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Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

• malteg 3mo ago
  its not about the size... its aboout the quality...even not available everywhere... fibre optic is threaten as a common good....
• esseph 3mo ago
  Ziply fiber has 50Gbps service Their service area is >15x the size of Switzerland. (16k sq miles vs 250k square miles) The overbuilding is a very annoying problem though, I agree.
  • fc417fc802 3mo ago
    TBF Ziply is very much an outlier. Most urban and suburban places in the US have middling to poor connectivity provided by a monopoly or duopoly that overcharges while engaging in various underhanded tactics. Weirdly enough some of the most reasonable offerings in the US can be had in the few rural counties that have built out municipal fiber networks alongside the electric grid. Unfortunately that is once again very much the exception rather than the norm.
• foobarbecue 3mo ago
  "This article is ... spellchecked with AI" ??? Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???
  • OscarCunningham 3mo ago
    The AI understands context so it's able to spot typos even when they coincidentally make reel words.
  • snowl 3mo ago
    I mean it feels like it was just straight written with AI: "Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways."
• michelsedgh 3mo ago
  Why Switzerland doesnt have its own Starlink?
  • initramfs 3mo ago
    Why would Switzerland want Starlink when they can get 25Gbps fiber?
    • rmunn 3mo ago
      Starlink's best value proposition is competing with other satellite services, or DSL over copper wire, in remote areas where those are the only feasible choices. Which describes much of rural America, as well as many other locations... but not most of Switzerland.
• kyralis 3mo ago
  The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
  • Xirdus 3mo ago
    There are cities in the US that have 2.5x the population density that Zurich does. Rural Texas might have this excuse, but New York City absolutely does not.
  • danpalmer 3mo ago
    It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population. As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.
    • cogman10 3mo ago
      Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas. You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines. It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.
      • rootusrootus 3mo ago
        > 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.
• trynumber9 3mo ago
  I guess they don't bother using Speedtest in Switzerland, as the average speed seems about the same as the US: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index Must be a sampling bias or something.
  • danpalmer 3mo ago
    I ran speed tests a lot more when I had internet that varied from 5-20MB depending on the day/weather/etc. Now I'm on >1GB it's so rarely a concern that I don't bother. I suspect this skews the data significantly.
    • aaron695 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • SXX 3mo ago
    Most people use Speedtest when something going terrible wrong and they have packet loss, extreme latency or something similar. Or before renting out their appartment on AirBnB.
  • not_your_vase 3mo ago
    You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
    • arthurofbabylon 3mo ago
      There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run. (Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
• user3939382 3mo ago
  I talked to someone laying fiber in Manhattan circa 2020 he said it was $25k / ft. That the permitting process took so long by the time it got approved the people on the city council had changed. That the conduits are so packed you can’t fit another fiber line in it and almost all of them are undocumented. All kinds of union circumvention BS from Verizon aka Empire City Subway who’s supposed to be maintaining this stuff per contract. It’s a shit show.
• initramfs 3mo ago
  The fact that some in Switzerland wanted to cap population at 10 million says a lot about their free market. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/14/switzerland-referendum-population-cap-svp 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).
  • ivell 3mo ago
    It was a referendum. Anyone can trigger a referendum if they have 100k signatures. This was not the government position.
  • vixen99 3mo ago
    I'm not sure what economic migration is. Economic for whom? I'm not taking a side by asking, merely wondering.
    • danielheath 3mo ago
      "Economic migration" is a (usually derogatory) term for moving into a country to earn more money, with no desire to adapt to the culture of your new home.
      • initramfs 3mo ago
        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.
• phendrenad2 3mo ago
  > Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP. In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
  • lxgr 3mo ago
    Are you arguing that a country as large and wealthy as the US can only solve one problem at a time or that fast, affordable Internet access is somehow a luxury problem?
    • phendrenad2 3mo ago
      I'm saying that if it's 8x as costly to run fibre to every American house, then it requires 8x the political willpower.
