Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

“Anecdotally, X works better in another country than it does in the USA- the free market is a lie!”

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?

Switzerland has a freer market than America. Free market keep winning, stay mad commies!

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

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.

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.

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Why Switzerland doesnt have its own Starlink?

cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.

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.