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I live in NYC, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet Verizon Fios 1 Gbps is my only option. I tried to upgrade to Fios 2 Gbps, but it's

I live in NYC, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet Verizon Fios 1 Gbps is my only option. I tried to upgrade to Fios 2 Gbps, but it's not available. Spectrum only goes to 200Mbps; no other providers in my area. I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

porknubbins 3mo ago
Its not how bad must other areas be when NYC is this bad- its bad because its NYC. Corruption, aging infrastructure, enormous construction costs, diverse building types and complex ownership interests etc etc. The fastest and most competitive internet is in places like wealthy suburbs where you just roll it out without any issues.
- ElProlactin 3mo ago
  > Corruption, aging infrastructure... There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.
  - gleenn 3mo ago
    I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.
    - jimnotgym 3mo ago
      Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...
      - Foobar8568 3mo ago
        France had Minitel and now, for less than 50, you have up/down 8Gbps with TV etc. 5G is half that price. Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom ) US just has many excuses that's it.
        spwa4 3mo ago
        Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.
      - sph 3mo ago
        Haven’t you heard? We barely have electricity here in Europe, let alone phones. Or so I keep reading online.
      - Beretta_Vexee 3mo ago
        Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters. There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.
    - edukite 3mo ago
      Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users
    - piltdownman 3mo ago
      In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster. European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst. For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners. Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases. An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled. https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/ https://www.clearmobile.ie/
      - argentier 3mo ago
        In Ireland at least local calls were a fixed price, no matter how long the call was. Long-distance calls were billed by the minute.
        piltdownman 3mo ago
        No they weren't - they were billed by the minute. About 5c/min in new money. That's why you had things like night and off-peak tariffs for 56k dial-up services in Ireland in the early 00s.
    - ElProlactin 3mo ago
      > Because Europe didn't have as much... Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.
      - ahartmetz 3mo ago
        South Korea isn't the developing world neither (at least since the mid 90s), but 10 years ago I could barely read HN on the subway in Berlin while I saw people watching YouTube on the subway in Seoul.
    - jabl 3mo ago
      Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing. Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.
    - stefanfisk 3mo ago
      Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower. 2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%. Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/ https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/. The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....
      - ahartmetz 3mo ago
        There is a real disadvantage of countries with large population: More layers of management in politics, more corruption.
        stefanfisk 3mo ago
        Oh certainly. I'm not saying that "we did it so it should be just as easy for you". But neither having an existing copper network nor being sparsely populated is the reason for why the US does not have extensive fiber coverage. AFAICT the required political will just isn't there due to how campaign financing works. Just look at the plain insanity of laws like this https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-community-owned-broadband-networks-because-att-and-comcast-told-them-to/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....
        kalleboo 3mo ago
        Maybe the US should split themselves up into 50 smaller divisions of populations that have more local autonomy to optimize things like this.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
Aurornis 3mo ago
> I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling". Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation. I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere. Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.
- serial_dev 3mo ago
  Rural area? Hard to build. Dense city? Hard to build. Got it. Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.
  - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - miki123211 3mo ago
    Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs. Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently. Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.
    - matt-p 3mo ago
      Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk. I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure. The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space. The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.
ra 3mo ago
Sydney, Australia - the most I can get is 500mbps from our government owned nbn. I have a 1Gb plan, but in reality it's half that.
- Nursie 3mo ago
  Just outside Perth, WA. I pay for 400Mbps 'fixed wireless', which became available last year (prior to that it was capped at 250). On a good day I get 200/14. Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.
Gasp0de 3mo ago
It is harder to install fiber in densely populated areas than in some backcountry farm. Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber vs. digging a trench in the dirt next to the farm road. Which one do you think costs more? For which do you think you need to jump through 1001 bureaucratic hoops?
- throwaway27448 3mo ago
  Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.
- dalben 3mo ago
  And yet the root comment claims the opposite (the US is very stretched out, so it’s harder to connect all of it). In my country, fiber is run to my apartment building and through the technical shafts. Very easy for the telco: to connect a unit, they only need to branch off from the technical shaft. I imagine the total cost to connect 200 apartment units is much lower than connecting 200 farms or 200 houses in the suburbs, even with the red tape.