  • Hikikomori 3mo ago
    Are all Americans living in single person houses spread out evenly over the entire land area?
    • defrost 3mo ago
      Is there any other way to ranch spherical cows?
      • Hikikomori 3mo ago
        Had to google it but that's pretty funny.
• yawnxyz 3mo ago
  should really look at the Australian system... it's not really a free market there and the internet is awful
  • danpalmer 3mo ago
    The Australian system is much better than the US system, even with 1/10th the country-level density. The internet here is generally faster and cheaper than the suburban US, with a similar system to Switzerland.
    • deleted 3mo ago
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    • deleted 3mo ago
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  • RachelF 3mo ago
    Yes, Australia destroys his whole argument. They went the Swiss way with a single provider (NBN). But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.
  • mjmas 3mo ago
    We have our NBN fibre here in Australia and it works fine. We can get 1000 down / 400 up for ~100USD.
• avalys 3mo ago
  Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.
• waetsch 3mo ago
  There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages. Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government. Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet. I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
  • fransje26 3mo ago
    > That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well. Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders.. Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking. In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..
  • panick21_ 3mo ago
    Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization. Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization. That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors. Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.
• mmaunder 3mo ago
  25 gig is still expensive for consumers to configure end to end.
  • loeg 3mo ago
    Right. US consumers don't want 25 gig.
    • danpalmer 3mo ago
      But the article does point out that 1G plans are very widely available at low prices. US consumers would love that but it's not available anywhere near as widely as in Switzerland.
      • rootusrootus 3mo ago
        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.
• Alex4386 3mo ago
  cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.
  • lxgr 3mo ago
    Smaller territory is an often-repeated claim for why any particular infrastructure strategy doesn't transfer to the US, but that makes no sense to me as most numbers can just be scaled up and still make sense. Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.
• gregsadetsky 3mo ago
  Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating. Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider. Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!). Truly embarrassing and sad.
  • initramfs 3mo ago
    I'm guessing you saw this SNL sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM
    • ritcgab 3mo ago
      It's a documentary.
  • vlovich123 3mo ago
    No one is forcing you to use their modem or router. Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.
    • saghm 3mo ago
      At the apartment I lived at until last year, Spectrum only offered up to half a gig down unless you used their modem (which of course meant an extra $15 per month on top of the plan for a full gig already being more expensive). Of course, neither of these were symmetric, with the connection listed as "mixed" between copper and fiber. I stuck with the half gig since it was the best option without paying them for the "privilege" of using their equipment. At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.
• lxgr 3mo ago
  What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that. Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
  • doublepg23 3mo ago
    The point is "America Bad. Upvotes to the left."
    • ChuckMcM 3mo ago
      Yeah, that was kind of my take on it.
• efitz 3mo ago
  “Anecdotally, X works better in another country than it does in the USA- the free market is a lie!”
  • Nursie 3mo ago
    That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up. According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices. The free market does work, when given the right rails.
• db48x 3mo ago
  False! Ziply Fiber offers speeds up to 50Gbps. https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig
  • danpalmer 3mo ago
    I can also get 400Gbit in my office, that doesn't mean it's a useful benchmark for the country. The article seems to represent the state of the 3 countries compared pretty well. Where exactly is Ziply available? Their website is vague, but it seems to be at most a small corner of the North West, and it seems like their 50G plan is not as widely available as their 2G plan.
    • db48x 3mo ago
      Ziply is a regional ISP. They serve the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Here’s a map showing their backbone links: https://ziplyfiber.com/~/media/Residential/modules/Columns---new/northern-link-map.ashx https://ziplyfiber.com/~/media/Residential/modules/Columns--... > I can also get 400Gbit in my office… Sure, but remember that we’re talking about _residential_ services here. Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps to all residential fiber customers. They also sell IP Transit services to businesses at higher speeds, but we’re not talking about those.
