This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title.
Some important points that they leave out:
- 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations.
- The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
- 25G internet is also available in some locations in the United States.
- As another commenter discovered, the average speed test results of US and Swiss internet connections are pretty similar. The average Swiss person isn't connected to the internet faster than the average United States person.
> - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_.
What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.
The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.
Density is not the correct measure here because empty land decreases density but doesn't need to be covered. What matters is how much the population is clustered.
But that makes it even worse because a lot of Switzerland is entirely unoccupied mountains whereas millions of people live in places like Kansas and Nebraska and expect to have internet access.
25 Gbps is a silly (but illustrative / clickbaity) take in this context. The more relevant measures as others have pointed out is how well-covered clusters of population are, but also what their broadband quality is. I live in Sweden, where we have extremely well-built out broadband networks, especially in cities. (My professional take is that quality is often very poor, but that is comparing to the rest of the country). We are a small country too, but we have still chosen symmetric active ethernet over the assymmetric PON, we have largely discontinued DSL, our cable/coax offerings have largely been replaced with fibre, and where DSL was not profitable, 4G is generally built out well enough to cover most people. Swedes in rural areas buy Starlink not for their reach, but for redundancy or even price.
I would say most of those things are not true in the US market. The united states IS a much, much bigger country, but my guess is that the median reach, stability, and speed is way lower than the Swedish and Swiss examples, compared to what it could be. The US has way higher military costs, still relatively high taxes, and most of all a stronger buying power. I pay $35/month for 300/300 Mbps Active Ethernet FTTH, and consider that overprized. When I last looked, the median American could generally afford more than that, but had access to less. Sorry, I don't have the numbers at hand.
Which of the things you said don't also apply to the people in Zurich?
Also, if you say people in Kansas don't need fiber then you have to expect that to get averaged in. The population density in California is less than half what it is in Switzerland. Only 10% of US states have a higher population density than Switzerland and those states represent less than 10% of the US population (because of those 5 states the one with the largest land area is Maryland).
If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.
If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.
That seems like another way to lie with silly stats though. If 3% of the least populated areas of all the subdivisions of the US the size of Switzerland were not connected, then that would indeed be just as irrelevant.
Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?
It's a false equivalence to compare working in a company to have the same scaling problems as implementing policies to set up broadband infrastructure.
Taking politics out of it. If you wanted to start a 25gbps project today, who do you think could get it done quicker. A small local municipality with a few network engineers. Or getting a Federal agency to do it?
To some extent there are, but in many cases it's because the law prohibits that. It imposes build out requirements so that if you want to offer service in the higher density area you also have to provide service over a wide area that includes a bunch of farmland or similar.
In theory this is supposed to be to make sure someone is serving rural areas but in practice it's because the incumbents don't want new challengers showing up to provide better service in the areas where it's profitable to build a competing network and so lobby the government to saddle them with a huge barrier to entry.
Indeed. But also some things that were harder at the small company were easier at the large one. You have processes in place, were things in the small company are all done ‘by hand’.
So I think it is hard to compare small and big. For one company things are easy that are hard for the other and vice-versa.
> Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?
I don't know about anyone else, but I have *never* found this to be the case.
Dealing with a larger company you've got a far greater selection of people you can get to say "uh, yeah, I guess, why not? It's not really my department..." which you can take as a yes.
In a smaller company no matter what you're doing you've got to get it past Old Bob, who's been there since before most of the current management team were born and will argue over everything simply because he can.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Sort of?
If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.
Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.
But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.
For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?
Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.
At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)
This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"
It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.
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.
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.
> 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.
You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to.
Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere.
High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.
Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
It's illegal in many states for the local municipality to do it. Here it's the norm, so our local power companies put down fiber when do power or other utilities.
Nah it's BS. It's American-flavored capitalism that's the issue, and it's crushing the free-market.
I live in SF - the densest US city on the west coast, and the densest US city after NYC. We have city-owned "dark fiber" run through (most?) every street. Any ISP can offer service by renting the connection to my house, as long as they service "the last hundred feet" from pole to door and the billing.
I have about half-dozen ISPs that will give me from 1G-5G of service, all under $100/mo - (a great price in America). I pay for redundant >1g fiber connections to my house for less than the price of my parent's 50 mbps bill.
The issue is capitalism. In much of the US, the ISPs have lobbied and enforced "monopolies" by exclusive fiat of the jurisdiction, in some shape or form. 16 US states have laws that prevent the local government from maintaining or providing internet infrastructure like fiber lines, requiring private companies to maintain it all. Any free-market enthusiast will readily tell you that competition brings prices down, but capitalism is crushing the free-market, reducing competition for the benefit of the wealthy.
I just commented this elsewhere. It does exist and is where the good internet is. Good internet being a few g, but still better than i've had downtown or rurally
I cannot comment on the cost in the US, but in the UK it would be the farm that’s more expensive because the cost is relative the distance. You still have to file the same government applications to close a dirt road as you would a busy city street. But you would have much more miles of road to file the application for, plus the actual expense of the engineering work, for rural destinations.
And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.
This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.
I've lived dense city to rural in the US, and it's suburbia that has the best internet. Can rip up the street for days no problem, but still a relatively dense population.
> Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber
Or you can just run new fiber in the pipes that contained copper wiring that has most likely already been swapped out for fiber in the 1990s. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.
In theory you would be right. In practice you have to ask all of your competitors for permission to change anything, and all the old copper is still there. They never actually swapped it out for fiber! You cannot take out any of their old copper, even though you’re sure it’s not in use by anyone, to make space for your new fiber.
Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.
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.
Don't you already have conduits, or undergrounds where old telephone lines are running already? That's what we used to install optical fiber everywhere in cities France. Really easy, nothing to tear open. And because it's dense, it's cheap per home.
On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.
Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.
In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.
It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.
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.
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
Not quite. There are some homes where P2MP was installed before the court order that are still P2MP. These still have fiber but only 10Gbps shared, not 25Gbps dedicated.
Also, the only ISP that offers 25Gbps is Init7 and they need to have their equipment at the other end of the fiber to offer 25Gbps. I don't think they quite have 100% coverage yet.
On a similar note, there is 50G internet available in the UK, but there is only a single customer to my knowledge (on the Youfibre/Netomnia network). Another difference is that I believe Switzerland is using 25GBASE-X as the transport, whereas in the UK it is 50G-PON (alongside the regular XGS-PON service which most customers have).
The United States might be 85 times larger than Switzerland but it still has a higher population density than Sweden, and even in rural Sweden (similar population density to Wyoming) where my father lives he has a similar ability to pick providers at will as the Swiss.
Average and median is not the same. Listed speed and actual speed is not the same (as mentioned in the article).
Also, about the size of the countries. The underlying model scales, that’s the point. Unless you were talking about political willingness to back large commitments. That’s a another question.
- Swiss here, you’re coping, 25G is available almost anywhere,
- the size doesn’t matter that much, you also have considerably more money and urban density comparable to us or higher. If you want to start counting reasons it’s harder here: we have mountains to go over, strong environmental regulations, can’t build at night in cities, must stop working on Sunday… no cheap labor, etc.
> The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland.
All other things being equal; it's a lot easier to dig huge amounts of fibre runs (following roads) where there isn't a heavy density of people.
Distance is practically meaningless for fibre optic cabling, but digging up historic cities, digging through mountain ranges, avoiding subways, plumbing and ensuring you have enough cables for the density of humans is hard.
Much harder than running cables between buildings that house 10 people which are 50ft away from each other.
> It's just the fastest tier available in some locations
It's available where I live, and I live in some backwater little town. I think around 60% of the population currently has 25G, and that's expected to reach 80% by 2030.
The area of just the contiguous US is almost 200 times as big as Switzerland. Where did the 85 come from? Did you divide square miles by square kilometers?
That's exactly what he did. At least he didn't include any of the 300,000 square miles of water.
This argument somehow appears every time there is an article comparing American internet to another country's, regardless of the country. And it's such a lazy argument, you wouldn't expect them to even get the match correct.
Switzerland is larger than New Jersey and with a lower population and higher per capita gdp. I assume therefore New Jersey is better than Switzerland in all these metrics, from public transport to internet.
for those curious, regarding your first point, as far as I know any home that is dark red on this map has access to it, and any light red is planned to get access: https://ftth.init7.net/
It also assumes the US broadband market is free, which it effectively isn’t. There’s a huge moat of hard-lobbied for “regulations” put in place by the established players.
Other than running a commercial CDN at home or something.. what possible need is there for a 25 Gbit home connection?
My home ISP connection (in Silicon Valley) is ~22 Mbit. That is enough for just about everything I can think of. We can run 3 zoom calls simultaneously (3 people in the house), stream movies, play online games, etc, all works fine.
The only time I wish for a bit more is for huge downloads, but that is so rare (once a month? probably not even) that it's just a footnote.
And at my personal office I have ~150Mbit connection and that is overkill for everything I can think of.
25 gigabit might be overkill for now as there is not a lot of end user equipment supporting it but 22 megabit would be painful for me.
My family have a number of gaming PC's and a playstation, downloading a game is easily 40-60 gigabytes so the difference between 22 megabit and a gigabit makes a huge change in usability.
22 megabit is also not really enough for 4K streaming (netflix 4K is 15-25 megabits, the better ones is even more).
> Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I don't think anyone is suggesting the US be covered with broadband, just the bits where people live. That then becomes a comparable problem, insofar as Switzerland has comparable size communities (with the exception of the very largest end of US cities whose population exceeds that of Switzerland)
US annual freight tonnage per annum is much the same as Australia's (1.5 billion tonne /annum, IIRC).
Australia has longer, more control complex trains (leading, trailing and midway locomotives).
To the best of my knowledge the US has never once had a single train 7 km in length with 680+ cars and a gross tonnage of 99,734 tonne - Australia has set a record with such a train and moves smaller (but still at that scale) trains daily.
( That's over 4.3 miles in length carrying 109,938 short tons for any readers from Liberia, or Myanmar )
Tech-wise Australia also operates the world's first (and still only?) fully autonomous rail heavy haul routes.
"Australia" doesn't really set records, multinational mining companies do. The records might as well be set on another planet. There is virtually no population, roads or utilities, no agricultural land beyond low density cattle stations that need up to 50 hectares per head, no mountain ranges, no large rivers, and employing people to work on site out there is might be 3x more expensive than the rest of the economy. The records are set on private lines that operate outside normal rail regulations by agreement set down by state governments that are beholden to the mining companies.
Comparing USA's freight rail network to Australia's on those numbers paints a misleading picture. 3/4 of it is iron ore and coal being carried relatively short distances (few 100s of km) from inland out to the nearest coastal port, and most of that is away from any significant population centers.
By ton-mile, USA takes 5-6x more than Australia and much more interesting and varied conditions and freight types and destinations - not just ferrying it from a hole in the ground, across highway 1, then into a bunker at a shipping terminal.
Again, same freight tonnages as the US .. and with fewer people == vastly greater rail performance per capita, and similar tonnages in absolute numbers.
The US is just another G20 country, and one sliding down the rankings on freedom, and democracy.
Well the metric you replied to was rail network size, and was correct about the USA having the largest. "Rail performance" would more typically be measured by ton miles or tonne miles, not "tonnage". Australia still does a bit better there per capita there.
But in either case it is almost entirely these isolated short private coal and ore export lines that have no interconnection or interaction with the rest of the country's freight nor does it remove freight from any roads that the rest of the population would be using. These are virtually entirely in isolation from the rest of the country or economy or transport network and are built by and for mining multinationals. In the context of a country's governance or transport infrastructure or general rail networks, they don't say anything. If they were there or not there or private road and oversize road trains instead, it would not change anything about the rest of the country's transport.
This is kind of a dumb statement. Yes the US is one of the larges most populated countries and has been for a long time. Its just coping instead of actually engaging with the question about what makes railways good. The US put down lots of track in the 18-19th centuries as its industrial revolution was pre-car and its the biggest country where this happened.
If you look into detail and not just very simple 'we transport this much cargo' you see the US system has many disadvantages and is not nearly as amazing as some US people barging make it seem.
Frankly given the historical strength of railways in the US into the 20th century, the near perfect geography for rail and the lack of ports its quite embracing how little things are done with rail.
Hi, that statistic probably looked at the full price of the various plans before discounts. The reality is different, all providers offer significant discounts, and you’ll hardly find anyone paying more than 50 CHF a month for 10 Gbps (including streaming TV channels). Personally, I’ve never paid more than 45 CHF a month for 10 Gbps and TV and I currently pay 38 CHF, but I know people with even better deals.
The same goes for mobile service. The expensive plans are the “standard” ones from Swisscom or Sunrise, the two major carriers, but most people use low-cost digital providers that offer excellent plans for less than 20 CHF a month. Mobile prices, however, remain high compared to the rest of Europe and the world. Still, fiber-optic internet is available in virtually every city, with the exception of very small, remote mountain villages.
I’m an Italian who’s lived in Switzerland for years, and fiber-optic prices here aren’t that much higher than in Italy, especially when you consider speed and reliability.
