Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

An example from someone who has lived at a condo in Asia. Around 8 PM the internet becomes unusable. Everyone's back home and they want to watch their favorite series. If you need to work at that time, e.g. if you work US hours, you are screwed.

P.S. I experienced this at different condos in different countries in South East Asia.

Working from home on raw and cooked SKA data and visualisations being remote served by supercomputing centres, team co-editing of multiple raw RED cinema camera channels.

Essentially any job that involves massive fat data streams that ends up having a real time collabrative hybrid remote team.

I use my home connection for VPN access remotely. I back up snapshots of data every day. I like to be able to download games and Linux ISOs practically on demand. I work from home and often enough faster speeds can avoid several minutes of additional waiting in a day.

This connection is shared as well. My partner relies heavily on cloud syncing. We both like to stream 4K HDR video. I like being able to get devices updated and ready to use with minimal time spent waiting for downloads.

I also live in NZ, where multi-gigabit fibre connections are often cheaper than what Americans have to pay for a fraction of the bandwidth. It’s not a notable financial burden or anything, and it’s not like we have data caps to worry about. It’s very much a situation where the use cases naturally find themselves once the option is there.

Also, 25/10 Mbps is painfully slow for a shared home connection in the modern day. There’s videos on YouTube that can push a higher bitrate than that. The absolute slowest plan that my ISP even offers is 100/20 Mbps for about $35 USD per month, while the most common/baseline plan for most households in NZ is 500/100 Mbps after the fibre carriers continued to increase speeds at the lowest tiers.

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.

This article is hard to take seriously when it presents 25 Gbps internet like it's available everywhere in Switzerland. Even the page you click on has an "Up to" and requires you to enter your address to check availability.

That's on top of the usual problems with comparing small European countries to all of America. Switzerland's entire population is barely larger than the population of New York City. There are several metro areas in the US with more people than Switzerland.

Switzerland is also very, very small. It's lands mass is equal to about 0.5% of the United States. We only have a handful of states smaller than Switzerland.

There are valid geopolitical discussions to be had, but it's hard to read these articles that single out tiny little European countries and compare them to the sprawling United States and ignore the elephant in the room.