• alex1138 3mo ago
  cries in canada Yes, fine - 'land mass'. (ditto US) But land mass doesn't make corporations lobby and collude
• oceanplexian 3mo ago
  We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end. If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    WEF says you aren't allowed to own things, -999 KYC points for you
  • bhhaskin 3mo ago
    That's great for Utah, but most other places in the US don't have a system like that and are stuck with one maybe two ISPs.
    • oceanplexian 3mo ago
      Switzerland is 1/5th the size of Utah, seems like a fair comparison to me.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
    > in Utah What percentage of the US population does that cover?
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • pottertheotter 3mo ago
    I don’t think Utopia lets you buy it now? In the past you could.
• UltraSane 3mo ago
  I can get 1Gbps up/down for $50. It is a PON fiber connection. This seems fast enough for everything a computer professional needs to do. I'm not sure what 25 Gbps internet access would actually be needed for.
• fl4regun 3mo ago
  I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
  • jerf 3mo ago
    At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.
    • danpalmer 3mo ago
      At some point these things become cheap enough that you might as well. The price difference between 500MB and 1GB for me is very little, and so for the peak usage time improvements and few times a month that I download a steam game or movie, it's worth it. I pay significantly less than 70 USD a month for my 1GB connection.
    • kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago
      I had an apartment once with both 300Mb cable and 1Gb fiber available. Cable was $40 and reliable with all the bandwidth I needed. The fiber sales reps would stop by a few times a year perplexed that I didn't want to pay through the nose for a bigger number. Moving away to a different location, I had to put up with a dodgy cable provider until cheap fiber was deployed and still don't need the extra bandwidth.
    • computerdork 3mo ago
      Actually, think all the devs here should know this too (and am surprised people on HN are making such a big deal about this). Agreed, 500Mb is what most households need because, yeah, 90% of the time 4k video is the most demanding thing we do (which is only 25Mb/s per person in the household). Having been telling this to my family and friends whenever they want to upgrade to 1Gb/s, but to noavail. They rarely ever take the suggestion (ah well, to each their own).
• up2isomorphism 3mo ago
  Who told you US telco sector is a free market?
  • lyu07282 3mo ago
    I think the people who think "free market" will fix any problem are the same exact people who think that it would be a great idea if companies are allowed to own their own fiber or put thousands of satellites into orbit. They will see it as a problem of regulations that it is too cumbersome to put fiber into the ground as a company, and advocate for deregulation, "micro trenching" and privatization, that in order to "let the market do its thing" you need to deregulate the ISPs, get rid of net neutrality, get rid of the FCC, privatize all publicly owned infrastructure not yet privatized. Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
    • parineum 3mo ago
      > Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke. The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture. Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.
      • lyu07282 3mo ago
        > 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.
        • 3mo ago
• varun_ch 3mo ago
  on the topic of Swiss Internet: everyone I know in Zurich’s home internet gets a mostly-static IPv4. It’s not a promised feature or anything, but my IP didn’t rotate for years. This is super handy for self hosting.
• Cider9986 3mo ago
  692 comments 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652400
• arthurofbabylon 3mo ago
  I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article. The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that. Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that. The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
  • jraby3 3mo ago
    Population of Switzerland is around 9 million people. Slightly larger than NYC. Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.
    • arthurofbabylon 3mo ago
      I'll briefly reiterate the essay's primary point, for your convenience, which is agnostic to population size: when a natural monopoly exists, the best solution – regardless of ideology – is to make the underlying infrastructure at once singular and public while fostering competition at the level of servicing that infrastructure. That is how Switzerland accomplished its highly functional fiber-optic network, a system that is at once cheaper, more reliable, and more performant than its US and German peers. This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.
  • oceanplexian 3mo ago
    The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US. The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
• al_borland 3mo ago
  Switzerland is smaller than West Virginia. Less than 1% of the US. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one.
  • Symbiote 3mo ago
    Is West Virginia wired up?