You can find 25 Gbps plans for less than 70 CHF a month.
Yes, comparatively to a lot of stuff (like food for example), internet connectivity is cheap in Switzerland.
To take 2 countries where I have been living in the last 10 years, if you compare internet prices and average income in Switzerland and Spain, Swiss citizens end up in a favorable situation compared to Spanish ones.
That's right. Swiss wages are at least twice the European average (actually much more than that, but let's keep it conservative). If we exclude home rent and healthcare costs, the vast majority of things definitely don't cost twice as much. Switzerland ranks among the highest in Europe in terms of purchasing power, that's the figure that matters when determining how expensive a country actually is.
Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating.
Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you? In my experience, it's one of the best ISPs I've ever had.
Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.
They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.
Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.
> If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you?
Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.
Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.
At my past place Fios was excellent but I've had mixed results recently, with ping spikes and a lot of suspected traffic shaping of things like Youtube.
No one is forcing you to use their modem or router.
Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.
At the apartment I lived at until last year, Spectrum only offered up to half a gig down unless you used their modem (which of course meant an extra $15 per month on top of the plan for a full gig already being more expensive). Of course, neither of these were symmetric, with the connection listed as "mixed" between copper and fiber. I stuck with the half gig since it was the best option without paying them for the "privilege" of using their equipment.
At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.
You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true.
Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.
(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
Swiss law does require an overwhelming majority of the value of a product be made in Switzerland to use Swiss flag branding, or even Swiss landmarks or other signifiers of Swiss-ness. That's why Toblerone had to remove the drawing of the Matterhorn they've had since forever on the side of their triangular tubes, because some production has been shifted to Poland.
> in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality
That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.
For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.
And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.
I feel it's a little more extreme for swiss companies though, especially outside the country. My aunt who works in Rome in the tourism industry told us of a local company that had 'swiss' in the name, simply because of the positive connotation, even when they don't seem to have any relation to the country.
It's why I feel wary of making business with any company with the word 'swiss' in it's name
And Decathlon's bikes are Van Rysel, which does mean "from Lille" (where the bikes are designed) but you wouldn't know it unless you speak Dutch. I don't think they hide anything really, but having a Dutch-sounding makes a connection to the Dutch and Flemish who are well known for cycling.
"made in" is completely different. A higher price is justified by supporting Americans in some way, rather than somewhere offshore.
This is more like McDonald's putting a maple leaf in their logo in Canada. It changes nothing but, apparently, Canadians like it more (I frequently watch Canadian television and non-canadian companies are frequently adding a leaf somewhere in the advertising).
I've noticed a similar thing when buying products online. Overseas sellers from Asia will package their product as "Designed in Germany" or include a red cross to indicate Swiss design, but may not actually be designed or manufactured in Switzerland. Nice packaging though :)
Kind of the ideal setup though. Apple’s design and engineering work has been great, China’s manufacturing can execute on it better than anyone else (see the issues with iPhone production in India).
It’s like saying the ideal car would be designed by Italians, engineered by Germans, and built by the Japanese.
Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.
The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!
I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.
The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.
This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.
So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.
Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.
I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.
At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.
In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.
What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.
Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.
I wish my country India was like that, because we are totally opposite. Anything made in India is considered very bad quality and will not fetch a good price even if better than imported goods.
I ran speed tests a lot more when I had internet that varied from 5-20MB depending on the day/weather/etc. Now I'm on >1GB it's so rarely a concern that I don't bother. I suspect this skews the data significantly.
Most people use Speedtest when something going terrible wrong and they have packet loss, extreme latency or something similar. Or before renting out their appartment on AirBnB.
25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps.
25Gbps requires pretty unusual hardware to use (see [0] for example) and you need to pay a couple hundred francs for installation so even among the geeks and nerds, it's not common.
I have it myself but recommend to friends and colleagues to use Init7 but 10Gbps instead.
That says as much about socioeconomics (price sensitivity, laws that prohibit calling for upselling, etc.) as actual speed. E.g. in my country, the last time I looked over 95% had a fiber connection to home and the major providers offer 1Gbit (for connections still on AON) or 4 to 8Gbit (on XGS-PON).
Yet, our average is still a mid 230Mbit. Why? People sticking with cable internet out of inertia, people sticking with cable because they have more attractive TV packages. People choosing 100 or 200 Mbit because it's cheaper (e.g. my parents just stick to 200Mbit because they don't need more for web browsing and some streaming).
Same for cellular. My country is only in the 17th position, yet I have 1Gbit 5G cellular with unlimited data for ~25 Euro per month. Most people just don't want to spend more than 10 per month and go for cheap plans/providers.
But such price sensitivity differs a lot per country.
You're not missing anything. The article is trying to imply that 25G is everywhere in Switzerland, but it's not. They just picked the fastest available speed and ignored the fact that some places in the United States also have 25G internet available.
I did an internship in Switzerland in 2007 and mobile data was 14 USD/MB while I had unlimited data in the US. The place I was staying in Zurich had only 128 kbps ISDN while I had a symmetric gigabit line in my US dorm room. At that time I thought Switzerland was the most backward country ever.
I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.
At some point these things become cheap enough that you might as well. The price difference between 500MB and 1GB for me is very little, and so for the peak usage time improvements and few times a month that I download a steam game or movie, it's worth it. I pay significantly less than 70 USD a month for my 1GB connection.
Actually, think all the devs here should know this too (and am surprised people on HN are making such a big deal about this). Agreed, 500Mb is what most households need because, yeah, 90% of the time 4k video is the most demanding thing we do (which is only 25Mb/s per person in the household).
Having been telling this to my family and friends whenever they want to upgrade to 1Gb/s, but to noavail. They rarely ever take the suggestion (ah well, to each their own).
Agreed. It's telling that the ads for speed upgrades all seem to focus on families: when all are uploading and streaming maybe at the same time. The marketeers know that 1
individuals and couples are not the target market and 2 they want everyone to be using as much as possible.
I had an apartment once with both 300Mb cable and 1Gb fiber available. Cable was $40 and reliable with all the bandwidth I needed. The fiber sales reps would stop by a few times a year perplexed that I didn't want to pay through the nose for a bigger number. Moving away to a different location, I had to put up with a dodgy cable provider until cheap fiber was deployed and still don't need the extra bandwidth.
I lived with about 5 people and our internet was 500mbps and it was more than enough.
Looking at the network monitor the only need for anything really above 100mbps was when people wanted to download something. For daily needs, surfing, browsing, the odd download you don't need a lot. And that's with everyone streaming, scrolling, gaming etc concurrently.
Totally agree - having been telling this to friends for years, to no avail.
Btw, what network monitor are you using? Was it just a diagnostic tool in your router's admin page? Or is it something special like dd-wrt? Because seems like it's kind of hit or miss if a router's stock admin includes a reliable network monitor.
The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.
That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.
There are a few things that support it, at least in my experience… I get close to line rate for steam downloads for large games, and other content with a good CDN.
The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.
I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine freezes (I download games to a normal SATA drive and the machine is a Ryzen 9 9900X). I have to option to go to 2Gbit or even 8Gbit but I don't want to buy more expensive switches/routers and network cards for my computers.
Who (not including geeks) would want to go faster than 1Gbit?
edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers
In Catania 10 gbit Internet costs 35 euros/month and is available everywhere in the city and even in a big slice of the small towns around Catania. And indeed public incentives played a big role. But what I believe it is more interesting is that 1 gigabit was common like 10 years ago or even more. Infrastructure is a bit too important to be left to what the market believes will be profitable.
Btw the paradox I have is that my local lan is 1 gbit...
Interesting to read. I actually did not really looked into the rest of Italy's fibre build out state, but FWIW here in South Tyrol - basically the other end of the country - there's fully build out fibre access into every municipality since 2013.
And basically every village (outside the cities most municipalities consist of a handful of villages here) got access a few years too, even the ones with sub 1k population.
There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages.
Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.
Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.
I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
> That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..
Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.
In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..
Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization.
Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.
That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.
Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.
Init7 (the ISP in question) is pretty fantastic for peering. They're good to start with but there have been times I've just written them an email and said "hey, I know you and ASABCD have a presence at BLAH-IX, could you peer directly" and it ends up working.
I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe.
Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.
I’m fortunate where I’m at in the Bay Area to get 10Gpbs for $50/mo from Sonic. Service has been amazing.
It’s a no brainer at the cost even if it’s not saturated. 10 gig equipment is expensive so majority of my LAN is 1gig. I ended up getting some new network equipment and my WiFi caps at 2.5Gbps.
Steam and Usenet are my primary downloads that can take advantage but even my NAS only has a 1gig card as I haven’t bought the 10gig upgrade card.
Majority of homes are most likely fine with 1 gig, but we also don’t know what the future holds for network bandwidth.
The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does.
I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
Density doesn't really make the sort of difference you might think.
Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.
In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).
US regulations actually give telecoms a leg up in a lot of ways to expand services. These private companies have utility access to power polls and easement access to common lines. About the only regulation that can get in the way is some cities and states have minimum service requirements before you can start burying in a new territory. That is a give away to the ISPs to tamp down competition.
The reason internet is so crap is because utility lines are all private. For example, in the UK BT owns all the lines and British law allows for line rental from 3rd party ISPs. That's what allows you to get a wide variety of ISPs without having to plow in a brand new line to your location. That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere. Without that, ISPs have no incentive to increase speeds as new competition is very hard to create or come by.
I agree with you about the effects of regulation and privatization. The installation challenges of dense urban environments are no joke either. But:
> Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem.
Plumbing yes, but it might not leave the property. About 25% of US homes have septic systems, and some states are as high as 50%. For water, 15% of homes use private wells, which goes to 72% for rural households.
It's not everything, but density absolutely matters for rural households. The US is vast and contains many areas where you are your water and sewer company because there's no municipal option.
That said, your electricity example shows the way. That got to every home through massive public infrastructure projects. And internet could too, far easier than water or sewer.
> In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).
If endpoints are spread too far out, it's not hard technically to connect them, but it might be very expensive and not feasible economically.
If density is too high on the other hand (say NYC), it's becoming hard to technically connect, because, as you mentioned, there's already a lot of "stuff" there that you have to be careful about. But it might be much more interesting economically.
I think Switzerland just hits a sweet spot between these two. It's dense enough to be profitable but sparse enough to make construction still feasible. So essentially, we're just lucky.
> That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere.
In case of India, the government lines had higher costs and lower service standards than the private Jio. So it is not always the case that government infrastructure is better. However, there are regulations that require rural infrastructure development which ensures coverage on low profitability regions.
> Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.
Those utilities are also far older than the Internet, so they should be expected to have more penetration. Also, the fair comparison here wouldn't be "how many American homes have a super fast Internet connection", but rather "how many American homes have the Internet at all".
As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).
Whenever I hear the density problem for internet cables, I think about all the cables in the ocean and how few people actually live on the bottom of it.
It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population.
As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.
Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas.
You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines.
It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.
> It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas
This is backwards in my experience, but I probably have a different definition of urban from you. In my area, the suburban area has mostly underground lines that pre-date fiber, and getting fiber is probably not ever happening. Comcast is all we got. But if I drive 15 minutes into the city, there are fiber lines on every pole, and I could choose from a couple different providers.
It'll depend on the area. From what I've seen, it appears that a lot of cities are eliminating utility poles and are burying all their lines (except for high voltage power).
An urban buried line will be harder than a suburban or rural buried line. Pole access is easier in both situations.
Utilities like buried lines because people will cut and strip overhead lines looking for copper.
Yeah that sounds like just a regional definition of what constitutes urban :). My city is old only by western US standards, approaching 200 years old, and nobody seems to have any intention of burying the existing wired utilities. Probably not enough tax funding or voter enthusiasm to pull it off is my guess. The one upside is that poles are cheap to put new infrastructure on. But it would be so much prettier without all the wires criss-crossing everywhere. I hope someday we do it.
There are cities in the US that have 2.5x the population density that Zurich does. Rural Texas might have this excuse, but New York City absolutely does not.
The higher the density, the more problematic to dig up the streets to bury the fibre lines. And US streets are much wider to dig the lines.
I've seen city-level street works in the US and they are incredibly slow compared to national highway work, or street work in Europe. Like 10x slower. And getting the permissions? Impossible
You often do, if the street has been there for a while. The exact location of underground infrastructure was rarely documented in the past. While the city should have a general idea of what lies under the street, you usually have to dig the street up to determine where you can install new infrastructure safely.
Why are you using all of US then compare the internet of most US cities and to most cities in Europe and Asia. US has a problem of false advertisement it is portrayed as the free market but reality it is filled with monopolies/duopolies/captured markets in most industries and americans are propagandized to believe stupidly that it is a good thing.
It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state. I heard about one German auto engineer who was visiting Los Angeles. He looked at a map and thought it would be a fun drive to go to Portland and back on a Saturday. He was shocked when his American colleagues told him to look at the map's scale more closely, and that it would be more than 24 hours of driving just to get there and come back.
So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.
European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.
The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there. The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.
It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.
