete on price or quality. They extract rent. Sounds like racketeering with extra steps..
• panick21_ 6mo ago
  As a Swiss person with access to 25Gbit, its honestly just to hard to get a actual router that can do 25Gbit, I opted for 10Gbit, just so I could use a normal router.
• VimEscapeArtist 6mo ago
  AI-generated graphics make my eyes bleed
• sometimes_all 6mo ago
  In Mumbai, a fiber plan with 300 Mbps symmetrical is around USD 20 with tax. A 1 Gbps is about 50 USD with tax. Also includes a landline number, Netflix (plan depends on which fiber plan you use, the 1 Gb ones have Premium) and a bunch of other local subscriptions (some of which include HBO shows). Have never had a single hitch, and I can switch providers if I want as long as they have infra in the city. Despite presence of some very big names (Jio, Airtel), there still is healthy local competition, and the former haven't been able to play any monopoly-related games yet, since it's quite easy to switch. The past few years have been a significant upgrade compared to what I've observed happening in the US. Providers might even start offering 10+ Gbit for consumers in the future, but I doubt there's a market for it right now.
• scirob 6mo ago
  I can confirm init7 and the whole setup in CH is indeed working well
• palata 6mo ago
  The only reason I can see to not treat natural monopolies as government-owned monopolies is political: those in power benefit from privatising those. Maybe this shows that Switzerland has a sane political system?
  • bsenftner 6mo ago
    Why doesn't X have Y? When talking about nations, that is typically corruption. Why can't NationX have quality public transit? Corruption. Why can't NationX have quality political parties or politicians? Corruption. Why can't NationX have a quality education and produce people capable of understanding and supporting their own political system? Corruption.
    • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      This is a thought-terminating cliché [1]. Not an actual explanation. Like, why is the assumption that countries should be homogenous? Since when did geography, culture, industrial structure, natural-resource availability and national wealth become irrelevant? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
      • bsenftner 6mo ago
        Maybe thought terminating but it is discussion instigating, and if stated in a public conversation by anyone of authority and power, it's a nuclear bomb going off. This is the unstated conversation that needs to occur in public, and not by me or you or anyone less than a ruler of a major country, and not that idiot Trump.
        • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
          > it is discussion instigating Not really. "Corruption" as the answer to why America doesn't have 25 Gbit internet is (a) mostly wrong and (b) useless in terms of developing next steps. > the unstated conversation that needs to occur in public Everyone is constantly talking about corruption. Pretending it's "unstated" is wrong. The conversation usually doesn't go anywhere because saying corruption with zero evidence is essentially useless for generating next steps. Maybe you're right. Maybe it leads to a wild-goose chase. Either way, insufficient to actually do anything with.
• haunter 6mo ago
  I live in a small town (~10k) in Hungary and we have 4Gbit fiber here
  • halapro 6mo ago
    This is one of the benefits of living in Europe, which is relatively densely populated compared to places like the US.
    • sumedh 6mo ago
      Does New York, LA etc have 25 Gbit internet?
      • halapro 6mo ago
        Density doesn't cause faster internet but it certainly facilitates it. The US has far too much lobbying to favor consumers.
        • sumedh 6mo ago
          Now you are moving the goalpost.
• firesteelrain 6mo ago
  I have 500 Mbps internet (fiber optic) with 40+ devices on it. I don’t see myself needing even 1 Gbps nor even close to 25 Gbps. At my enterprise, we have 900 simultaneous users to include thousands of CICD jobs, and we don’t even come close to 25 Gbps.
  • beAbU 6mo ago
    People were saying the same thing about 10Mbps 15 years ago. Things change, and 25Gbps is massive future proofing for the next 50 years probably.
    • firesteelrain 6mo ago
      My point is I don’t even come close to the bandwidth limits. My latency is excellent. I had coax based internet and it was going down a lot. I switched to fiber about 5-6 years ago. Never went down once
      • beAbU 6mo ago
        Yes, and my point is 10 years from now when you are streaming your 16k Netflix movie while saving all you 8k cctv camera footage to the cloud you might have a different opinion about gigabit internet.
        • im3w1l 6mo ago
          Money has a time value. It's better to build things just before you need them than decades prior.
  • himata4113 6mo ago
    It's more of a "wow how could I have tolerated 500mbps" once you experience 1gbps and 10gbps.
    • xxs 6mo ago
      realistically the only part at half a gb/s I'd care is latency. Latency is a lot more important than the throughput.