  • rags2riches 3mo ago
    Just above your comment is one lamenting the situation in New York City. That's roughly the same population as Switzerland in a not quite as massive area.
  • ascorbic 3mo ago
    That's not what the article is about. It's about what goes in the ducts when they are connected, and who has access to the infra.
  • robocat 3mo ago
    It is usually silly to compare any country with the whole US. Instead search for the most similar state to compare with: for example Colorado has similarities with Switzerland. Does Colorado have similarly affordable 25 Gbit fiber? > much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one If your theory makes any sense at all, then Vermont with 60% of the size and 7% of the population should have amazing internet... does it? I'm in New Zealand: Our internet isn't like Switzerlands (~1/2 the population in 6x the size). I use Oregon for our benchmark state.
• dirtikiti 3mo ago
  Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference. I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially. When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed. Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe. The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit. The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers. And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure. Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe. US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not. It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
  • _fizz_buzz_ 3mo ago
    > Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference. I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc. Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.
    • dirtikiti 3mo ago
      What part about that is puzzling? A population 30-40x the size, split out over 50 states, with different laws and regulations, different political governance, different geographical and economic considerations... Why wasn't Switzerland compared to the rest of Europe? Comparing the whole of Europe to the whole of the US is a closer comparison.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• freitasm 3mo ago
  This is the New Zealand model. Multiple ISPs but only a few fibre providers - the largest one is Chorus, with a few that are very localised, but follow the same rules. The ONT is accessible to all ISPs, and you can provision both available ports with different ISPs if wanted. Usually, a change from one ISP to another happens within the day, like number portability.
• PeterHolzwarth 3mo ago
  I don't know that this is an easy comparison to make. Switzerland is 16k square miles in size (and about 9.1 million people). Taking a random, low-density American state as a comparison - say, the innocuous and sparsely-populated western state of Idaho - I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure. A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to. <edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!) <second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>. Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major. Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.
  • rullelito 3mo ago
    Now do Sweden.
• hahahaa 3mo ago
  Isn't it better to compare Switzerland with say NYC? Or compare US to EU as a whole.
• tom910 3mo ago
  > The Free Market Lie Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
  • catlikesshrimp 3mo ago
    Free market doesn't sort itself out. It has to be streamed through proper regulation.
    • Cantinflas 3mo ago
      That is not what the article is saying, at all.
    • diordiderot 3mo ago
      Hence why the EU is competing so well against the US
    • sschueller 3mo ago
      I don't know why you are getting down voted. I wrote the article and that is the point of the article. A free market requires proper and smart regulation to work for all the people to get the best product.
      • tom910 3mo ago
        Do we know places when it actually works well? I agree about a small regulation layer, but the issue is that regulation grows over time to the point when it limits free market power. The most problematic markets in the US is over regulated by my opinion
  • mewse-hn 3mo ago
    The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism. What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's anti-capitalism in the guise of capitalism.
• lowbloodsugar 3mo ago
  I’ll help out everyone who is having trouble: the claim is that if you have municipal water then you should have municipal fiber.
• marcus_holmes 3mo ago
  Every Aussie techie reading this curses Murdoch and Abbott for screwing up the NBN, which would have given us what Switzerland has.
• modeless 3mo ago
  Meh. I have gigabit fiber and it's enough for me right now. I could pay for 5 gigabit, but why? The last mile is almost never the bottleneck in my connection. 99% of the time it's upstream somewhere, with the only real exception being Steam game downloads. And my home network is gigabit ethernet so to actually get any benefit I'd have to upgrade a ton of my own hardware, the router and the switches and the NICs and even all the way down to the cables.
• userbinator 3mo ago
  * Up to 25Gbps... All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors. Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. "dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link. Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
  • hnav 3mo ago
    We're all going to caching appliances deployed on the ISP's network these days anyway.