Yeah that sounds impossible. How are these places able to get power, sewage or water? Do they all just have solar panels in their huge backyard or something? Did they just get the Internet with starlink?
The guy I responded to didn't describe something rural though.
Heard about every excuse possible in this thread. Cities are too dense, can't put fiber in the ground. Suburb yards are too big so not enough density. Rural have too much distance.
As if these things doesn't exist in Europe at all. In reality they do, we don't have fiber everywhere but we for certain have a lot more of it in areas that matches all excuses given.
Guess what makes it real easy to build out fiber? Whenever you're already digging for power, water, sewage, roadwork, whatever, you put some fiber down. But "efficient" capitalism doesn't work like that I guess.
Now thing about all the single houses on multiple sq mile plots and the fact that a $40-$100 subscription is never going to pay back the millions it took to get to each of those homes. There are tons of those. I've lived in several states like that.
Is that 2.5x number the average of the whole of the US compared to Switzerland? Because NYC probably has higher density than Switzerland, but Oklahoma probably has much lower than even that 2.5x number, and it doesn't make sense to put them under the same umbrella.
Every story about how the US has awful internet has a comment like this. I suspect that the refusal to believe the US is worse at anything is part of the reason it never catches up in those areas.
This article isn't about coverage, it's about what goes in the duct if there is a connection. If Comcast can run a cable to your house, then they can put four strands and allow other ISPs access to them.
That said, how many of these homes have mains electricity? Landline phone service? If they can do that, then they can do fiber. Sure your cabin in Montana might not have it (though the equivalent in Sweden probably would), but the small town probably does.
How do you explain the top comment at this time (about Spectrum in NYC)? It can't get denser than NYC. So I guess it's not the density that's the problem.
Except in my very rural and very poor part of the US we got a fiber co-op that formed a few years ago that provides 1 gig direct to home without a problem.
People only using aggregate density calculation is so overly simplistic. Inside of each country there are patterns.
Imagine a country with two huge cities and a very long empty desert in the middle. Density can be low but its still easy to connect.
I not totally skeptical that some places are harder to connect then others but given we live in the modern world with algorithms and satellites we should be able to do a better job than top level density.
And I'm not saying this to convince you that Switzerland is easier. Frankly I do think it easier. But because I am actually interested if anybody knows if such work and estimations exist.
Like lets assume all fiber, cable and old phone connections are gone. How hard much would it cost to get every person to some very high speed.
I'm in central Switzerland and I have 15 Mbps internet (just measured with https://www.speedtest.ch/, the cables to the nearest exchange can't handle any more traffic), and I don't know why I would need more.
What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that.
Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
I can also get 400Gbit in my office, that doesn't mean it's a useful benchmark for the country. The article seems to represent the state of the 3 countries compared pretty well.
Where exactly is Ziply available? Their website is vague, but it seems to be at most a small corner of the North West, and it seems like their 50G plan is not as widely available as their 2G plan.
Sure, but remember that we’re talking about _residential_ services here. Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps to all residential fiber customers. They also sell IP Transit services to businesses at higher speeds, but we’re not talking about those.
Also Spain followed the Swiss model, with a twist. The line was laid by telefonica/movistar, everyone rents from them. You can normally get at least 1Gbps at any residential location (often even rural ones if at least a few houses are clumped together).
> In the United States, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber, you might get 1 Gigabit. But often it’s shared with your neighbors. And you usually have exactly one choice of provider.
I've got 5gbps symmetric right now and I can barely use it. Steam is the only app that can get close to saturating the connection. There is another fiber provider and a docsis provider available. I live in a fairly rural area. There's more options than I care to evaluate at this point.
This article sounds like it was written pre-2020. Times have changed. At least in Texas ISP markets. Maybe others are still stuck in the old ways.
I have often wondered why my country does not have fast Internet and my own hypothesis is that our phone companies push so hard for mobile data plans that most people just use their phone's Internet for everything. I have seen many people always connecting their laptop and TV and even security cameras to the hotspot provided by their phone, with only mild complaining about how annoying it can be. When I suggest they get a proper home connection they just shrug it off as an extra pointless expense and something only nerds like me care.
We could have so much better connectivity, but average people are happy as long as they can watch <streaming-service>.
Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.
Irish model is similar (shared ducts, backbone networks which are mandated to provide connectivity to ISPs, including competitors). But Irish market is shit. All is done over pppoe, hard to get fair dual-stack, assymetric shaping (5gbit down, 50mbit up), hidden 10tb/month limits, etc.
The Australian system is much better than the US system, even with 1/10th the country-level density. The internet here is generally faster and cheaper than the suburban US, with a similar system to Switzerland.
This is the New Zealand model. Multiple ISPs but only a few fibre providers - the largest one is Chorus, with a few that are very localised, but follow the same rules.
The ONT is accessible to all ISPs, and you can provision both available ports with different ISPs if wanted. Usually, a change from one ISP to another happens within the day, like number portability.
I don't know that this is an easy comparison to make. Switzerland is 16k square miles in size (and about 9.1 million people). Taking a random, low-density American state as a comparison - say, the innocuous and sparsely-populated western state of Idaho - I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people).
I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to.
<edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!)
<second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>.
Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major.
Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.
I feel like this argument doesn't work in all cases, because of course there are densely populated parts of America. Massachusetts is 7,800 sq miles of land and 7 million people. New Jersey is 7,354 sq miles and over 9 million people, so almost double the density of Switzerland!
So sure, nationwide policies in America have to account for all the empty space, but there's also wide swaths of the country that have relatively normal (if still overall low) levels of density. What's stopping MA or NJ from starting a similar scheme to the one in the article? Probably a lack of funding, state capacity, and political will.
If anything, the comparison probably falls apart because Switzerland is filthy rich. Apparently their GDPPC is $126k vs America's $94k, and crucially, I suspect the former is much more evenly distributed. All I have to go off of is visiting once, but it's certainly a very expensive and well-maintained country.
>I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people).
>I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.
The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.
In fairness, the phone network practically took a century to get fully set up, was quite expensive in its time, and it's pretty easy to run a dinky little wire pair to a house (sometimes they'd literally use barbed wire fences). And labor costs were a lot lower when the phone network was built out.
Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.
The regulations here aren't about forcing companies to lay fiber to every home, it's enforcing a standard that when a company does lay fiber it lays four strands that any ISP can use.
That argument might be valid if there were no urban areas in America. However it fails to explain why, for example, New Jersey does not have affordable 25 Gbit residential internet either. It is half the size of Switzerland but has similar population and much more favorable geography. And even if you wanted to only look at a place like Idaho, the explanation (and solutions!) provided by the article is even more applicable to places where building infrastructure is hard/costly.
Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]
> We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.
We're one of the most spread out populations in Europe, and yet we have ubiquitous gigabit fibre to even the smallest of villages (I have it in a village of ~12 houses, an hour's drive from the nearest population hub), with a broad selection of providers.
Why? Because Movistar, the former national telecom, is required by law to connect the entire population to fibre, and then rent access to all their smaller competitors.
Well in the area of Sweden I live in a particular company seems to own the fibre, and then they have to allow access to resell it. The company owning the fibre has been finding interesting extra ways of charging me extra fees over the years and I don't have a choice of moving away from them (except paying for commercial fibre or using slower 5G with quotas)
Well I get your point, but Sweden has a GDP of just under a trillion. The example US state of Idaho has a GDP of about 100 billion. It really is just a quiet, no-frills, rural kind of state.
He’s talking about natural monopolies. Those exist in most US cities and towns. Simple rule of thumb: if you don’t have municipal water, this doesn’t apply to you either. If you do, you should have dedicated fibers.
It is a stupid comparison with a stupid anti capitalist agenda. All infrastructure in Switzerland is high quality and highly maintained because they are a tiny and wealthy country. Their wealth has something to do with banking. Maybe the author of the stupid blog post can ponder the relationship between free markets, banking, and wealth.
Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
I don't know why you are getting down voted. I wrote the article and that is the point of the article. A free market requires proper and smart regulation to work for all the people to get the best product.
The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism.
What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's anti-capitalism in the guise of capitalism.
Because the fixed cost of deploying infrastructure (digging the fiber to the house) is extremely expensive compared to the marginal cost (of serving data over an already installed fiber). 20 different companies all digging their own fibers to the same house would be tremendously wasteful.
People really don't have a clue how fast 25Gbps is, no personal device can come close to taking advantage of it. SSDs barely will transfer that fast on the best case scenarios (buffered large blocks). Most wifi won't even clear 0.5Gbps. If you have the latest and greatest wifi7 where both your PC and router supports it, you can get up to 2.5Gbps if you're sitting next to the router. If you're wired, few people have 10Gbps ethernet. You have to get a dedicated adapter for it since practically no PCs come with it. And that's just for 10Gbps. For 25Gbps, there's nothing available for the consumer market. That's enterprise level stuff. A single 25Gbps ethernet card costs $500.
I get that but in all seriousness if they're saying "the free market" doesn't provide what people want it's worth asking if most people (remember, not HN readers) actually want 25 Gbit internet.
I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article.
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
It is an essay not a scientific paper. As such it's more an opinion peace. The first question in my head why it does not compare with Rumania and South Korea.
It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g.
The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the German speaking world and to the US as Americans are very loud on HN , Internet so you need to canter this audience.
That's why I don't like this essay. This very specific sound from "we know it better". This essay doesn't want to find the best way for this type of infrastructure. Ironically I know this sound only from Germany.
The author is Swiss – your ad hominem attach fails twice. And again, I'll direct you to original point of my above comment and a point made in the essay: if you want to be effective you'll need to look past ideology to see the actually working dynamics of the system. There is no doubt that the Swiss internet service provision system is superior to the US and Germany – no doubt. The essay explains why, an essay you are welcome to read.
Ok and you couldn't get my argument: Why not Rumania, South Korea? These countries have also a great quality of internet. On mobile Poland, France and Austria?
This is also a difference between an ideologicopinion piece with a "Ive told you so" and "Markets are bad " to an scientific review.
I'm sure the analysis could be expanded – why don't you give your try at an essay? If you write it, I'll read it.
How much should the essay be expanded? Surely we don't want a 1:1 scale model of reality. We probably should not factor in the conductivity of water and compare against the cost of 1 liter of milk; although if I wanted to attack the integrity of the essay I might lament those factors' absence.
Snark aside, I like that the author chose to compare Switzerland, Germany, and the US. It elegantly illustrated the similarities and differences.
Population of Switzerland is around 9 million people. Slightly larger than NYC.
Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.
I'll briefly reiterate the essay's primary point, for your convenience, which is agnostic to population size: when a natural monopoly exists, the best solution – regardless of ideology – is to make the underlying infrastructure at once singular and public while fostering competition at the level of servicing that infrastructure. That is how Switzerland accomplished its highly functional fiber-optic network, a system that is at once cheaper, more reliable, and more performant than its US and German peers.
This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.
The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.
The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
Look, as mentioned in the prior comment there are varying spreads of performance across geography (including in Switzerland), and while you might be experiencing one expression of that variance (good internet connection in Utah) you need to look beyond that anecdote to trace the bigger picture and observe performance/cost/reliability beyond your narrow environment.
> "That's not a capitalism problem"
It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.
(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)
Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.
I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).
"Economic migration" is a (usually derogatory) term for moving into a country to earn more money, with no desire to adapt to the culture of your new home.
Often times the children of such migrants adapt pretty well. I think the term is more euphemistic and neutral than derogatory. It's more like a category that's existed for centuries (but gets more stigma now) because some the older generations who have been in the U.S. for a few decades now look down on those "fresh off the boat," the same way those before them did to them. Irish fled the Potato Famine in the 1850s- they were economic migrants too.
I never really thought of it as a subset of immigrants who move to get rich but not adapt. Lisa Su, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are also economic migrants. Just because they adapted/assimilated more than others doesn't make them _not_ economic migrants.
All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors.
Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared.
"dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link.
Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
Your post is unnecessarily pedantic. The point the article makes is that they have a dedicated line to the next router unlike cable (DOCSIS) or GPON fiber where already the bandwidth of the last mile is shared among subscribers.
It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.
>Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first few phone lines.
But the article does point out that 1G plans are very widely available at low prices. US consumers would love that but it's not available anywhere near as widely as in Switzerland.
For certain definitions of 1G, it's probably available widely in the US at this point. It won't be symmetrical, but Comcast (and I would guess Spectrum) have 1G+ download speeds in lots of places.
> Some in <country> have X, while other friends in <city> have Y
Cool. What's your message here, though?
I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently.
Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.
I mean it feels like it was just straight written with AI: "Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways."
Meh. I have gigabit fiber and it's enough for me right now. I could pay for 5 gigabit, but why? The last mile is almost never the bottleneck in my connection. 99% of the time it's upstream somewhere, with the only real exception being Steam game downloads. And my home network is gigabit ethernet so to actually get any benefit I'd have to upgrade a ton of my own hardware, the router and the switches and the NICs and even all the way down to the cables.
on the topic of Swiss Internet: everyone I know in Zurich’s home internet gets a mostly-static IPv4. It’s not a promised feature or anything, but my IP didn’t rotate for years. This is super handy for self hosting.