• dangoodmanUT 6mo ago
  > This is marketed as competition. But it’s not. It’s a cartel. Each company gets its own protected territory, and consumers get no choice. Starlink has me extra excited for exactly this: region agnostic competition. Get rekt, telecom incumbents
• cesarb 6mo ago
  > Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways. [...] That dedicated fiber terminates in a neutral, open hub. If you think about it, other than the "neutral, open" part, it's a return to the traditional phone model, where every home gets a dedicated point-to-point copper pair (or sometimes two pairs), which terminates in a hub (the telco central building) nearby, instead of being shared between several homes (though I've heard that, in the distant past, phone lines were also sometimes shared between households).
• ascotan 6mo ago
  The real reason for the “cartels” in the US is because of the cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because the United States is so large there are only a few companies that can create the infrastructure required to service large area areas with fiber. So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth. It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.
  • everyone 6mo ago
    "It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this." Why? Other countries with similar population densities have done it. A bigger country should have an advantage due to economies of scale.
    • Xunjin 6mo ago
      I think he means it's not economic viable to the companies, however as you can see the Swiss model was defined by politics. Even though, I agree with you it's possible, in my city the internet only got better when a monopoly was broken, and a state company decide to work in a new infrastructure, all FTTH, now I pay less than 100BRL for 300/150Mbps with that price 10 years ago it was only possible ADSL connections (25Mbps). Now every major provider do have FTTH infra with great prices.
    • ranman 6mo ago
      Which countries? Density matters but raw volume matters too.
  • jmyeet 6mo ago
    This is just pure nonsense. The only reason for "cartels" is regulatory capture. Most of the cost of an ISP is the so-called "last mile". Depending on your locale this is usually either stringing up cables on existing telephone poles or digging trenches, typically in the setback area between the road and the sidewalk that you might maintain but you don't technically own (or the municipality maintains an easement on, it varies). Once you go from the premises to a central POP, the costs basically go to zero (per install). Backhaul bandwidth for a residential ISP is incredibly cheap, even free with peering arrangements. The point is that geography really doesn't matter. Wiring up a 10,000 homes in Phoenix, Zurich, Shanghai or Sydney is basically the same (normalized for labor costs). The US is very spread out due to geography. It doesn't matter. The links between towns are a small fraction of the cost and often covered by existing rights-of-way anyway (eg railroads). You compare that to a highly urbanized and concentrated population like Australia where urban density is very similar to many American towns and cities and you're dealing with a very similar cost structure. Think about it this way: if geography was the issue and not, say, artificial barriers to prevent competition (including from municipal broadband), why would the ISP lobby spend so much moeny to make municipal broadband illegal (as they do in many states)? Or why would they formalize a monopoly into a contract with an "exclusivity" deal (ie franchise agreement)?
• slackfan 6mo ago
  Because America built the backbone for our connected systems 50+ years ago, and also because the US of A is 238 times larger than Switzerland. /thread
• phkahler 6mo ago
  Switzerland is 1/6 the size of Michigan and has 90 percent as many people as Michigan (9M vs 10M). With a higher population density I'd expect better rollout of things like internet service. And that's just ONE average size US state - there are 50, some of which are larger with even fewer people. It's not really a fair comparison regardless of which business or political factors are in play.
  • scraptor 6mo ago
    So what's your excuse for why New York has equally bad internet?
    • AdamJacobMuller 6mo ago
      City or state? City: just take a walk through manhattan and in a block or two look at the giant open-pit excavation with a 200-year-old morass of undocumented infrastructure under the street. This is before you even try to run fiber up to units in buildings which were built before electricity was standard. I am hardly saying it can't be done, simply that it is not as easy as density makes it seem. State: the exact opposite problem -- just drive two hours north of NYC and (if you're not still in manhattan) you'll be in some fantastic areas of the state, but, the exact opposite problem exists. Of note, I do think both of these problems are solvable and we should fundamentally solve them. Just anybody who thinks it's easy or cheap to do so is being myopic. If spent wisely, could be a very useful investment of our money, however.
      • SpaceNugget 6mo ago
        Do you think the wilds two hours north of NYC are more or less difficult for laying fibre lines than between homes literally in the alps? 60% of switzerland is alps. Not exactly a cake walk for infrastructure development. And why would they need open pit excavation for FTTH in NYC? Are there not existing trenches and under-street ducting for cables already in most of the city? Surely there are going to be some tricky areas but how to the other utilities like phones and electric work on their cabling?
