Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

Im genuinely curious what is a use-case for 25GB Internet in a typical Switzerland household?

Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course).

The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

This article would be so much better without the generic AI-generated images everywhere.

Ho-lee smokes is that Speedtest screenshot even real? Have some mercy for those of us in third-world infrastructure (US).

I'm jealous.

why is it a lie? a natural monopoly doesn't bar other entrance, it's just naturally difficult, like space travel. also, unpopular comment but who cares? my Internet does everything I want it to and I'd wager that the price from the swiss government is highly subsidized. A market means a meeting of supply and demand, it's possible that currently the swiss speed is overboard for most users.

Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans, replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with various residential housing developments scattered around. What was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20 Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not high prices compared to Australia.

Path dependence is a thing.

How many Switzerlands is USA again

I think there’s quite a little bit missing here. As an example, Switzerland’s road/rail lines and US road:rail lines are both treated in this way and the outcomes are different. So I think the dominant effect isn’t in this form of building.

In addition, requiring fiber to each new home would expand housing costs in the US substantially because many are not located close by to existing fiber networks.

I’m not familiar with Swiss government policy but their government construction efforts are frequently far more successful for lower costs than ours. I cannot say whether Switzerland does it differently but usually in the US if there is surplus to be captured it is captured. As an example, if the Swiss system were to be implemented with US tools it would look like a government project would here: private companies would be invited to build the fiber to each home, and eventually one would win the contract and if the economic benefit would be $1b, they would charge $0.99b to construct it. M

If the government itself attempts to build it, it is constrained by its pension obligations and its desire to remain solvent to not actually have employees on staff. It therefore will use contractors in order to do things and we’re back in situation 1.

Governments originally formed for this kind of shared task and to enforce no free riding on it. But whatever factors drive US politics, US government purposes are to extract maximally from economically productive classes and redirect it to politically productive classes - through the use of selective government contracts and populist giveaways.

Why isn’t france your European example? Its larger and better served than switzerland

This article is technically incorrect on so many levels I didn’t even bother to finish it.

1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber

2. Everyone on the internet is using a “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream. If your ISP doesn’t provision enough upstream capacity, the last mile doesn’t matter.

3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.

4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland

5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day.

Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M

Before I start with my real comment I'll point out that the AI slop images really detract from this article and the author should stop.

To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing even better than that.

Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be ahead of most places, although they certainly pay for it. (Even that has gotten way, way better. I'm getting really nice MVNO service with unlimited data and even a decent unlimited tethering plan for less than $30/month)

25 Gigabit is nice but that's so expensive on the client device side to the point where it's basically unattainable for any consumer. Your average consumer primarily uses the Internet via WiFi devices that might max out at 300Mbps practical speeds or lower depending on when they purchased their devices and WiFi access point and their distance from it.

Then you've got the problem of the speed on the other end. 25Gb fiber is great until you realize that the server you are downloading from is only going to give you 1/100th a lot of the times.

I haven't even mentioned the fact that you're now adding CPU and SSD bottlenecks to the equation. I'm pretty sure 25Gb/s is higher than the maximum write speed on my SSD.

I have gigabit fiber at home and the ability to buy faster speeds from my ISP but I find the idea totally pointless when that means I would have to buy $500 in networking equipment (if not more) and possibly rewire my home (currently sketchy Cat 5e that seems to be installed poorly and I'm lucky to have that). I even have the latest WiFi 7 from a highly reputable prosumer brand along with very new WiFi 7 and 6E 6Ghz client devices but the highest speed I see using those devices where I want to use them is around 600Mbps.

Switzerland - self hosting paradise.

what a well written article.

makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.

I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.

I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.

One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.

if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you’d be right!

Another thing that I think Europeans often fail to take into consideration is scale.

USA: 9,147,590 km^2

Switzerland: 41,295 km^2

That's a factor of 221.5 to 1.

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tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.

The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.

A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.

Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.

Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.

Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.

Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.

The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)

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Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like natural monopoly.

And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.

The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.

All connections to the Internet are at some level "shared", except perhaps if you get a direct connection to one of the core routers. As others have mentioned, this is in a dense area and much closer to being in a LAN environment.

The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.

Care to give a rebuttal?

The author keeps repeating this idea of a "dedicated internet connection" (DIA), and it kind of just irks me. Not because the author is wrong in how they use it, but because the term itself I find misleading, and I hate to see it continue to poison the common discourse.

A dedicated last-mile connection gives you a dedicated link to your ISP’s edge network, not a dedicated path across the internet. You won’t compete with your immediate neighbors on a shared access network anymore, sure, but you’re still sharing the ISP core, peering links, and transit links with the rest of their customers.

In practice this usually works well enough, because ISPs engineer their core and peering capacity with low over-subscription, especially for business and DIA customers. So you can often push near line rate anyway, but not because you have a truly reserved slice of the internet. A Switzerland-sized country would need like petabit-scale connectivity to provide actually dedicated 25G links (or even just 1G links) to everyone.