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  So wait, a good deal from an ISP requires just the right Goldilocks zone of not-too-rural and not-too-urban, and for some reason almost nowhere in the US qualifies even though it's more-common in other countries? That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.
  - UberFly 3mo ago
    Just dealt with this. I'm square in suburb America. AT&T in my community can't run lines into established neighborhoods because they can't use existing conduits. They have to dig their own, but local regulations make it difficult and a lengthy process. Easier for companies to just give up and move on. Who's fault does your smell test point to?
esseph 3mo ago
> If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through. It's actually easier in some ways. I can build tons of infrastructure to cover tens of thousands of people in fiber for what it would cost to dig up one NYC street for a few days.
ricardobayes 3mo ago
Exactly why starlink's business was viable.
dzhiurgis 3mo ago
I live in NZ, but work with mostly US SaaS'es. Got 1 gpbs fiber but I'm torn between downgrading to something like 500mbps which also downgrades your upload and upgrading to 6gbps so I get better international speeds (right now it's something like 100mbps tops).
- lancewiggs 3mo ago
  Yup. For those interested we have a similar approach where the fibre to the home is owned by a regulated provider that is required to offer its service to all retail service providers (RSPs) at the same price. Competition is strong.
Nnnes 3mo ago
> imagine what someone in rural America goes through. Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2025&zoom=4&vlon=-98.635707&vlat=42.801385&br=r&speed=1000_100&tech=3 https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2... Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly). Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one
- fransje26 3mo ago
  Just for the sake of information, related to the article being discussed. In Switzerland: - Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222 - Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)
apexalpha 3mo ago
> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. 1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.
- laughing_man 3mo ago
  I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I don't think I've ever been able to use more than about 50 mbit due to constraints on the other end.
  - lwkl 3mo ago
    You don’t really need it but it is nice when downloads are really fast. Though most services cap downloads at 2 - 3 Gbit/s.
  - jjav 3mo ago
    > I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.
    - petee 3mo ago
      I appreciated it for my Google Takeout download - they seemed to cap per file speed, so I could get multiple going. Getting it done quickly was important since google would force 2fa re-auth if you waited literally 30 seconds between files, ~80 4G files Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.
PowerElectronix 3mo ago
There are issues everywhere. Companies that had their cables deployed made sure that any regulation that would eliminate that moat heavily favor them, either by forbidding other companies to deploy and forcing them to lease the already deployed infra or by forbidding them digging ir whatever bullshit. Very few companies wanna get into deploying their own network (both in the states and europe), but the few that do make money out of it. I would be really surprised if Switzerland is any different.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
Everyone's mocking you for using more than 1 Gbps of internet bandwidth, but I honestly want to know how you are able to saturate it. I've found on even the fastest internet connections, it's difficult to get more than a few hundred Mbps, from any given sever. Do you have a bunch of people on the network downloading large files simultaneously, or are you connected to servers able to saturate your connection? I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch.
- m4rtink 3mo ago
  Steam CDN can saturate 1 GBit/S line just fine - and its actually super convenient when a bunch of friends wants to play some 50 GB game you don't have installed at the moment - it will download and install in a few minutes.
- zepearl 3mo ago
  > I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch. Maybe your LAN cables have deteriorated? Reaching 100 MiB/s should be easy peasy for a PC; in my case (2 10Gbps switches) by using nvme SSDs I reach almost 950 MiB/s and with 4x raidz1 HDDs I reach 450-650 MiB/s. Until a few years ago I was smoking in my flat and often I had to change lan cables (whatever's in the smoke was sticking to the connectors)
jjav 3mo ago
> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling appalling? What exactly, in detail, can't you do with a 1 Gpbps connection?! My home ISP delivers ~22 Mbps and it is totally fine for all use cases.
- guiambros 3mo ago
  You missed the point (and I should have clarified better). It's not that 1 Gbps is bad; it's pretty good, actually. And I do think Verizon is one of the least bad options. The problem is that there's zero competition. And while many other countries have 2, 5, 8Gbps available, there's zero reason for Verizon to offer it, despite being a densely populated area. And 1 Gbps has been the max available for 10 years. It's very likely in 2036 we'll be in the exact same situation. I wish we had a model like Switzerland, where the fiber is centrally managed, and providers compete just to connect you to the network.
glimshe 3mo ago
I have 5 Gbps available in a near-rural area in the southern US. It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest. Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.
mlrtime 3mo ago
Funny, I used to live in NYC and I was a few blocks from the Verizon datacenter downtown and one of the first to get direct fiber, FIOS. It was amazing. Fast forward 10 years , FIOS still only has 1gbps in this area but my rural town will give me 10gbps fiber no problem. I just can't afford the router right now :)
trashface 3mo ago
1 Gbps is still pretty good if you can get it for a reasonable price. Just did a speed test at my parents place in Philly suburbs, they only get 50Mbps down. They pay A LOT of money to comcast, every month.
qingcharles 3mo ago
When I was living in the city of Chicago only a couple of years ago the best wired connection I could get was 1.5Mbps AT&T (the tech said it might push 3Mbps if I was lucky, but would only guarantee the slower speed). Comcast said they'd run a cable for $71,000 as long as I agreed to a multi-year $800/month contract on top. Ended up with a $40/month T-Mobile 5G hub which got me ~800Mbps.