  • realityking 3mo ago
    Your post is unnecessarily pedantic. The point the article makes is that they have a dedicated line to the next router unlike cable (DOCSIS) or GPON fiber where already the bandwidth of the last mile is shared among subscribers. It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.
  • Hikikomori 3mo ago
    >Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!? They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first few phone lines.
    • userbinator 3mo ago
      to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated You basically just showed how stupid the "but it's dEdIcAtEd!!11" argument is.
• ironbound 3mo ago
  Some in Poland have 2.5Gbit+ fiber, while other friends in Berlin have ADSL. Sweden has good fiber to, off the top of my head.
  • numlock86 3mo ago
    > Some in <country> have X, while other friends in <city> have Y Cool. What's your message here, though? I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently. Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.
    • mstaoru 3mo ago
      AFAIK _most_ of German personal customers are still only covered by DSL. - Happy Vodafone customer having 40 Mbps on a good day.
    • ironbound 3mo ago
      The point is your main city is holding back having faster internet for average citizens
      • numlock86 2mo ago
        Since when are "main cities" the benchmark for anything but demographic development?
• nextlevelwizard 3mo ago
  I have often wondered why my country does not have fast Internet and my own hypothesis is that our phone companies push so hard for mobile data plans that most people just use their phone's Internet for everything. I have seen many people always connecting their laptop and TV and even security cameras to the hotspot provided by their phone, with only mild complaining about how annoying it can be. When I suggest they get a proper home connection they just shrug it off as an extra pointless expense and something only nerds like me care. We could have so much better connectivity, but average people are happy as long as they can watch <streaming-service>.
• Aurornis 3mo ago
  This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title. Some important points that they leave out: - 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations. - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland. - 25G internet is also available in some locations in the United States. - As another commenter discovered, the average speed test results of US and Swiss internet connections are pretty similar. The average Swiss person isn't connected to the internet faster than the average United States person.
  • atoav 3mo ago
    Now let's do trains.
    • johnsmith1840 3mo ago
      US has the largest railway on earth by a large margin
      • yogorenapan 3mo ago
        Largest freight rail. Public transport for normal people is still shit compared to Europe.
        • BDPW 3mo ago
          And especially China. And Japan.
        • mrits 3mo ago
          Have you been to Europe? What area do you enjoy the public transportation?
          • sixothree 3mo ago
            Have you been to America? Public transportation barely exists.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• ironbound 3mo ago
  Don't look up the 40+ Billion spent trying to get every American service. https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equity-access-and-deployment-bead-program https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equ...
  • fransje26 3mo ago
    Don't look up!
• avhception 3mo ago
  While the article does have its shortcomings, it drives me crazy that we'd have to build 3 or 4 fiber lines to each house individually here in Germany. Imagine we'd have done it that way with water or electricity. It's completely braindead. Just one town over, there are houses that had the street dug up 3 times to lay fiber. But only to connect the neighborhood 2km down the valley. No internet for them. It's absolutely stupid.
• slopinthebag 3mo ago
  Switzerland has a freer market than America. Free market keep winning, stay mad commies!
• tipsytoad 3mo ago
  [dead]
• CalRobert 3mo ago
  Crazy idea but... Do I _need_ 25 Gb internet? Even when I had 1 Gb I never saturated the connection.
  • mdavid626 3mo ago
    …and 640kb RAM is more than enough.
    • CalRobert 3mo ago
      I get that but in all seriousness if they're saying "the free market" doesn't provide what people want it's worth asking if most people (remember, not HN readers) actually want 25 Gbit internet.
      • mdavid626 3mo ago
        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.
  • dopadelic 3mo ago
    People really don't have a clue how fast 25Gbps is, no personal device can come close to taking advantage of it. SSDs barely will transfer that fast on the best case scenarios (buffered large blocks). Most wifi won't even clear 0.5Gbps. If you have the latest and greatest wifi7 where both your PC and router supports it, you can get up to 2.5Gbps if you're sitting next to the router. If you're wired, few people have 10Gbps ethernet. You have to get a dedicated adapter for it since practically no PCs come with it. And that's just for 10Gbps. For 25Gbps, there's nothing available for the consumer market. That's enterprise level stuff. A single 25Gbps ethernet card costs $500.
