Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#271

Post by imoverclocked » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

dlenski wrote: post #223

I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home. I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fin…

The total bandwidth up/down is only part of the story.

I was on a cell modem until very recently. Just the latency difference between gigabit fiber and anything else is noticeable for me. When a website loads a ton of stuff in a single page, some of that is serialized and requests are back to back instead of parallelized. The longer the serial chain, the higher you multiply your round trip time. This is especially so with auth providers that take you away and back to a site (or similar for online purchases via external sites (eg: PayPal etc.)) All of that time adds up.

So, my home connection is now down to 11.9 ms to google.com, my wifi adds another 5ms. I did "start timeline recording" and hit the google homepage. It just took 900ms to load the front page in Safari. On a good day with my cell hotspot, my latency is 35 at idle and goes way up (sometimes in seconds) when pushing bandwidth.

Video calls with 1000ms and higher latency are ... difficult. Especially when everyone else is in the sub 100ms range.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#272

Post by jayd16 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

hahahacorn wrote: post #254

bestouff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't know. I feel like "price fixing until maybe there was a hint of competition" is pretty far from frictionless sphere, supply and demand economics.

Competition was possible but was not working. A fake news brief is the supposed solution. That's not really competition actually lowering prices. That's the price fixing regime blinking for an unsubstantiated reason.

It would be a different story if the friend's fiber laying company actually saw an opportunity and pursued it, but they didn't.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#273

Post by shepherdjerred » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #234

dlenski wrote: post #223

I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home. I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fin…

Pulling or pushing Docker images, downloading LLM models, installing AAA games from Steam. There are so many use cases that you won't see if you're just doing email and web browsing with a little bit of video streaming. It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very helpful for this. > I don't understand the desire (fetish?) If you don't need it t…

Gigabit is incredible if you are a dev

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#274

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:46 AM UTC

ragall wrote: post #259

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #83

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 o…

> But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. Yes there is: the cost. > Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile. It is in Switzerland. That's the whole point of this setup. > Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland It is in the big cities. Elsewhere the same arrangement is true, but on a lower scale.

You know being shared at the last mile is exactly what you don’t want?

The article made it seem like everyone in Switzerland had access to 25Gbps - thst isn’t true.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#275

Post by lclc » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:01 AM UTC

It's definitely because of the free markets. Only because Init7, the provider who actually provides the 25 Gbit/s, is constantly fighting Swisscom, the government-owned provider.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#276

Post by Karuma » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:12 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #185

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 ahe…

Only the images? The entire article is pure AI slop. But no one even cares anymore... People seem to love this kind of empty text, or no one even reads anymore, or everyone here is a bot already... Who knows.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#277

Post by cycomanic » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:19 AM UTC

I would argue that the Scandinavian countries are a much better example to use than Switzerland. In contrast to Switzerland Sweden leads the world in fibre access build out (while being geographically much larger). While I haven't seen 25 G internet 10G is relatively common and 1G is the default (at around 40-50 euro per month). The model has is quite similar to Switzerland though, open access fibre infrastructure with competition over providing the data, either using equipment of the main provider or using their own equipment.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#278

Post by lmm » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

lava_pidgeon wrote: post #199

ceejayoz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do we struggle to get the infrastructure to work in dense urban areas still? Or even just “not Wyoming”? Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?

Just for the information Switzerland neither does ;)

Switzerland has a few sections of barely-high-speed rail such as the Lötschberg Base Tunnel.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#279

Post by nnevod » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #190

kulahan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if a simple unsubstantiated rumor is enough to get your competitors to spend potentially millions of dollars to fight you, that's a competition. Literally what else could it be? It can be two things, anyways. You can utilize fraud to manage your competitors expectations. CEOs lie constantly about the state their products are in, in order to drum up more sales. It has absolutely zero requirement to be beneficial…

> They're also competing to make as much profit as possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the public. The end result is plenty of cheap stuff for people to buy. It's why free markets have full supermarkets and socialist markets have long lines. Take the free market in software, for example. My entire software stack on my linux box cost me $0.

Plenty of cheap stuff is a consequence of companies interested in people's money and, yes, presence of at least nominal competition between providers (i.e. they can be essentially a cartel, mirrioring each other exactly, but each still wants to step into other's money supply and retain its own). Choice for customer is present but also equally nominal.

In deficit economy, economic agents aren't really interested in people's money, and competition is between consumers - who'll bid higher and offer something of real interest to provider. So providers hoard stuff and there are long lines.

Benefit for public is not a boolean, it's a spectrum. Lots of cheap poor stuff readily availible is better than having to compete for stuff, but less good than having choice between cheap poor stuff and more expensive better stuff, for example. For the latter, you need non-nominal competition and providers having to compete whithin the market, not outside of it, and also each individual provider having infinitesimal effect on whole market.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

#280

Post by wahnfrieden » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #208

bigbadfeline wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly did they prove? They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically provide functional competition, if you think about it, the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help you here. > The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre). The OP is about free market failures, not about comp…

Free markets don't automatically do anything. There's nothing automatic. It's about giving individual people the opportunity to take action.

Free markets tend toward monopoly which restricts individual people’s opportunities for action. In this example, there was a cable monopoly mentioned. The only way to coerce it (not even to defeat it in some way) was through baseless deception, not free market competitive action. The monopoly remained.