We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.
If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
These sound like two entitely disconnected points, also sans facts?
I could get 25 gbps in Switzerland for CHF 69 pm right now through init7. From what I've seen, this would be considered quite competitive in other countries. In Switzerland this is actually very affordable when compared to salaries.
The article goes to some efforts to show how the Swiss model drives competition which has given us these relatively competitive prices. I'm not seeing how your personal lack of utility for 25 Gbps addresses that, let alone refutes it.
Hate to sound like a cable company, but same. I have 8/8 available to me for barely more money, but I just don't need it. Sites don't load faster, movies don't play clearer, and I don't have a huge family. 1/1 suits me fine.
Just above your comment is one lamenting the situation in New York City. That's roughly the same population as Switzerland in a not quite as massive area.
While the article does have its shortcomings, it drives me crazy that we'd have to build 3 or 4 fiber lines to each house individually here in Germany. Imagine we'd have done it that way with water or electricity. It's completely braindead. Just one town over, there are houses that had the street dug up 3 times to lay fiber. But only to connect the neighborhood 2km down the valley. No internet for them. It's absolutely stupid.
I can get 1Gbps up/down for $50. It is a PON fiber connection. This seems fast enough for everything a computer professional needs to do. I'm not sure what 25 Gbps internet access would actually be needed for.
Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP.
In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
Are you arguing that a country as large and wealthy as the US can only solve one problem at a time or that fast, affordable Internet access is somehow a luxury problem?
TBF Ziply is very much an outlier. Most urban and suburban places in the US have middling to poor connectivity provided by a monopoly or duopoly that overcharges while engaging in various underhanded tactics.
Weirdly enough some of the most reasonable offerings in the US can be had in the few rural counties that have built out municipal fiber networks alongside the electric grid. Unfortunately that is once again very much the exception rather than the norm.
Ah yes, the classic gotcha: why doesn’t the world’s largest economy, spanning a continent, look exactly like a country of 9 million that fits inside West Virginia? Truly a mystery. Next up: why doesn’t the US have Monaco’s per capita yacht ownership?
That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up.
According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.
The free market does work, when given the right rails.
I think the people who think "free market" will fix any problem are the same exact people who think that it would be a great idea if companies are allowed to own their own fiber or put thousands of satellites into orbit. They will see it as a problem of regulations that it is too cumbersome to put fiber into the ground as a company, and advocate for deregulation, "micro trenching" and privatization, that in order to "let the market do its thing" you need to deregulate the ISPs, get rid of net neutrality, get rid of the FCC, privatize all publicly owned infrastructure not yet privatized. Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
The problem here is, unironically, caused by the government getting involved. Many of these companies are granted legal monopoles in their service areas. If someone dares to start a competitor, the incumbent harasses them with lawsuits to try to shut them out. The free market isn't all sunshine and rainbows (and natural monopolies like infrastructure are a place where it frequently fails), but the market is not particularly free in this case.
No the problem is that it just doesn't work no matter how much faith you have in the free market. The whole point is to get over this crazy ideology and think rationally about it, the problem isn't "caused by the government getting involved" it's caused by people who think like you, running the government. The article explains this very well you should read it:
> True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.
> The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.
> Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture.
Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.
> Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players.
You have to understand that some things can not be different. Lets take an example that is simpler, that even libertarians might understand: Streets, you can not privatize streets. You can not have a market where companies build streets and compete for customers to use their streets. Because you can not build 5 different streets to the same place. Infrastructure like fiber internet is like streets, you can't have 5 different companies rip open every street to every house and put fiber into it.
I talked to someone laying fiber in Manhattan circa 2020 he said it was $25k / ft. That the permitting process took so long by the time it got approved the people on the city council had changed. That the conduits are so packed you can’t fit another fiber line in it and almost all of them are undocumented. All kinds of union circumvention BS from Verizon aka Empire City Subway who’s supposed to be maintaining this stuff per contract. It’s a shit show.
The USA is run by a greedy oligarchy. Switzerland
is on the other hand closer to a direct democracy.
That explains a LOT. (It's not a full direct
democracy since they have representatives still,
but look at the current orange king and his cronies,
they are not going to fix anything but solely to
enrich themselves and delay investigations as to
who really organised the naughty parties at Epstein
islands. Could be called oligarch parties too. They
can hire underage people and the "justice" system
will not uncover anything.)
The Mad Australian NBN model. The absolute worst method possible.
Switzerland looks like the Singapore ULL model. Glass to the house, with competition for the terminating device. Absolute perfection. Its not anti market really so its a weird place to crow about free markets.
That said, the US is still in a much better position than Aus with local power companies forming coops with ISPs to deliver glass via power conduit. It really is the next best thing. Of course, Australia has power monopolies that make this super awkward.
That said there's nothing wrong with something like Germany, except instead of multiple pits, you just have common pit and pipe. Providers apply for access to the pits and run their own cabling. Australia does this already, but Telstra still owns a large part of the pit and pipe, making it costly, and NBNCo is allowed to police residential competition (The charge being more points than importing drugs) so it never helped us.
Hey this is a great place to look at how many times Australia has fucked its own internet supply.
1. We had ULL with Telstra but tossed that out with NBNCo.
2. We had a small number of PoI's, but the ACCC agreed with the big 4 that this was somehow anticompetitive.
3. We have pit and pipe asset that could be gifted to local government to maintain for service providers. But we leave it owned by monopolies.
4. We could have more ISPs negotiating access to lead ins, but we have power monopolies that make it impossible.
Effectively, stupid nonsense prevents us from picking up anyones good last mile internet scheme.
Starlink's best value proposition is competing with other satellite services, or DSL over copper wire, in remote areas where those are the only feasible choices. Which describes much of rural America, as well as many other locations... but not most of Switzerland.
cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.
Smaller territory is an often-repeated claim for why any particular infrastructure strategy doesn't transfer to the US, but that makes no sense to me as most numbers can just be scaled up and still make sense.
Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.
Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially.
When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed.
Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe.
The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.
The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.
And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.
Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.
US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.
It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
> Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc.
Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.
This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title.
Some important points that they leave out:
- 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations.
- The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
- 25G internet is also available in some locations in the United States.
- As another commenter discovered, the average speed test results of US and Swiss internet connections are pretty similar. The average Swiss person isn't connected to the internet faster than the average United States person.
> - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_.
What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.
The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.
Population density is the thing people are talking about when they say that. It's 6 times higher in Switzerland than in the US.
Density is not the correct measure here because empty land decreases density but doesn't need to be covered. What matters is how much the population is clustered.
But that makes it even worse because a lot of Switzerland is entirely unoccupied mountains whereas millions of people live in places like Kansas and Nebraska and expect to have internet access.
And they do have it, but it does not need to be 25 gbps. Even if they had access to it, they wouldn't/shouldn't pay for it.
25 Gbps is a silly (but illustrative / clickbaity) take in this context. The more relevant measures as others have pointed out is how well-covered clusters of population are, but also what their broadband quality is. I live in Sweden, where we have extremely well-built out broadband networks, especially in cities. (My professional take is that quality is often very poor, but that is comparing to the rest of the country). We are a small country too, but we have still chosen symmetric active ethernet over the assymmetric PON, we have largely discontinued DSL, our cable/coax offerings have largely been replaced with fibre, and where DSL was not profitable, 4G is generally built out well enough to cover most people. Swedes in rural areas buy Starlink not for their reach, but for redundancy or even price.
I would say most of those things are not true in the US market. The united states IS a much, much bigger country, but my guess is that the median reach, stability, and speed is way lower than the Swedish and Swiss examples, compared to what it could be. The US has way higher military costs, still relatively high taxes, and most of all a stronger buying power. I pay $35/month for 300/300 Mbps Active Ethernet FTTH, and consider that overprized. When I last looked, the median American could generally afford more than that, but had access to less. Sorry, I don't have the numbers at hand.
Which of the things you said don't also apply to the people in Zurich?
Also, if you say people in Kansas don't need fiber then you have to expect that to get averaged in. The population density in California is less than half what it is in Switzerland. Only 10% of US states have a higher population density than Switzerland and those states represent less than 10% of the US population (because of those 5 states the one with the largest land area is Maryland).
If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.
If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.
That seems like another way to lie with silly stats though. If 3% of the least populated areas of all the subdivisions of the US the size of Switzerland were not connected, then that would indeed be just as irrelevant.
> A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal
It will never be both objectively and subjectively equal. Even the geographic is already difference, the weather, then there is people, wealth, etc.
Yes but all of those things are independent of the size of the country, which is the point.
Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?
It's a false equivalence to compare working in a company to have the same scaling problems as implementing policies to set up broadband infrastructure.
Not really at all.
Taking politics out of it. If you wanted to start a 25gbps project today, who do you think could get it done quicker. A small local municipality with a few network engineers. Or getting a Federal agency to do it?
My money is on the municipality.
So why don't you have ISPs that focus on one state or one geographical area. We have that all over in Europe.
To some extent there are, but in many cases it's because the law prohibits that. It imposes build out requirements so that if you want to offer service in the higher density area you also have to provide service over a wide area that includes a bunch of farmland or similar.
In theory this is supposed to be to make sure someone is serving rural areas but in practice it's because the incumbents don't want new challengers showing up to provide better service in the areas where it's profitable to build a competing network and so lobby the government to saddle them with a huge barrier to entry.
Indeed. But also some things that were harder at the small company were easier at the large one. You have processes in place, were things in the small company are all done ‘by hand’.
So I think it is hard to compare small and big. For one company things are easy that are hard for the other and vice-versa.
Do you imagine an infrastructure project in ANY country is managed like a project in a small company?
> Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?
I don't know about anyone else, but I have *never* found this to be the case.
Dealing with a larger company you've got a far greater selection of people you can get to say "uh, yeah, I guess, why not? It's not really my department..." which you can take as a yes.
In a smaller company no matter what you're doing you've got to get it past Old Bob, who's been there since before most of the current management team were born and will argue over everything simply because he can.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Sort of?
If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.
Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.
But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.
For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?
Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.
At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)
This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"
It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.
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.
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.
> 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.
You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to.
Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere.
Edge cases are hard is not a bad rule of thumb.
High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.
Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.
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.
> Corruption, aging infrastructure...
There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.
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.
Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...
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.
Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.
Haven’t you heard? We barely have electricity here in Europe, let alone phones. Or so I keep reading online.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/
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.
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.
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.
Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 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/.
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_5....
There is a real disadvantage of countries with large population: More layers of management in politics, more corruption.
Maybe the US should split themselves up into 50 smaller divisions of populations that have more local autonomy to optimize things like this.
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-....
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.
> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.
1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> imagine what someone in rural America goes through.
Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet.
https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2...
Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly).
Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one
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)
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.
> 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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
It's illegal in many states for the local municipality to do it. Here it's the norm, so our local power companies put down fiber when do power or other utilities.
Nah it's BS. It's American-flavored capitalism that's the issue, and it's crushing the free-market.
I live in SF - the densest US city on the west coast, and the densest US city after NYC. We have city-owned "dark fiber" run through (most?) every street. Any ISP can offer service by renting the connection to my house, as long as they service "the last hundred feet" from pole to door and the billing.
I have about half-dozen ISPs that will give me from 1G-5G of service, all under $100/mo - (a great price in America). I pay for redundant >1g fiber connections to my house for less than the price of my parent's 50 mbps bill.
The issue is capitalism. In much of the US, the ISPs have lobbied and enforced "monopolies" by exclusive fiat of the jurisdiction, in some shape or form. 16 US states have laws that prevent the local government from maintaining or providing internet infrastructure like fiber lines, requiring private companies to maintain it all. Any free-market enthusiast will readily tell you that competition brings prices down, but capitalism is crushing the free-market, reducing competition for the benefit of the wealthy.
I just commented this elsewhere. It does exist and is where the good internet is. Good internet being a few g, but still better than i've had downtown or rurally
I cannot comment on the cost in the US, but in the UK it would be the farm that’s more expensive because the cost is relative the distance. You still have to file the same government applications to close a dirt road as you would a busy city street. But you would have much more miles of road to file the application for, plus the actual expense of the engineering work, for rural destinations.
And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.
This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.
I've lived dense city to rural in the US, and it's suburbia that has the best internet. Can rip up the street for days no problem, but still a relatively dense population.
That's my sense, too. Companies seem to get permits really quickly where I live, and there are enough people around to make it worth their while.
AT&T, which already had cable here, ripped up the street a few months back and put in fiber. There are two other high speed providers as well.
> Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber
Or you can just run new fiber in the pipes that contained copper wiring that has most likely already been swapped out for fiber in the 1990s. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.
In theory you would be right. In practice you have to ask all of your competitors for permission to change anything, and all the old copper is still there. They never actually swapped it out for fiber! You cannot take out any of their old copper, even though you’re sure it’s not in use by anyone, to make space for your new fiber.
I don't think you need to tear open busy streets to install fiber. In my area we got fiber (up to 10G now) and they didn't open any trench.
Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.
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.
Don't you already have conduits, or undergrounds where old telephone lines are running already? That's what we used to install optical fiber everywhere in cities France. Really easy, nothing to tear open. And because it's dense, it's cheap per home.
On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.
Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.
In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.
It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.
Imagine providing fibers in city such as London, Paris or Geneva. Oh wait.
> 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.
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.
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.
Exactly why starlink's business was viable.
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations.
It is available everywhere where fiber internet is available. As of May 2026 this is ~50% of all households in Switzerland.
Not quite. There are some homes where P2MP was installed before the court order that are still P2MP. These still have fiber but only 10Gbps shared, not 25Gbps dedicated.
Also, the only ISP that offers 25Gbps is Init7 and they need to have their equipment at the other end of the fiber to offer 25Gbps. I don't think they quite have 100% coverage yet.
On a similar note, there is 50G internet available in the UK, but there is only a single customer to my knowledge (on the Youfibre/Netomnia network). Another difference is that I believe Switzerland is using 25GBASE-X as the transport, whereas in the UK it is 50G-PON (alongside the regular XGS-PON service which most customers have).
The United States might be 85 times larger than Switzerland but it still has a higher population density than Sweden, and even in rural Sweden (similar population density to Wyoming) where my father lives he has a similar ability to pick providers at will as the Swiss.
Average and median is not the same. Listed speed and actual speed is not the same (as mentioned in the article).
Also, about the size of the countries. The underlying model scales, that’s the point. Unless you were talking about political willingness to back large commitments. That’s a another question.
- Swiss here, you’re coping, 25G is available almost anywhere,
- the size doesn’t matter that much, you also have considerably more money and urban density comparable to us or higher. If you want to start counting reasons it’s harder here: we have mountains to go over, strong environmental regulations, can’t build at night in cities, must stop working on Sunday… no cheap labor, etc.
> The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland.
All other things being equal; it's a lot easier to dig huge amounts of fibre runs (following roads) where there isn't a heavy density of people.
Distance is practically meaningless for fibre optic cabling, but digging up historic cities, digging through mountain ranges, avoiding subways, plumbing and ensuring you have enough cables for the density of humans is hard.
Much harder than running cables between buildings that house 10 people which are 50ft away from each other.
If the geographic factors are dominant then we should expect New Jersey to have 25 Gbps internet.
> It's just the fastest tier available in some locations
It's available where I live, and I live in some backwater little town. I think around 60% of the population currently has 25G, and that's expected to reach 80% by 2030.
The area of just the contiguous US is almost 200 times as big as Switzerland. Where did the 85 come from? Did you divide square miles by square kilometers?
That's exactly what he did. At least he didn't include any of the 300,000 square miles of water.
This argument somehow appears every time there is an article comparing American internet to another country's, regardless of the country. And it's such a lazy argument, you wouldn't expect them to even get the match correct.
Switzerland is larger than New Jersey and with a lower population and higher per capita gdp. I assume therefore New Jersey is better than Switzerland in all these metrics, from public transport to internet.
Any data available regarding the median or how many with no connection at all?
for those curious, regarding your first point, as far as I know any home that is dark red on this map has access to it, and any light red is planned to get access: https://ftth.init7.net/
Chicago here, 2gbps via coax (so probably 40 or 60 down) is the max I can get.
It also assumes the US broadband market is free, which it effectively isn’t. There’s a huge moat of hard-lobbied for “regulations” put in place by the established players.
Other than running a commercial CDN at home or something.. what possible need is there for a 25 Gbit home connection?
My home ISP connection (in Silicon Valley) is ~22 Mbit. That is enough for just about everything I can think of. We can run 3 zoom calls simultaneously (3 people in the house), stream movies, play online games, etc, all works fine.
The only time I wish for a bit more is for huge downloads, but that is so rare (once a month? probably not even) that it's just a footnote.
And at my personal office I have ~150Mbit connection and that is overkill for everything I can think of.
25 gigabit might be overkill for now as there is not a lot of end user equipment supporting it but 22 megabit would be painful for me.
My family have a number of gaming PC's and a playstation, downloading a game is easily 40-60 gigabytes so the difference between 22 megabit and a gigabit makes a huge change in usability.
22 megabit is also not really enough for 4K streaming (netflix 4K is 15-25 megabits, the better ones is even more).
Switzerland is small but mountainous.
And just for reference:
So you can think of Switzerland as Delaware, but landlocked and full of 4,000-meter peaks.All your points completely miss the point of the article, no?
> Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I don't think anyone is suggesting the US be covered with broadband, just the bits where people live. That then becomes a comparable problem, insofar as Switzerland has comparable size communities (with the exception of the very largest end of US cities whose population exceeds that of Switzerland)
Now let's do trains.
US has the largest railway on earth by a large margin
US annual freight tonnage per annum is much the same as Australia's (1.5 billion tonne /annum, IIRC).
Australia has longer, more control complex trains (leading, trailing and midway locomotives).
To the best of my knowledge the US has never once had a single train 7 km in length with 680+ cars and a gross tonnage of 99,734 tonne - Australia has set a record with such a train and moves smaller (but still at that scale) trains daily.
( That's over 4.3 miles in length carrying 109,938 short tons for any readers from Liberia, or Myanmar )
Tech-wise Australia also operates the world's first (and still only?) fully autonomous rail heavy haul routes.
"Australia" doesn't really set records, multinational mining companies do. The records might as well be set on another planet. There is virtually no population, roads or utilities, no agricultural land beyond low density cattle stations that need up to 50 hectares per head, no mountain ranges, no large rivers, and employing people to work on site out there is might be 3x more expensive than the rest of the economy. The records are set on private lines that operate outside normal rail regulations by agreement set down by state governments that are beholden to the mining companies.
Comparing USA's freight rail network to Australia's on those numbers paints a misleading picture. 3/4 of it is iron ore and coal being carried relatively short distances (few 100s of km) from inland out to the nearest coastal port, and most of that is away from any significant population centers.
By ton-mile, USA takes 5-6x more than Australia and much more interesting and varied conditions and freight types and destinations - not just ferrying it from a hole in the ground, across highway 1, then into a bunker at a shipping terminal.
Like everything, it all depends on your metric.
Again, same freight tonnages as the US .. and with fewer people == vastly greater rail performance per capita, and similar tonnages in absolute numbers.
The US is just another G20 country, and one sliding down the rankings on freedom, and democracy.
Well the metric you replied to was rail network size, and was correct about the USA having the largest. "Rail performance" would more typically be measured by ton miles or tonne miles, not "tonnage". Australia still does a bit better there per capita there.
But in either case it is almost entirely these isolated short private coal and ore export lines that have no interconnection or interaction with the rest of the country's freight nor does it remove freight from any roads that the rest of the population would be using. These are virtually entirely in isolation from the rest of the country or economy or transport network and are built by and for mining multinationals. In the context of a country's governance or transport infrastructure or general rail networks, they don't say anything. If they were there or not there or private road and oversize road trains instead, it would not change anything about the rest of the country's transport.
Largest freight rail. Public transport for normal people is still shit compared to Europe.
And especially China. And Japan.
Have you been to Europe? What area do you enjoy the public transportation?
Switzerland.
The Netherlands
Have you been to America? Public transportation barely exists.
That doesn't seem to be stopping europeans from moving to USA.
Apparently net migration has been towards the EU rather than towards the USA since 2022, but I can't find a better source than this: https://x.com/benbawan/status/2049303326999609846
Your source literally has been community noted as misleading.
But how much of it is electrified?
How fast does it move? How's the latency?
This is kind of a dumb statement. Yes the US is one of the larges most populated countries and has been for a long time. Its just coping instead of actually engaging with the question about what makes railways good. The US put down lots of track in the 18-19th centuries as its industrial revolution was pre-car and its the biggest country where this happened.
If you look into detail and not just very simple 'we transport this much cargo' you see the US system has many disadvantages and is not nearly as amazing as some US people barging make it seem.
Frankly given the historical strength of railways in the US into the 20th century, the near perfect geography for rail and the lack of ports its quite embracing how little things are done with rail.
Yeah, what a biased piece of reporting.
Switzerland has one of the highest Internet prices in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...
And don't talk to me about mobile data prices, it's out of the planet.
Hi, that statistic probably looked at the full price of the various plans before discounts. The reality is different, all providers offer significant discounts, and you’ll hardly find anyone paying more than 50 CHF a month for 10 Gbps (including streaming TV channels). Personally, I’ve never paid more than 45 CHF a month for 10 Gbps and TV and I currently pay 38 CHF, but I know people with even better deals.
The same goes for mobile service. The expensive plans are the “standard” ones from Swisscom or Sunrise, the two major carriers, but most people use low-cost digital providers that offer excellent plans for less than 20 CHF a month. Mobile prices, however, remain high compared to the rest of Europe and the world. Still, fiber-optic internet is available in virtually every city, with the exception of very small, remote mountain villages.
I’m an Italian who’s lived in Switzerland for years, and fiber-optic prices here aren’t that much higher than in Italy, especially when you consider speed and reliability.
You can find 25 Gbps plans for less than 70 CHF a month.
As posted above, for information. In Switzerland, fresh from their website:
- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222
- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)
Switzerland has some of the highest prices in the world for everything. This isn't unique to the Internet.
Yes, comparatively to a lot of stuff (like food for example), internet connectivity is cheap in Switzerland.
To take 2 countries where I have been living in the last 10 years, if you compare internet prices and average income in Switzerland and Spain, Swiss citizens end up in a favorable situation compared to Spanish ones.
That's right. Swiss wages are at least twice the European average (actually much more than that, but let's keep it conservative). If we exclude home rent and healthcare costs, the vast majority of things definitely don't cost twice as much. Switzerland ranks among the highest in Europe in terms of purchasing power, that's the figure that matters when determining how expensive a country actually is.
Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating.
Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
Truly embarrassing and sad.
If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you? In my experience, it's one of the best ISPs I've ever had.
Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.
They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.
Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.
> If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you?
Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.
Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.
At my past place Fios was excellent but I've had mixed results recently, with ping spikes and a lot of suspected traffic shaping of things like Youtube.
Service is pretty good though.
I'm guessing you saw this SNL sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM
No one is forcing you to use their modem or router.
Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.
At the apartment I lived at until last year, Spectrum only offered up to half a gig down unless you used their modem (which of course meant an extra $15 per month on top of the plan for a full gig already being more expensive). Of course, neither of these were symmetric, with the connection listed as "mixed" between copper and fiber. I stuck with the half gig since it was the best option without paying them for the "privilege" of using their equipment.
At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.
I guess they don't bother using Speedtest in Switzerland, as the average speed seems about the same as the US: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
Must be a sampling bias or something.
You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true.
Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.
(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
Swiss law does require an overwhelming majority of the value of a product be made in Switzerland to use Swiss flag branding, or even Swiss landmarks or other signifiers of Swiss-ness. That's why Toblerone had to remove the drawing of the Matterhorn they've had since forever on the side of their triangular tubes, because some production has been shifted to Poland.
> allusions to the Swiss flag,
It is a big plus.
I see red when I read this kind of comments.
> in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality
That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.
For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.
And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.
I feel it's a little more extreme for swiss companies though, especially outside the country. My aunt who works in Rome in the tourism industry told us of a local company that had 'swiss' in the name, simply because of the positive connotation, even when they don't seem to have any relation to the country.
It's why I feel wary of making business with any company with the word 'swiss' in it's name
The cachet of "Swiss" products is a lot higher than US. (Whether this is merited is another question entirely)
Not really.
In France we have a French brand of bikes, from the sports retailer Intersport, called Nakamura...
They actually hide the fact it's a local brand, let people think it's a Japanese brand, to suggest it's higher quality.
And Decathlon's bikes are Van Rysel, which does mean "from Lille" (where the bikes are designed) but you wouldn't know it unless you speak Dutch. I don't think they hide anything really, but having a Dutch-sounding makes a connection to the Dutch and Flemish who are well known for cycling.
"made in" is completely different. A higher price is justified by supporting Americans in some way, rather than somewhere offshore.
This is more like McDonald's putting a maple leaf in their logo in Canada. It changes nothing but, apparently, Canadians like it more (I frequently watch Canadian television and non-canadian companies are frequently adding a leaf somewhere in the advertising).
That's how we can tell they aren't Canadian.
Feels like it's only U.S companies that do that, because that's what works in the States.
I've noticed a similar thing when buying products online. Overseas sellers from Asia will package their product as "Designed in Germany" or include a red cross to indicate Swiss design, but may not actually be designed or manufactured in Switzerland. Nice packaging though :)
Plenty of American firms do this too, notably Apple.
Made in China, Designed by Apple in California, lmao
Kind of the ideal setup though. Apple’s design and engineering work has been great, China’s manufacturing can execute on it better than anyone else (see the issues with iPhone production in India).
It’s like saying the ideal car would be designed by Italians, engineered by Germans, and built by the Japanese.