porknubbins 3mo ago

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

ElProlactin 3mo ago
> Corruption, aging infrastructure... There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.
- gleenn 3mo ago
  I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.
  - jimnotgym 3mo ago
    Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...
    - Foobar8568 3mo ago
      France had Minitel and now, for less than 50, you have up/down 8Gbps with TV etc. 5G is half that price. Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom ) US just has many excuses that's it.
      - spwa4 3mo ago
        Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.
    - sph 3mo ago
      Haven’t you heard? We barely have electricity here in Europe, let alone phones. Or so I keep reading online.
    - Beretta_Vexee 3mo ago
      Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters. There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.
  - edukite 3mo ago
    Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users
  - piltdownman 3mo ago
    In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster. European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst. For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners. Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases. An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled. https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/ https://www.clearmobile.ie/
    - argentier 3mo ago
      In Ireland at least local calls were a fixed price, no matter how long the call was. Long-distance calls were billed by the minute.
      - piltdownman 3mo ago
        No they weren't - they were billed by the minute. About 5c/min in new money. That's why you had things like night and off-peak tariffs for 56k dial-up services in Ireland in the early 00s.
  - ElProlactin 3mo ago
    > Because Europe didn't have as much... Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.
    - ahartmetz 3mo ago
      South Korea isn't the developing world neither (at least since the mid 90s), but 10 years ago I could barely read HN on the subway in Berlin while I saw people watching YouTube on the subway in Seoul.
  - jabl 3mo ago
    Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing. Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.
  - stefanfisk 3mo ago
    Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower. 2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%. Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/ https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/. The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....
    - ahartmetz 3mo ago
      There is a real disadvantage of countries with large population: More layers of management in politics, more corruption.
      - stefanfisk 3mo ago
        Oh certainly. I'm not saying that "we did it so it should be just as easy for you". But neither having an existing copper network nor being sparsely populated is the reason for why the US does not have extensive fiber coverage. AFAICT the required political will just isn't there due to how campaign financing works. Just look at the plain insanity of laws like this https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-community-owned-broadband-networks-because-att-and-comcast-told-them-to/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....
      - kalleboo 3mo ago
        Maybe the US should split themselves up into 50 smaller divisions of populations that have more local autonomy to optimize things like this.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

Aurornis 3mo ago

> I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling". Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation. I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere. Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.

serial_dev 3mo ago
Rural area? Hard to build. Dense city? Hard to build. Got it. Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.
- inemesitaffia 3mo ago
  [dead]
- miki123211 3mo ago
  Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs. Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently. Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.
  - matt-p 3mo ago
    Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk. I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure. The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space. The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.

ra 3mo ago

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

Nursie 3mo ago
Just outside Perth, WA. I pay for 400Mbps 'fixed wireless', which became available last year (prior to that it was capped at 250). On a good day I get 200/14. Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.

Gasp0de 3mo ago

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

throwaway27448 3mo ago
Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.
dalben 3mo ago
And yet the root comment claims the opposite (the US is very stretched out, so it’s harder to connect all of it). In my country, fiber is run to my apartment building and through the technical shafts. Very easy for the telco: to connect a unit, they only need to branch off from the technical shaft. I imagine the total cost to connect 200 apartment units is much lower than connecting 200 farms or 200 houses in the suburbs, even with the red tape.
Terr_ 3mo ago
So wait, a good deal from an ISP requires just the right Goldilocks zone of not-too-rural and not-too-urban, and for some reason almost nowhere in the US qualifies even though it's more-common in other countries? That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.
- UberFly 3mo ago
  Just dealt with this. I'm square in suburb America. AT&T in my community can't run lines into established neighborhoods because they can't use existing conduits. They have to dig their own, but local regulations make it difficult and a lengthy process. Easier for companies to just give up and move on. Who's fault does your smell test point to?