• protocolture 3mo ago
  Not Pictured: The Mad Australian NBN model. The absolute worst method possible. Switzerland looks like the Singapore ULL model. Glass to the house, with competition for the terminating device. Absolute perfection. Its not anti market really so its a weird place to crow about free markets. That said, the US is still in a much better position than Aus with local power companies forming coops with ISPs to deliver glass via power conduit. It really is the next best thing. Of course, Australia has power monopolies that make this super awkward. That said there's nothing wrong with something like Germany, except instead of multiple pits, you just have common pit and pipe. Providers apply for access to the pits and run their own cabling. Australia does this already, but Telstra still owns a large part of the pit and pipe, making it costly, and NBNCo is allowed to police residential competition (The charge being more points than importing drugs) so it never helped us. Hey this is a great place to look at how many times Australia has fucked its own internet supply. 1. We had ULL with Telstra but tossed that out with NBNCo. 2. We had a small number of PoI's, but the ACCC agreed with the big 4 that this was somehow anticompetitive. 3. We have pit and pipe asset that could be gifted to local government to maintain for service providers. But we leave it owned by monopolies. 4. We could have more ISPs negotiating access to lead ins, but we have power monopolies that make it impossible. Effectively, stupid nonsense prevents us from picking up anyones good last mile internet scheme.
• mdavid626 3mo ago
  “America is best country in the world” thinking is very visible from the comments. Yeah, it has super bad internet, but because it’s too big, Europe installed copper wires later, 25Gbit is not really that much in Switzerland, etc. Millions of reasons, but understanding that the current capitalist system doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.
• maxignol 3mo ago
  Thus the prices in switzerland are higher than anywhere else. I don’t know about you, but I’d have no use of 25gbits/s
  • silisili 3mo ago
    Hate to sound like a cable company, but same. I have 8/8 available to me for barely more money, but I just don't need it. Sites don't load faster, movies don't play clearer, and I don't have a huge family. 1/1 suits me fine.
  • greggoB 3mo ago
    These sound like two entitely disconnected points, also sans facts? I could get 25 gbps in Switzerland for CHF 69 pm right now through init7. From what I've seen, this would be considered quite competitive in other countries. In Switzerland this is actually very affordable when compared to salaries. The article goes to some efforts to show how the Swiss model drives competition which has given us these relatively competitive prices. I'm not seeing how your personal lack of utility for 25 Gbps addresses that, let alone refutes it.
• bob1029 3mo ago
  > In the United States, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber, you might get 1 Gigabit. But often it’s shared with your neighbors. And you usually have exactly one choice of provider. I've got 5gbps symmetric right now and I can barely use it. Steam is the only app that can get close to saturating the connection. There is another fiber provider and a docsis provider available. I live in a fairly rural area. There's more options than I care to evaluate at this point. This article sounds like it was written pre-2020. Times have changed. At least in Texas ISP markets. Maybe others are still stuck in the old ways.
• landgenoot 3mo ago
  I don't care about fancy numbers, I care about high quality peering. I'd rather have a stable 50Mbit than 1Gbit and 0.5Mbit international peering with packet loss.
  • inemesitaffia 3mo ago
    Don't sign up with a Tier 1 or aspiring one
    • landgenoot 3mo ago
      How do I compare the peering capabilities of different ISP's? Assuming tier 1 ISP's are not available in my geographic location.
      • inemesitaffia 3mo ago
        Radar by qrator and BGP.tools. BGP.tools may be inaccurate for upstreams. Liberty Global is fine.
  • Youden 3mo ago
    Init7 (the ISP in question) is pretty fantastic for peering. They're good to start with but there have been times I've just written them an email and said "hey, I know you and ASABCD have a presence at BLAH-IX, could you peer directly" and it ends up working. I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe. Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.