Also a large fraction of the swiss population is old, and the older portion of the population:
- do not like changes
- value loyalty much more than younger people
- consider that bar an important change in income, there is no reason they shouldn't pay x if they agreed on it 10 years before.
If it works and continue working the same as it ever been and at the same price, they don't see a reason to look for something else.
It's nationalism mixed up with marketing.
Nationalism works for domestic markets.
The association with quality manufacturing and precision helps abroad.
Very similar thing happens for "Made in Italy".
Especially that behind Salt was/is a French company, ohhh the horror.
For me, the positive connotation of "Swiss" only applies to mechanical watches.
Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.
The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!
I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.
The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.
This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.
So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.
Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.
I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.
At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.
In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.
What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.
Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.
I wish my country India was like that, because we are totally opposite. Anything made in India is considered very bad quality and will not fetch a good price even if better than imported goods.
I ran speed tests a lot more when I had internet that varied from 5-20MB depending on the day/weather/etc. Now I'm on >1GB it's so rarely a concern that I don't bother. I suspect this skews the data significantly.
Most people use Speedtest when something going terrible wrong and they have packet loss, extreme latency or something similar. Or before renting out their appartment on AirBnB.
25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps.
25Gbps requires pretty unusual hardware to use (see [0] for example) and you need to pay a couple hundred francs for installation so even among the geeks and nerds, it's not common.
I have it myself but recommend to friends and colleagues to use Init7 but 10Gbps instead.
[0]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-07-10-linux-25gbit-...
Since its 2026 now we have easier alternatives.
https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/cloud-gateways/efg?subcategor...
https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq
That says as much about socioeconomics (price sensitivity, laws that prohibit calling for upselling, etc.) as actual speed. E.g. in my country, the last time I looked over 95% had a fiber connection to home and the major providers offer 1Gbit (for connections still on AON) or 4 to 8Gbit (on XGS-PON).
Yet, our average is still a mid 230Mbit. Why? People sticking with cable internet out of inertia, people sticking with cable because they have more attractive TV packages. People choosing 100 or 200 Mbit because it's cheaper (e.g. my parents just stick to 200Mbit because they don't need more for web browsing and some streaming).
Same for cellular. My country is only in the 17th position, yet I have 1Gbit 5G cellular with unlimited data for ~25 Euro per month. Most people just don't want to spend more than 10 per month and go for cheap plans/providers.
But such price sensitivity differs a lot per country.
You're not missing anything. The article is trying to imply that 25G is everywhere in Switzerland, but it's not. They just picked the fastest available speed and ignored the fact that some places in the United States also have 25G internet available.
Or like your apples is what people have chosen and the oranges is what is available to buy if you want it.
I upgaded to 1000mbps as it is the same price now as slower but only time itll make a difference is downloading a model or huge installer.
The limiting factor on speed-tests when you have 10-25 Gbps internet is WiFi. That’s what this is more likely showing.
I did an internship in Switzerland in 2007 and mobile data was 14 USD/MB while I had unlimited data in the US. The place I was staying in Zurich had only 128 kbps ISDN while I had a symmetric gigabit line in my US dorm room. At that time I thought Switzerland was the most backward country ever.
Things change, I guess.
Brazil is surprisingly good. What are they doing right?
The funny thing is, it works on people outside of Switzerland too. There are actual Americans fooled by this blatant marketing in this very thread.
I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.
At some point these things become cheap enough that you might as well. The price difference between 500MB and 1GB for me is very little, and so for the peak usage time improvements and few times a month that I download a steam game or movie, it's worth it. I pay significantly less than 70 USD a month for my 1GB connection.
Actually, think all the devs here should know this too (and am surprised people on HN are making such a big deal about this). Agreed, 500Mb is what most households need because, yeah, 90% of the time 4k video is the most demanding thing we do (which is only 25Mb/s per person in the household).
Having been telling this to my family and friends whenever they want to upgrade to 1Gb/s, but to noavail. They rarely ever take the suggestion (ah well, to each their own).
Agreed. It's telling that the ads for speed upgrades all seem to focus on families: when all are uploading and streaming maybe at the same time. The marketeers know that 1 individuals and couples are not the target market and 2 they want everyone to be using as much as possible.
those advertisers are crafty:)
I had an apartment once with both 300Mb cable and 1Gb fiber available. Cable was $40 and reliable with all the bandwidth I needed. The fiber sales reps would stop by a few times a year perplexed that I didn't want to pay through the nose for a bigger number. Moving away to a different location, I had to put up with a dodgy cable provider until cheap fiber was deployed and still don't need the extra bandwidth.
Yep completely agree.
I lived with about 5 people and our internet was 500mbps and it was more than enough.
Looking at the network monitor the only need for anything really above 100mbps was when people wanted to download something. For daily needs, surfing, browsing, the odd download you don't need a lot. And that's with everyone streaming, scrolling, gaming etc concurrently.
Totally agree - having been telling this to friends for years, to no avail.
Btw, what network monitor are you using? Was it just a diagnostic tool in your router's admin page? Or is it something special like dd-wrt? Because seems like it's kind of hit or miss if a router's stock admin includes a reliable network monitor.
The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.
That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.
There are a few things that support it, at least in my experience… I get close to line rate for steam downloads for large games, and other content with a good CDN.
The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.
Don't look up the 40+ Billion spent trying to get every American service.
https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equ...
Don't look up!
I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine freezes (I download games to a normal SATA drive and the machine is a Ryzen 9 9900X). I have to option to go to 2Gbit or even 8Gbit but I don't want to buy more expensive switches/routers and network cards for my computers.
Who (not including geeks) would want to go faster than 1Gbit?
> not including geeks
Sir, this is Hackernews
edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers
In Catania 10 gbit Internet costs 35 euros/month and is available everywhere in the city and even in a big slice of the small towns around Catania. And indeed public incentives played a big role. But what I believe it is more interesting is that 1 gigabit was common like 10 years ago or even more. Infrastructure is a bit too important to be left to what the market believes will be profitable.
Btw the paradox I have is that my local lan is 1 gbit...
Interesting to read. I actually did not really looked into the rest of Italy's fibre build out state, but FWIW here in South Tyrol - basically the other end of the country - there's fully build out fibre access into every municipality since 2013. And basically every village (outside the cities most municipalities consist of a handful of villages here) got access a few years too, even the ones with sub 1k population.
Once you have 1Gbps Fiber it's not particularly hard to go to 25 if some other entity other than the Telco is covering the costs.
692 comments 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400
There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages.
Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.
Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.
I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
> That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..
Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.
In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..
Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization.
Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.
That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.
Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.
Every Aussie techie reading this curses Murdoch and Abbott for screwing up the NBN, which would have given us what Switzerland has.
I don't care about fancy numbers, I care about high quality peering.
I'd rather have a stable 50Mbit than 1Gbit and 0.5Mbit international peering with packet loss.
Init7 (the ISP in question) is pretty fantastic for peering. They're good to start with but there have been times I've just written them an email and said "hey, I know you and ASABCD have a presence at BLAH-IX, could you peer directly" and it ends up working.
I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe.
Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.
Don't sign up with a Tier 1 or aspiring one
How do I compare the peering capabilities of different ISP's? Assuming tier 1 ISP's are not available in my geographic location.
Radar by qrator and BGP.tools.
BGP.tools may be inaccurate for upstreams.
Liberty Global is fine.
I’m fortunate where I’m at in the Bay Area to get 10Gpbs for $50/mo from Sonic. Service has been amazing.
It’s a no brainer at the cost even if it’s not saturated. 10 gig equipment is expensive so majority of my LAN is 1gig. I ended up getting some new network equipment and my WiFi caps at 2.5Gbps.
Steam and Usenet are my primary downloads that can take advantage but even my NAS only has a 1gig card as I haven’t bought the 10gig upgrade card.
Majority of homes are most likely fine with 1 gig, but we also don’t know what the future holds for network bandwidth.
The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does.
I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
Density doesn't really make the sort of difference you might think.
Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.
In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).
US regulations actually give telecoms a leg up in a lot of ways to expand services. These private companies have utility access to power polls and easement access to common lines. About the only regulation that can get in the way is some cities and states have minimum service requirements before you can start burying in a new territory. That is a give away to the ISPs to tamp down competition.
The reason internet is so crap is because utility lines are all private. For example, in the UK BT owns all the lines and British law allows for line rental from 3rd party ISPs. That's what allows you to get a wide variety of ISPs without having to plow in a brand new line to your location. That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere. Without that, ISPs have no incentive to increase speeds as new competition is very hard to create or come by.
I agree with you about the effects of regulation and privatization. The installation challenges of dense urban environments are no joke either. But:
> Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem.
Plumbing yes, but it might not leave the property. About 25% of US homes have septic systems, and some states are as high as 50%. For water, 15% of homes use private wells, which goes to 72% for rural households.
It's not everything, but density absolutely matters for rural households. The US is vast and contains many areas where you are your water and sewer company because there's no municipal option.
That said, your electricity example shows the way. That got to every home through massive public infrastructure projects. And internet could too, far easier than water or sewer.
> In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).
If endpoints are spread too far out, it's not hard technically to connect them, but it might be very expensive and not feasible economically.
If density is too high on the other hand (say NYC), it's becoming hard to technically connect, because, as you mentioned, there's already a lot of "stuff" there that you have to be careful about. But it might be much more interesting economically.
I think Switzerland just hits a sweet spot between these two. It's dense enough to be profitable but sparse enough to make construction still feasible. So essentially, we're just lucky.
> That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere.
In case of India, the government lines had higher costs and lower service standards than the private Jio. So it is not always the case that government infrastructure is better. However, there are regulations that require rural infrastructure development which ensures coverage on low profitability regions.
> Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.
Those utilities are also far older than the Internet, so they should be expected to have more penetration. Also, the fair comparison here wouldn't be "how many American homes have a super fast Internet connection", but rather "how many American homes have the Internet at all".
As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).
Whenever I hear the density problem for internet cables, I think about all the cables in the ocean and how few people actually live on the bottom of it.
It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population.
As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.
Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas.
You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines.
It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.
> It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas
This is backwards in my experience, but I probably have a different definition of urban from you. In my area, the suburban area has mostly underground lines that pre-date fiber, and getting fiber is probably not ever happening. Comcast is all we got. But if I drive 15 minutes into the city, there are fiber lines on every pole, and I could choose from a couple different providers.
It'll depend on the area. From what I've seen, it appears that a lot of cities are eliminating utility poles and are burying all their lines (except for high voltage power).
An urban buried line will be harder than a suburban or rural buried line. Pole access is easier in both situations.
Utilities like buried lines because people will cut and strip overhead lines looking for copper.
Yeah that sounds like just a regional definition of what constitutes urban :). My city is old only by western US standards, approaching 200 years old, and nobody seems to have any intention of burying the existing wired utilities. Probably not enough tax funding or voter enthusiasm to pull it off is my guess. The one upside is that poles are cheap to put new infrastructure on. But it would be so much prettier without all the wires criss-crossing everywhere. I hope someday we do it.
There are cities in the US that have 2.5x the population density that Zurich does. Rural Texas might have this excuse, but New York City absolutely does not.
The higher the density, the more problematic to dig up the streets to bury the fibre lines. And US streets are much wider to dig the lines.
I've seen city-level street works in the US and they are incredibly slow compared to national highway work, or street work in Europe. Like 10x slower. And getting the permissions? Impossible
You don’t need to dig up streets to install fiber underground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_boring
You often do, if the street has been there for a while. The exact location of underground infrastructure was rarely documented in the past. While the city should have a general idea of what lies under the street, you usually have to dig the street up to determine where you can install new infrastructure safely.
Well, that's "small" digging, but you still need maps and permissions.
Why are you using all of US then compare the internet of most US cities and to most cities in Europe and Asia. US has a problem of false advertisement it is portrayed as the free market but reality it is filled with monopolies/duopolies/captured markets in most industries and americans are propagandized to believe stupidly that it is a good thing.
It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state. I heard about one German auto engineer who was visiting Los Angeles. He looked at a map and thought it would be a fun drive to go to Portland and back on a Saturday. He was shocked when his American colleagues told him to look at the map's scale more closely, and that it would be more than 24 hours of driving just to get there and come back.
So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.
European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.
The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there. The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.
It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.
Yeah that sounds impossible. How are these places able to get power, sewage or water? Do they all just have solar panels in their huge backyard or something? Did they just get the Internet with starlink?
...For rural places in America, at least, they don't get sewer or water lines run to them. They have a septic tank and a well.
Power lines are significantly easier to run than water/sewer.
The guy I responded to didn't describe something rural though.
Heard about every excuse possible in this thread. Cities are too dense, can't put fiber in the ground. Suburb yards are too big so not enough density. Rural have too much distance.
As if these things doesn't exist in Europe at all. In reality they do, we don't have fiber everywhere but we for certain have a lot more of it in areas that matches all excuses given.
Guess what makes it real easy to build out fiber? Whenever you're already digging for power, water, sewage, roadwork, whatever, you put some fiber down. But "efficient" capitalism doesn't work like that I guess.