esseph 3mo ago

> If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through. It's actually easier in some ways. I can build tons of infrastructure to cover tens of thousands of people in fiber for what it would cost to dig up one NYC street for a few days.

ricardobayes 3mo ago

Exactly why starlink's business was viable.

dzhiurgis 3mo ago

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

lancewiggs 3mo ago
Yup. For those interested we have a similar approach where the fibre to the home is owned by a regulated provider that is required to offer its service to all retail service providers (RSPs) at the same price. Competition is strong.

Nnnes 3mo ago

> imagine what someone in rural America goes through. Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2025&zoom=4&vlon=-98.635707&vlat=42.801385&br=r&speed=1000_100&tech=3 https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2... Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly). Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one

fransje26 3mo ago
Just for the sake of information, related to the article being discussed. In Switzerland: - Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222 - Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)

apexalpha 3mo ago

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. 1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.

laughing_man 3mo ago
I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I don't think I've ever been able to use more than about 50 mbit due to constraints on the other end.
- lwkl 3mo ago
  You don’t really need it but it is nice when downloads are really fast. Though most services cap downloads at 2 - 3 Gbit/s.
- jjav 3mo ago
  > I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.
  - petee 3mo ago
    I appreciated it for my Google Takeout download - they seemed to cap per file speed, so I could get multiple going. Getting it done quickly was important since google would force 2fa re-auth if you waited literally 30 seconds between files, ~80 4G files Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over
- fragmede 3mo ago
  If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.

PowerElectronix 3mo ago

There are issues everywhere. Companies that had their cables deployed made sure that any regulation that would eliminate that moat heavily favor them, either by forbidding other companies to deploy and forcing them to lease the already deployed infra or by forbidding them digging ir whatever bullshit. Very few companies wanna get into deploying their own network (both in the states and europe), but the few that do make money out of it. I would be really surprised if Switzerland is any different.

dlcarrier 3mo ago

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

m4rtink 3mo ago
Steam CDN can saturate 1 GBit/S line just fine - and its actually super convenient when a bunch of friends wants to play some 50 GB game you don't have installed at the moment - it will download and install in a few minutes.
zepearl 3mo ago
> I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch. Maybe your LAN cables have deteriorated? Reaching 100 MiB/s should be easy peasy for a PC; in my case (2 10Gbps switches) by using nvme SSDs I reach almost 950 MiB/s and with 4x raidz1 HDDs I reach 450-650 MiB/s. Until a few years ago I was smoking in my flat and often I had to change lan cables (whatever's in the smoke was sticking to the connectors)

jjav 3mo ago

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling appalling? What exactly, in detail, can't you do with a 1 Gpbps connection?! My home ISP delivers ~22 Mbps and it is totally fine for all use cases.

guiambros 3mo ago
You missed the point (and I should have clarified better). It's not that 1 Gbps is bad; it's pretty good, actually. And I do think Verizon is one of the least bad options. The problem is that there's zero competition. And while many other countries have 2, 5, 8Gbps available, there's zero reason for Verizon to offer it, despite being a densely populated area. And 1 Gbps has been the max available for 10 years. It's very likely in 2036 we'll be in the exact same situation. I wish we had a model like Switzerland, where the fiber is centrally managed, and providers compete just to connect you to the network.

glimshe 3mo ago

I have 5 Gbps available in a near-rural area in the southern US. It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest. Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.

mlrtime 3mo ago

Funny, I used to live in NYC and I was a few blocks from the Verizon datacenter downtown and one of the first to get direct fiber, FIOS. It was amazing. Fast forward 10 years , FIOS still only has 1gbps in this area but my rural town will give me 10gbps fiber no problem. I just can't afford the router right now :)

trashface 3mo ago

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

qingcharles 3mo ago

When I was living in the city of Chicago only a couple of years ago the best wired connection I could get was 1.5Mbps AT&T (the tech said it might push 3Mbps if I was lucky, but would only guarantee the slower speed). Comcast said they'd run a cable for $71,000 as long as I agreed to a multi-year $800/month contract on top. Ended up with a $40/month T-Mobile 5G hub which got me ~800Mbps.