• antirez 3mo ago
  In Catania 10 gbit Internet costs 35 euros/month and is available everywhere in the city and even in a big slice of the small towns around Catania. And indeed public incentives played a big role. But what I believe it is more interesting is that 1 gigabit was common like 10 years ago or even more. Infrastructure is a bit too important to be left to what the market believes will be profitable. Btw the paradox I have is that my local lan is 1 gbit...
  • inemesitaffia 3mo ago
    Once you have 1Gbps Fiber it's not particularly hard to go to 25 if some other entity other than the Telco is covering the costs.
  • tlamponi 3mo ago
    Interesting to read. I actually did not really looked into the rest of Italy's fibre build out state, but FWIW here in South Tyrol - basically the other end of the country - there's fully build out fibre access into every municipality since 2013. And basically every village (outside the cities most municipalities consist of a handful of villages here) got access a few years too, even the ones with sub 1k population.
• ricardobayes 3mo ago
  Also Spain followed the Swiss model, with a twist. The line was laid by telefonica/movistar, everyone rents from them. You can normally get at least 1Gbps at any residential location (often even rural ones if at least a few houses are clumped together).
• kklisura 3mo ago
  Lol I love this thread. It's just pure cope.
• MemoryHoleHQ 3mo ago
  [dead]
• gib444 3mo ago
  Cope list: - Quality matters more than speed - Average speeds are similar anyway - US is big - It would be expensive - Nobody needs multi gig speed anyway Those are the kind of excuses a "declining" country like the UK would come out with haha
• wisprp 3mo ago
  It's an interesting model, but a few things I can't actually find in the article: 1. Who is initially paying for the physical shared infrastructure? 2. Who is in charge of the maintenance?
• plantain 3mo ago
  Australia has the same system. We don't have 25gbit, we have very expensive 1gbit asymmetric, and extremely expensive 1gbit symmetric. What gives?
  • kalleboo 3mo ago
    Rupert Murdoch and the Liberal party happened
• shevy-java 3mo ago
  The USA is run by a greedy oligarchy. Switzerland is on the other hand closer to a direct democracy. That explains a LOT. (It's not a full direct democracy since they have representatives still, but look at the current orange king and his cronies, they are not going to fix anything but solely to enrich themselves and delay investigations as to who really organised the naughty parties at Epstein islands. Could be called oligarch parties too. They can hire underage people and the "justice" system will not uncover anything.)
• crvst 3mo ago
  Ah yes, the classic gotcha: why doesn’t the world’s largest economy, spanning a continent, look exactly like a country of 9 million that fits inside West Virginia? Truly a mystery. Next up: why doesn’t the US have Monaco’s per capita yacht ownership?
  • sixothree 3mo ago
    This argument makes zero sense.
    • crvst 3mo ago
      Meanwhile, your counterargument is well supported by data and facts.
• ValdikSS 3mo ago
  You know the author has a fast internet connection when the photos are 6 MB PNG each.
• ivolimmen 3mo ago
  I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine freezes (I download games to a normal SATA drive and the machine is a Ryzen 9 9900X). I have to option to go to 2Gbit or even 8Gbit but I don't want to buy more expensive switches/routers and network cards for my computers. Who (not including geeks) would want to go faster than 1Gbit?
  • dagenleg 3mo ago
    > not including geeks Sir, this is Hackernews edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers
• pshirshov 3mo ago
  Irish model is similar (shared ducts, backbone networks which are mandated to provide connectivity to ISPs, including competitors). But Irish market is shit. All is done over pppoe, hard to get fair dual-stack, assymetric shaping (5gbit down, 50mbit up), hidden 10tb/month limits, etc.
• preisschild 3mo ago
  Austria doesn't even have 1gbit/s Internet for private customers in their capital city and it neighbors Switzerland...