Now thing about all the single houses on multiple sq mile plots and the fact that a $40-$100 subscription is never going to pay back the millions it took to get to each of those homes. There are tons of those. I've lived in several states like that.
If you can manage to have plumbing and electricity, you can manage to have proper broadband.
> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state
Which US states can you do this in? You can drive across Texas from El Paso to Port Arthur in 12 AFAICT. Alaska maybe?
Now Western Australia where I live ... 36 hours from Cape Leeuwin to Kununurra, and we only have 10% the population of Texas.
> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state.
I used to have a car like that also.
A slow one? Me too.
It takes longer to drive the length of Sweden than it does the length of California.
There are big countries with a good internet. Russia was one before it started turning back into totalitarian shithole.
To be fair the situation with the Internet in deep rural Russia was never great. Not everyone lives in a city.
Is that 2.5x number the average of the whole of the US compared to Switzerland? Because NYC probably has higher density than Switzerland, but Oklahoma probably has much lower than even that 2.5x number, and it doesn't make sense to put them under the same umbrella.
The vast, vast majority of Americans live in more dense areas.
A naive average national density obscures more than it reveals.
The US has it much easier not harder.
The average population density is pretty irrelevant here. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.pn...
Lots of high density cluster and much easier geography (Switzerland famously has lots of mountains in the way).
So the question is "Why do US metropolitan areas not have 25gbit fiber for about $60/month?".
Every story about how the US has awful internet has a comment like this. I suspect that the refusal to believe the US is worse at anything is part of the reason it never catches up in those areas.
This article isn't about coverage, it's about what goes in the duct if there is a connection. If Comcast can run a cable to your house, then they can put four strands and allow other ISPs access to them.
That said, how many of these homes have mains electricity? Landline phone service? If they can do that, then they can do fiber. Sure your cabin in Montana might not have it (though the equivalent in Sweden probably would), but the small town probably does.
How do you explain the top comment at this time (about Spectrum in NYC)? It can't get denser than NYC. So I guess it's not the density that's the problem.
Actually curious what you can get in NYC.
I’m getting 5/5gbps for $100 CAD in what qualifies as “rural Canada” for tax reasons. But in Toronto there was 10/10gbps for $30.
> But in Toronto there was 10/10gbps for $30
Who? What? Where? When?
Beanfield if you call and ask. It was years ago so they probably changed it a little for new customers.
Surely there are cities with the same density in the USA?
Yes the complete lack of geography in the article should of raised red flags for people.
Switzerland is half as dense as New Jersey.
It's around the same density as Delaware and Maryland. And it's full of giant mountains, which neither Delaware nor Maryland have.
Except in my very rural and very poor part of the US we got a fiber co-op that formed a few years ago that provides 1 gig direct to home without a problem.
People only using aggregate density calculation is so overly simplistic. Inside of each country there are patterns.
Imagine a country with two huge cities and a very long empty desert in the middle. Density can be low but its still easy to connect.
I not totally skeptical that some places are harder to connect then others but given we live in the modern world with algorithms and satellites we should be able to do a better job than top level density.
And I'm not saying this to convince you that Switzerland is easier. Frankly I do think it easier. But because I am actually interested if anybody knows if such work and estimations exist.
Like lets assume all fiber, cable and old phone connections are gone. How hard much would it cost to get every person to some very high speed.
25 gbit internet?
I'm in central Switzerland and I have 15 Mbps internet (just measured with https://www.speedtest.ch/, the cables to the nearest exchange can't handle any more traffic), and I don't know why I would need more.
What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that.
Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
The point is "America Bad. Upvotes to the left."
Yeah, that was kind of my take on it.
False! Ziply Fiber offers speeds up to 50Gbps. https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig
I can also get 400Gbit in my office, that doesn't mean it's a useful benchmark for the country. The article seems to represent the state of the 3 countries compared pretty well.
Where exactly is Ziply available? Their website is vague, but it seems to be at most a small corner of the North West, and it seems like their 50G plan is not as widely available as their 2G plan.
Ziply is a regional ISP. They serve the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Here’s a map showing their backbone links: https://ziplyfiber.com/~/media/Residential/modules/Columns--...
> I can also get 400Gbit in my office…
Sure, but remember that we’re talking about _residential_ services here. Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps to all residential fiber customers. They also sell IP Transit services to businesses at higher speeds, but we’re not talking about those.
Also Spain followed the Swiss model, with a twist. The line was laid by telefonica/movistar, everyone rents from them. You can normally get at least 1Gbps at any residential location (often even rural ones if at least a few houses are clumped together).
> In the United States, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber, you might get 1 Gigabit. But often it’s shared with your neighbors. And you usually have exactly one choice of provider.
I've got 5gbps symmetric right now and I can barely use it. Steam is the only app that can get close to saturating the connection. There is another fiber provider and a docsis provider available. I live in a fairly rural area. There's more options than I care to evaluate at this point.
This article sounds like it was written pre-2020. Times have changed. At least in Texas ISP markets. Maybe others are still stuck in the old ways.
I have often wondered why my country does not have fast Internet and my own hypothesis is that our phone companies push so hard for mobile data plans that most people just use their phone's Internet for everything. I have seen many people always connecting their laptop and TV and even security cameras to the hotspot provided by their phone, with only mild complaining about how annoying it can be. When I suggest they get a proper home connection they just shrug it off as an extra pointless expense and something only nerds like me care.
We could have so much better connectivity, but average people are happy as long as they can watch <streaming-service>.
Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.
Irish model is similar (shared ducts, backbone networks which are mandated to provide connectivity to ISPs, including competitors). But Irish market is shit. All is done over pppoe, hard to get fair dual-stack, assymetric shaping (5gbit down, 50mbit up), hidden 10tb/month limits, etc.
should really look at the Australian system... it's not really a free market there and the internet is awful
Yes, Australia destroys his whole argument. They went the Swiss way with a single provider (NBN).
But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.
The Australian system is much better than the US system, even with 1/10th the country-level density. The internet here is generally faster and cheaper than the suburban US, with a similar system to Switzerland.
We have our NBN fibre here in Australia and it works fine. We can get 1000 down / 400 up for ~100USD.
This is the New Zealand model. Multiple ISPs but only a few fibre providers - the largest one is Chorus, with a few that are very localised, but follow the same rules.
The ONT is accessible to all ISPs, and you can provision both available ports with different ISPs if wanted. Usually, a change from one ISP to another happens within the day, like number portability.
I don't know that this is an easy comparison to make. Switzerland is 16k square miles in size (and about 9.1 million people). Taking a random, low-density American state as a comparison - say, the innocuous and sparsely-populated western state of Idaho - I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people).
I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to.
<edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!)
<second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>.
Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major.
Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.
I feel like this argument doesn't work in all cases, because of course there are densely populated parts of America. Massachusetts is 7,800 sq miles of land and 7 million people. New Jersey is 7,354 sq miles and over 9 million people, so almost double the density of Switzerland!
So sure, nationwide policies in America have to account for all the empty space, but there's also wide swaths of the country that have relatively normal (if still overall low) levels of density. What's stopping MA or NJ from starting a similar scheme to the one in the article? Probably a lack of funding, state capacity, and political will.
If anything, the comparison probably falls apart because Switzerland is filthy rich. Apparently their GDPPC is $126k vs America's $94k, and crucially, I suspect the former is much more evenly distributed. All I have to go off of is visiting once, but it's certainly a very expensive and well-maintained country.
>I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). >I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
> it's very easy to provide electricity
America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.
The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.
In fairness, the phone network practically took a century to get fully set up, was quite expensive in its time, and it's pretty easy to run a dinky little wire pair to a house (sometimes they'd literally use barbed wire fences). And labor costs were a lot lower when the phone network was built out.
Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.
>but somehow internet is not.
Look up DSL.
The regulations here aren't about forcing companies to lay fiber to every home, it's enforcing a standard that when a company does lay fiber it lays four strands that any ISP can use.
That argument might be valid if there were no urban areas in America. However it fails to explain why, for example, New Jersey does not have affordable 25 Gbit residential internet either. It is half the size of Switzerland but has similar population and much more favorable geography. And even if you wanted to only look at a place like Idaho, the explanation (and solutions!) provided by the article is even more applicable to places where building infrastructure is hard/costly.
Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]
> We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyPHGZCmNE&t=17m17s
Now do Sweden.
Or Spain.
We're one of the most spread out populations in Europe, and yet we have ubiquitous gigabit fibre to even the smallest of villages (I have it in a village of ~12 houses, an hour's drive from the nearest population hub), with a broad selection of providers.
Why? Because Movistar, the former national telecom, is required by law to connect the entire population to fibre, and then rent access to all their smaller competitors.
Well in the area of Sweden I live in a particular company seems to own the fibre, and then they have to allow access to resell it. The company owning the fibre has been finding interesting extra ways of charging me extra fees over the years and I don't have a choice of moving away from them (except paying for commercial fibre or using slower 5G with quotas)
Well I get your point, but Sweden has a GDP of just under a trillion. The example US state of Idaho has a GDP of about 100 billion. It really is just a quiet, no-frills, rural kind of state.
If density is the primary factor, why doesn't an American city like NYC have faster/cheaper internet than Switzerland?
none of that explains why the dense states (e.g. ma, ny, ca, tx) have this solved
He’s talking about natural monopolies. Those exist in most US cities and towns. Simple rule of thumb: if you don’t have municipal water, this doesn’t apply to you either. If you do, you should have dedicated fibers.
Except that the people that I know in the US also say that internet is also overpriced and expensive with limited competition in many cities.
It is a stupid comparison with a stupid anti capitalist agenda. All infrastructure in Switzerland is high quality and highly maintained because they are a tiny and wealthy country. Their wealth has something to do with banking. Maybe the author of the stupid blog post can ponder the relationship between free markets, banking, and wealth.
You appear to be sponsored by the word "stupid."
> The Free Market Lie
Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
The article didn’t say free market is bad in general, it said it doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.
> low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
All I see on the Internet is Americans complaining about high prices and enshittification of every product. Is your market not free enough?
Free market doesn't sort itself out. It has to be streamed through proper regulation.
I don't know why you are getting down voted. I wrote the article and that is the point of the article. A free market requires proper and smart regulation to work for all the people to get the best product.
Hence why the EU is competing so well against the US
That is not what the article is saying, at all.
The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism.
What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's anti-capitalism in the guise of capitalism.
Why would fiber to the house be a natural monopoly?
Because the fixed cost of deploying infrastructure (digging the fiber to the house) is extremely expensive compared to the marginal cost (of serving data over an already installed fiber). 20 different companies all digging their own fibers to the same house would be tremendously wasteful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Overbuilding makes no financial sense for companies
Why would roads to your house be a natural monopoly?
Crazy idea but...
Do I _need_ 25 Gb internet? Even when I had 1 Gb I never saturated the connection.
People really don't have a clue how fast 25Gbps is, no personal device can come close to taking advantage of it. SSDs barely will transfer that fast on the best case scenarios (buffered large blocks). Most wifi won't even clear 0.5Gbps. If you have the latest and greatest wifi7 where both your PC and router supports it, you can get up to 2.5Gbps if you're sitting next to the router. If you're wired, few people have 10Gbps ethernet. You have to get a dedicated adapter for it since practically no PCs come with it. And that's just for 10Gbps. For 25Gbps, there's nothing available for the consumer market. That's enterprise level stuff. A single 25Gbps ethernet card costs $500.
…and 640kb RAM is more than enough.
I get that but in all seriousness if they're saying "the free market" doesn't provide what people want it's worth asking if most people (remember, not HN readers) actually want 25 Gbit internet.
You have to think longer term.
Today’s 1Gbit is tomorrow’s 25GBit.
It takes some time to actually install it. So, better to plan for the future.
I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article.
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
It is an essay not a scientific paper. As such it's more an opinion peace. The first question in my head why it does not compare with Rumania and South Korea.
It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g.
The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the German speaking world and to the US as Americans are very loud on HN , Internet so you need to canter this audience.
That's why I don't like this essay. This very specific sound from "we know it better". This essay doesn't want to find the best way for this type of infrastructure. Ironically I know this sound only from Germany.
The author is Swiss – your ad hominem attach fails twice. And again, I'll direct you to original point of my above comment and a point made in the essay: if you want to be effective you'll need to look past ideology to see the actually working dynamics of the system. There is no doubt that the Swiss internet service provision system is superior to the US and Germany – no doubt. The essay explains why, an essay you are welcome to read.
Ok and you couldn't get my argument: Why not Rumania, South Korea? These countries have also a great quality of internet. On mobile Poland, France and Austria?
This is also a difference between an ideologicopinion piece with a "Ive told you so" and "Markets are bad " to an scientific review.
I'm sure the analysis could be expanded – why don't you give your try at an essay? If you write it, I'll read it.
How much should the essay be expanded? Surely we don't want a 1:1 scale model of reality. We probably should not factor in the conductivity of water and compare against the cost of 1 liter of milk; although if I wanted to attack the integrity of the essay I might lament those factors' absence.