  • 6mo ago
• DonnyV 6mo ago
  This is a nice story and how it played out is great for Switzerland. But the ways listed on how to fix it, wouldn't work in the US. See companies in the US have already worked around what worked for Switzerland. The different levels of governments in the US are corrupt. Sometimes from town all the way up to Federal. Actually its definitely completly corrupt at the Federal level. A politician or Judge has already been bought to make sure a case like the Swisscom lost. Would never happen here. So before we have any progress in really any industry in the US. We need to desperately clean house with our politicians, attorney generals and judges.
• hermannj314 6mo ago
  Well, whenever my city has to vote on extending the Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, coincidently Xfinity/Comcast is giving $5 off pizza coupons at my local pizza place. Bet they don't have that in Switzerland.
• crispyambulance 6mo ago
  Simple question that doesn't seem to be addressed by "speed tests". Does 25Gbps matter? I mean, it's not like your online services are going to be "faster", right? Is Netflix or any other web endpoint that normal people use going to be noticeably better because a household has 25Gbps rather than 1Gbps? Doesn't this only matter for many simultaneous users of heavy web traffic?
  • abustamam 6mo ago
    In most cases probably not. But the question isn't "who needs 25gbps" it's "why are we only limited to 1gbps if we're lucky in the US?"
  • servo_sausage 6mo ago
    In terms of what one person consumes, it would be rare to make full use of it. I wonder if this speed was available everywhere, would more people self-host?
• jgalt212 6mo ago
  What can a homeowner (not a homelaber) do with 25 GB Internet that cannot be done with 1 GB Internet?
• oytis 6mo ago
  Because Switzerland is a tiny country that holds wealth extracted from whole wolrd's economies and that's just not replicatable even by the US?
• projektfu 6mo ago
  A couple of nitpicks (or nut-picks). AT&T is usually in competition with the local cable monopoly and runs FTTH where they run fiber. Google Fiber is installing as well, on the German model. The problem in the USA is that we protect an incumbent's profits at all costs. Natural monopolies end up serving the monopoly instead of the community. For example, in Atlanta, natural gas is delivered by Atlanta Gas Light, priced on some theoretical capacity number for the most gas you'll ever need at one time (DDDC). We then pay marketers to supply the gas. AGL gets paid whether or not we use gas, and the marketer gets paid both a monthly fee and a rate per therm. It's the most expensive gas I've had in this country.
• d_sem 6mo ago
  The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this. For context: 41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area. Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.
  • Sayrus 6mo ago
    Extrapolating with this method, large cities should be as well equipped as Switzerland. Los Angeles has 10x the population density of Switzerland and around the same population density in urban area. Same for Washington dc, San Francisco... It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. Distance between cities may be large, but the order of magnitude is closer when comparing within cities.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ryandrake 6mo ago
      Exactly. Whenever anyone trots out the "Bbbbut the USA is too large and sparsely populated to have X!" excuse, ask them why New Jersey doesn't have X.
  • senordevnyc 6mo ago
    I believe you mean 0.64%
  • fennecbutt 6mo ago
    Yeah but like 10x the population, 10x the GDP, etc. You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end during wild West times but modern infrastructure can't be built to the same scale even with mechanisation? Lmao sounds like the UK. It does make sense tho, the world is now filled with middlemen and getting any job done costs 10x because of parasites.
• darshil2023 6mo ago
  [dead]
• ExoticPearTree 6mo ago
  I live in a country where you can get 10Gbps fiber for ~ 10EUR. And one 1Gbps for the same money if they don't have coverage for the 10G. And, having worked with the US providers all I can tell you is this: greed, and lots of it. And if they're the only option in an area, they will charge you a literal arm and a leg. Just a small example: in a mall, there was a single provider Paid ~ 300USD for 5Mbps in 2024. Once we were able to upgrade the equipment and get a cell router, we got to pay about $50/mo for ~ 50-60Mbps. Mall provider not happy.
• geekraver 6mo ago
  Because it’s a functional society that has a government that works for the citizenry and not a small cadre of wealthy sponsors?
  • mrits 6mo ago
    It's a tiny rich country. We should be comparing it to New York City not the US
• FuriouslyAdrift 6mo ago
  You can run several mutually exclusive frequencies on a single strand of single mode fiber in multi-gigabit speeds. The biggest drawback is that the module price can get quite high. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with a P2MP topology for public infrastructure.
• ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
  Uh, maybe because Switzerland is the size of a Poptart?
• tristor 6mo ago
  This is true, but not in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga through EPB has had 25Gbit residential fiber service since 2022. EPB is the most successful municipal fiber program in the US, and has resulted directly in the creation of other municipal fiber programs in other parts of the US, as well as telco lobbying causing 16 states to enact laws banning it, because it was so successful it made Comcast and AT&T scared. I have 5gbit symmetric fiber at my house in Texas, and it is only available here because Google Fiber entered the city offer 1gbit symmetric fiber for 60% less than you could get a 300mbit cable link or 75mbit DSL link. Suddenly everyone was building out fiber infrastructure, and I now pay less for 5gbit symmetric fiber than I did for a brief while for gigabit cable (DOCSIS 3.1) which was 1gb/50mb. The primary piece about this that's relevant is the difference in deployment architecture. P2MP is much cheaper for providers to deploy, but it does lock you in, and more to the point it means even your symmetric links aren't guaranteed to get full throughput at all times because they oversubscribe the backhauls. Still, in most major US cities that now have fiber service, you will rarely see any performance drops. I can confirm that I get close to 5gbits bidirectionally during peak hours, which is a testament to the fact that it was completely possible to have done this a decade ago and it just required some actual competition for AT&T to get off its ass and do it. Unfortunately I don't have Google Fiber at my address because they're now offering 8gbit symmetric in the city.
• cute_boi 6mo ago
  I think the federal government should stop giving money to ISPs. They do nothing and just waste the budget. And, we should also use approach where ISP can use same fiber connection.
• im3w1l 6mo ago
  As someone living in neither country 50mbit is good enough for me and I have several times that already. I wouldn't wanna pay more on my bill for a rollout of newer tech when I'm perfectly happy with what I have.
• gherkinnn 6mo ago
  These threads are always the same. "No way the we [the US] can have $nice_thing because density, size, heterogeneity". Applies to internet, trains, functioning democracy, a lack school shootings, and all things decent. It's all bollocks of course. Nobody is asking for a dense railway network across a desert or fast internet for every last cabin in Alaska. It's such a bore. Granted, Europeans (so me) can be arrogant about these things.
  • xboxnolifes 6mo ago
    The argument loses even more weight if you look to China's infrastructure over their massive country.
• throwpoaster 6mo ago
  "Why does the country with the fifth highest GDP per capita have better infrastructure than the country with the ninth highest?"
• janpeuker 6mo ago
  I guess someone already said it but just to be sure Singapore also had Fiber to Home since 2010, roughly around the same time as Switzerland. But it’s less needed because Singapore also has 99% 5G coverage with 300-400Mbps
• kazinator 6mo ago
  What can the average person consume that needs 25 GB to their home? I don't know what speeds I'm getting. My streams are not skipping or pausing. The odd large download is quick enough beyond caring. Badly designed websites of course load badly. That has to do with latency rather than bandwidth, and the staging of the fetches.
• SpaceNugget 6mo ago
  If anyone on my team browses HN they will now know who I am :D I moved to a new house in the Netherlands at the end of last summer. KPN the FTTH provider was there by chance the day I got the keys to put the fibre in the cable box by my front door, however there was something wrong on the other end and the fibre was dark. The fibre lines themselves are owned by a different company and KPN couldn't issue a work order on my behalf to the fibre managment company since I didn't have an active KPN subscription. The way you get an active subscription is for the tech to connect his diagnostic machine (or a self installing modem/ont) to validate the connection works. Catch 22, can't fix the fibre without an active subscription, can't activate the subscription without a working fibre. In one of the ten or so phone calls trying to come to a sensible resolution, one of the support people suggested the only way to resolve this was for someone with an active KPN subscription moves to my street so they can issue the work order on their account instead (yea let me get right on that KPN) or to simply get a different ISP that is willing to issue the work order and then switch back to KPN. I told them to forget my number and went with a hyper local ISP that literally has a cat 6 cable running under the cobblestones from my neighbours house. Unfortunately it's not a very stable connection and the 1gb is more like 30-300mb depending on presumably the bandwidth usage of the neighbours.
• nullbyte808 6mo 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." Hey this can be good for privacy in a way at least. Your traffic can be from any of your neighbors. I wonder if you can sniff packets from other households?