• burnt-resistor 3mo ago
  GFiber 20 Gbps beta https://gfiber.com/gfiber-labs/20gig/ https://gfiber.com/gfiber-labs/20gig/
• nickzelei 3mo ago
  I’m fortunate where I’m at in the Bay Area to get 10Gpbs for $50/mo from Sonic. Service has been amazing. It’s a no brainer at the cost even if it’s not saturated. 10 gig equipment is expensive so majority of my LAN is 1gig. I ended up getting some new network equipment and my WiFi caps at 2.5Gbps. Steam and Usenet are my primary downloads that can take advantage but even my NAS only has a 1gig card as I haven’t bought the 10gig upgrade card. Majority of homes are most likely fine with 1 gig, but we also don’t know what the future holds for network bandwidth.
• Rochus 3mo ago
  25 gbit internet? I'm in central Switzerland and I have 15 Mbps internet (just measured with https://www.speedtest.ch/ 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.
• malteg 3mo ago
  It's interesting to see so much nationalism in the context of technological progress at this post... I always thought that people who are interested in progress have a different way of thinking.
• abustamam 3mo ago
  I don't get what the fuss is about. I have 2gig internet and it's good enough. I'm not downloading multi gigabyte files often, and even when I do, it's often bottlenecked at the provider, so it wouldn't go faster even if I had 20 gig internet.
• cykros 3mo ago
  Switzerland is the only first world country.
• LocalH 3mo ago
  The answer is "America is capitalist-first more so than any other country". This is exactly why capitalism isn't the end-all be-all of isms. I don't mind small capitalism. Open a business, give good service, you deserve to make a few million. But big capitalism? Take back some of the money they hoard for the purpose of the greater good. As I'm getting older, I'm starting to think that the best possible government would be one that's partially capitalist and partially communist (but without the "state is the proxy" problem of all previous communist states, maybe that's a good use of blockchain)
• BobbyTables2 3mo ago
  I have to wonder… is there enough content hosted locally in Europe that having >1Gbps Internet is of actual use? Sure would suck to have 25Gbps internet if mainly used to fetch files from the other side of the pond…
• tomdow 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• SamDc73 3mo ago
  Honestly this reads like a badly-written propaganda that relies on no messured statistic. From okla's Speedtest Global Index: Fixed broadband (median download): US: #9 306.86 Mbps Switzerland: #10 300.70 Mbps Mobile: US: #11 205.71 Mbps Switzerland: #42 118.93 Mbps the "25 Gbit" is top tier prodcut that while avablie in the US (sure not the whole country) it's not sometinhg the avg in both coutnries actully buy/use... > why Switzerland has such fast internet at a reasonable price also on prices the per 2023 (couldn't find any newer resoruces) [2] 100 Mbps in the US seems a bit cheaper in the US than swizerland (but the diffrnece is honestly neligable to begin with) > Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways. form a quick serach, this seems to simply be not true, FTTP coverage is 50% in swizerland (comapred to 69% in europe) and 27% in rural areas (compared to 58% in rural europe) per 2024 [3] > The United States prides itself on free markets boradcam is one of the most regualted/restricted markets in teh U.S (for better or worse) so it really isn't really free market ... Local governments grant the cable/telecom franchise and levy franchise fees up to 5% of gross revenue (Cable Act 1984, 47 U.S.C. §542). Entrants also need government-controlled pole and right-of-way access; pole/permit fights are what stalled Google Fiber. And ~16–17 states legally restrict or ban municipal broadband. Section 301 China tariffs (10–25%) since 2018 (Trump) hit optical fiber, routers, and network electronics. Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Act (IIJA) also restriected using some certin chinesse technology when buidling internet infrastructure. [1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index [2] https://www.picodi.com/us/bargain-hunting/internet-prices-2023 https://www.picodi.com/us/bargain-hunting/internet-prices-20... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/57cb0655-4734-11f0-85ba-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/57c...