Snark aside, I like that the author chose to compare Switzerland, Germany, and the US. It elegantly illustrated the similarities and differences.
Population of Switzerland is around 9 million people. Slightly larger than NYC.
Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.
I'll briefly reiterate the essay's primary point, for your convenience, which is agnostic to population size: when a natural monopoly exists, the best solution – regardless of ideology – is to make the underlying infrastructure at once singular and public while fostering competition at the level of servicing that infrastructure. That is how Switzerland accomplished its highly functional fiber-optic network, a system that is at once cheaper, more reliable, and more performant than its US and German peers.
This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.
The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.
The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
Look, as mentioned in the prior comment there are varying spreads of performance across geography (including in Switzerland), and while you might be experiencing one expression of that variance (good internet connection in Utah) you need to look beyond that anecdote to trace the bigger picture and observe performance/cost/reliability beyond your narrow environment.
> "That's not a capitalism problem"
It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.
(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)
It's an interesting model, but a few things I can't actually find in the article:
1. Who is initially paying for the physical shared infrastructure?
2. Who is in charge of the maintenance?
Isn't it better to compare Switzerland with say NYC? Or compare US to EU as a whole.
Australia has the same system. We don't have 25gbit, we have very expensive 1gbit asymmetric, and extremely expensive 1gbit symmetric. What gives?
Rupert Murdoch and the Liberal party happened
The fact that some in Switzerland wanted to cap population at 10 million says a lot about their free market. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/14/switzerland-re...
Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.
I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).
It was a referendum. Anyone can trigger a referendum if they have 100k signatures. This was not the government position.
Switzerland is a democracy, another concept foreign to Americans. People vote on all sorts of things all the time.
I'm not sure what economic migration is. Economic for whom? I'm not taking a side by asking, merely wondering.
"Economic migration" is a (usually derogatory) term for moving into a country to earn more money, with no desire to adapt to the culture of your new home.
Often times the children of such migrants adapt pretty well. I think the term is more euphemistic and neutral than derogatory. It's more like a category that's existed for centuries (but gets more stigma now) because some the older generations who have been in the U.S. for a few decades now look down on those "fresh off the boat," the same way those before them did to them. Irish fled the Potato Famine in the 1850s- they were economic migrants too.
I never really thought of it as a subset of immigrants who move to get rich but not adapt. Lisa Su, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are also economic migrants. Just because they adapted/assimilated more than others doesn't make them _not_ economic migrants.
see my response to danielheath.
* Up to 25Gbps...
All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors.
Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared.
"dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link.
Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
Your post is unnecessarily pedantic. The point the article makes is that they have a dedicated line to the next router unlike cable (DOCSIS) or GPON fiber where already the bandwidth of the last mile is shared among subscribers.
It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.
We're all going to caching appliances deployed on the ISP's network these days anyway.
>Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first few phone lines.
25 gig is still expensive for consumers to configure end to end.
Right. US consumers don't want 25 gig.
But the article does point out that 1G plans are very widely available at low prices. US consumers would love that but it's not available anywhere near as widely as in Switzerland.
For certain definitions of 1G, it's probably available widely in the US at this point. It won't be symmetrical, but Comcast (and I would guess Spectrum) have 1G+ download speeds in lots of places.
You know the author has a fast internet connection when the photos are 6 MB PNG each.
Some in Poland have 2.5Gbit+ fiber, while other friends in Berlin have ADSL.
Sweden has good fiber to, off the top of my head.
> Some in <country> have X, while other friends in <city> have Y
Cool. What's your message here, though?
I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently.
Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.
The point is your main city is holding back having faster internet for average citizens
AFAIK _most_ of German personal customers are still only covered by DSL.
- Happy Vodafone customer having 40 Mbps on a good day.
"This article is ... spellchecked with AI" ???
Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???
The AI understands context so it's able to spot typos even when they coincidentally make reel words.
I mean it feels like it was just straight written with AI: "Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways."
Meh. I have gigabit fiber and it's enough for me right now. I could pay for 5 gigabit, but why? The last mile is almost never the bottleneck in my connection. 99% of the time it's upstream somewhere, with the only real exception being Steam game downloads. And my home network is gigabit ethernet so to actually get any benefit I'd have to upgrade a ton of my own hardware, the router and the switches and the NICs and even all the way down to the cables.
on the topic of Swiss Internet: everyone I know in Zurich’s home internet gets a mostly-static IPv4. It’s not a promised feature or anything, but my IP didn’t rotate for years. This is super handy for self hosting.
We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.
If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
WEF says you aren't allowed to own things, -999 KYC points for you
That's great for Utah, but most other places in the US don't have a system like that and are stuck with one maybe two ISPs.
Switzerland is 1/5th the size of Utah, seems like a fair comparison to me.
I don’t think Utopia lets you buy it now? In the past you could.
> in Utah
What percentage of the US population does that cover?
“America is best country in the world” thinking is very visible from the comments.
Yeah, it has super bad internet, but because it’s too big, Europe installed copper wires later, 25Gbit is not really that much in Switzerland, etc.
Millions of reasons, but understanding that the current capitalist system doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.
Thus the prices in switzerland are higher than anywhere else. I don’t know about you, but I’d have no use of 25gbits/s
These sound like two entitely disconnected points, also sans facts?
I could get 25 gbps in Switzerland for CHF 69 pm right now through init7. From what I've seen, this would be considered quite competitive in other countries. In Switzerland this is actually very affordable when compared to salaries.
The article goes to some efforts to show how the Swiss model drives competition which has given us these relatively competitive prices. I'm not seeing how your personal lack of utility for 25 Gbps addresses that, let alone refutes it.
Hate to sound like a cable company, but same. I have 8/8 available to me for barely more money, but I just don't need it. Sites don't load faster, movies don't play clearer, and I don't have a huge family. 1/1 suits me fine.
Switzerland is smaller than West Virginia. Less than 1% of the US. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one.
It is usually silly to compare any country with the whole US.
Instead search for the most similar state to compare with: for example Colorado has similarities with Switzerland.
Does Colorado have similarly affordable 25 Gbit fiber?
> much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one
If your theory makes any sense at all, then Vermont with 60% of the size and 7% of the population should have amazing internet... does it?
I'm in New Zealand: Our internet isn't like Switzerlands (~1/2 the population in 6x the size). I use Oregon for our benchmark state.
Just above your comment is one lamenting the situation in New York City. That's roughly the same population as Switzerland in a not quite as massive area.
That's not what the article is about. It's about what goes in the ducts when they are connected, and who has access to the infra.
Is West Virginia wired up?
While the article does have its shortcomings, it drives me crazy that we'd have to build 3 or 4 fiber lines to each house individually here in Germany. Imagine we'd have done it that way with water or electricity. It's completely braindead. Just one town over, there are houses that had the street dug up 3 times to lay fiber. But only to connect the neighborhood 2km down the valley. No internet for them. It's absolutely stupid.
GFiber 20 Gbps beta https://gfiber.com/gfiber-labs/20gig/
Austria doesn't even have 1gbit/s Internet for private customers in their capital city and it neighbors Switzerland...
I’ll help out everyone who is having trouble: the claim is that if you have municipal water then you should have municipal fiber.
I can get 1Gbps up/down for $50. It is a PON fiber connection. This seems fast enough for everything a computer professional needs to do. I'm not sure what 25 Gbps internet access would actually be needed for.
> Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line
Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP.
In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
Are you arguing that a country as large and wealthy as the US can only solve one problem at a time or that fast, affordable Internet access is somehow a luxury problem?
Are all Americans living in single person houses spread out evenly over the entire land area?
Is there any other way to ranch spherical cows?
Ziply fiber has 50Gbps service
Their service area is >15x the size of Switzerland.
(16k sq miles vs 250k square miles)
The overbuilding is a very annoying problem though, I agree.
TBF Ziply is very much an outlier. Most urban and suburban places in the US have middling to poor connectivity provided by a monopoly or duopoly that overcharges while engaging in various underhanded tactics.
Weirdly enough some of the most reasonable offerings in the US can be had in the few rural counties that have built out municipal fiber networks alongside the electric grid. Unfortunately that is once again very much the exception rather than the norm.
Ah yes, the classic gotcha: why doesn’t the world’s largest economy, spanning a continent, look exactly like a country of 9 million that fits inside West Virginia? Truly a mystery. Next up: why doesn’t the US have Monaco’s per capita yacht ownership?
This argument makes zero sense.
Meanwhile, your counterargument is well supported by data and facts.
“Anecdotally, X works better in another country than it does in the USA- the free market is a lie!”
That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up.
According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.
The free market does work, when given the right rails.
Lol I love this thread. It's just pure cope.
cries in canada
Yes, fine - 'land mass'. (ditto US) But land mass doesn't make corporations lobby and collude
Who told you US telco sector is a free market?
I think the people who think "free market" will fix any problem are the same exact people who think that it would be a great idea if companies are allowed to own their own fiber or put thousands of satellites into orbit. They will see it as a problem of regulations that it is too cumbersome to put fiber into the ground as a company, and advocate for deregulation, "micro trenching" and privatization, that in order to "let the market do its thing" you need to deregulate the ISPs, get rid of net neutrality, get rid of the FCC, privatize all publicly owned infrastructure not yet privatized. Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
The problem here is, unironically, caused by the government getting involved. Many of these companies are granted legal monopoles in their service areas. If someone dares to start a competitor, the incumbent harasses them with lawsuits to try to shut them out. The free market isn't all sunshine and rainbows (and natural monopolies like infrastructure are a place where it frequently fails), but the market is not particularly free in this case.
No the problem is that it just doesn't work no matter how much faith you have in the free market. The whole point is to get over this crazy ideology and think rationally about it, the problem isn't "caused by the government getting involved" it's caused by people who think like you, running the government. The article explains this very well you should read it:
> True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.
> The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.
> Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture.
Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.
> Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players.
You have to understand that some things can not be different. Lets take an example that is simpler, that even libertarians might understand: Streets, you can not privatize streets. You can not have a market where companies build streets and compete for customers to use their streets. Because you can not build 5 different streets to the same place. Infrastructure like fiber internet is like streets, you can't have 5 different companies rip open every street to every house and put fiber into it.
Switzerland has a freer market than America. Free market keep winning, stay mad commies!
I talked to someone laying fiber in Manhattan circa 2020 he said it was $25k / ft. That the permitting process took so long by the time it got approved the people on the city council had changed. That the conduits are so packed you can’t fit another fiber line in it and almost all of them are undocumented. All kinds of union circumvention BS from Verizon aka Empire City Subway who’s supposed to be maintaining this stuff per contract. It’s a shit show.
The USA is run by a greedy oligarchy. Switzerland is on the other hand closer to a direct democracy. That explains a LOT. (It's not a full direct democracy since they have representatives still, but look at the current orange king and his cronies, they are not going to fix anything but solely to enrich themselves and delay investigations as to who really organised the naughty parties at Epstein islands. Could be called oligarch parties too. They can hire underage people and the "justice" system will not uncover anything.)
Cope list:
- Quality matters more than speed
- Average speeds are similar anyway
- US is big
- It would be expensive
- Nobody needs multi gig speed anyway
Those are the kind of excuses a "declining" country like the UK would come out with haha
Not Pictured:
The Mad Australian NBN model. The absolute worst method possible.
Switzerland looks like the Singapore ULL model. Glass to the house, with competition for the terminating device. Absolute perfection. Its not anti market really so its a weird place to crow about free markets.
That said, the US is still in a much better position than Aus with local power companies forming coops with ISPs to deliver glass via power conduit. It really is the next best thing. Of course, Australia has power monopolies that make this super awkward.
That said there's nothing wrong with something like Germany, except instead of multiple pits, you just have common pit and pipe. Providers apply for access to the pits and run their own cabling. Australia does this already, but Telstra still owns a large part of the pit and pipe, making it costly, and NBNCo is allowed to police residential competition (The charge being more points than importing drugs) so it never helped us.
Hey this is a great place to look at how many times Australia has fucked its own internet supply.
1. We had ULL with Telstra but tossed that out with NBNCo. 2. We had a small number of PoI's, but the ACCC agreed with the big 4 that this was somehow anticompetitive. 3. We have pit and pipe asset that could be gifted to local government to maintain for service providers. But we leave it owned by monopolies. 4. We could have more ISPs negotiating access to lead ins, but we have power monopolies that make it impossible.
Effectively, stupid nonsense prevents us from picking up anyones good last mile internet scheme.
Why Switzerland doesnt have its own Starlink?
Why would Switzerland want Starlink when they can get 25Gbps fiber?
Starlink's best value proposition is competing with other satellite services, or DSL over copper wire, in remote areas where those are the only feasible choices. Which describes much of rural America, as well as many other locations... but not most of Switzerland.
cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.
Smaller territory is an often-repeated claim for why any particular infrastructure strategy doesn't transfer to the US, but that makes no sense to me as most numbers can just be scaled up and still make sense.
Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.
Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially.
When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed.
Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe.
The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.
The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.
And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.
Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.
US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.
It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
> Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc.
Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.