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

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

#701

Post by dlenski » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 3:50 PM 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…

Yes, you're right. "Fetish" was too weird and dismissive, but I can't edit it now.

Perhaps "irrational obsession" would be a better word.

I don't understand why so many people are obsessed with maximizing technical specifications of their computers. I want a computer that works predictably and reliably with some minimum acceptable level of performance.

Overlockers void their warranties and spend thousands of dollars to squeeze out 50% more performance than what they'd get from off-the-shelf CPUs… and for what? To play games at a slightly higher framerate, sometimes, but often just to show screenshots of benchmarking rates for bragging rights.

I view people who are obsessed with Internet connection bandwidth similarly.

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

#702

Post by dlenski » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

db48x wrote: post #441

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…

> What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??! Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford. But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries t…

> > What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

> Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.

Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199

> But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built.

Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home.

In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well.

> For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.

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

#703

Post by dlenski » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #253

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…

>I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. Do you mean the other way around, 25Mbps Down and 10 Mbps up? It is nice to have, especially when it doesn't cost much. That is why I am perfectly OK with PON rather than dedicated fibre. You only need the 1 or 10Gbps speed for may be a 10 min window per month. I do think 25Mbps on a house hold bases is quite low. On a 5Mbps Video file I want the fir…

Yes, I reversed the up/down bandwidths as you noticed, but didn't see the mistake until I could no longer edit.

> Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the point we see law of diminishing returns.

Right. Whether we think the diminishing returns are at 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 Mbps per user, there are diminishing returns.

The vast, vast majority of residences simply do not need symmetric 25 Gbps bandwidth, and it would be a massive waste of resources to try to build out a residential network providing that level of bandwidth, rather than prioritizing universal accessibility of 50 or 100 Mbps.

I'd liken it to the overprovisioning of EV batteries, particularly in North America. Many, many car owners would be perfectly satisfied with a car with a range of only (say) 60 miles or 100 km, and overall EV cost and adoption rate is hurt by the fact that leading-edge manufacturers, especially Tesla, were only building EVs with range of 5x that.

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

#704

Post by dlenski » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #574

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…

> I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. This is dog slow, you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that. Downloading a reasonably recent game would also take close to an entire day. Not everyone needs a full symmetric Gbps perhaps, but 100Mbps is kind of a baseline nowadays, and more is better for faster downloads.

> you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that

Not something I care about.

I don't have a 4K TV. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 4K TV. I've definitely seen a very high-resolution TV at a friend's house, and it was kind of cool, but not something interesting enough to motivate me to spend $500 or $20/month to acquire one of my own.

I hardly watch TV. My TV has a native resolution of 720p, I think, and 720p videos look really high-quality to me on the occasions when I watch.

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

#705

Post by dlenski » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

rubiquity wrote: post #232

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 optionality of consuming services from places other than internet titans for one would be nice.

What exactly does that have to do with the bandwidth of one's home Internet connection?

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

#706

Post by eatsyourtacos » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #587

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the definitions of poverty are defined to make it seems like it's not poverty. When you have a massive amount of the population that lives paycheck to paycheck, is one small medical emergency away from bankruptcy / can't pay their rent/mortgage. Will lose their job because of little to no protections. Very little social safety nets... most people are a lot closer to 'poverty' than looking at simple statistics.

Living paycheck to paycheck is usually a choice: people earn a lot of money and spend it immediately. The fact that this leaves them vulnerable to misfortune doesn't mean they're poor.

Give me a break. Most people don't have any real benefits. Healthcare costs are insane. Daycare costs are insane. Rent is insane. Car costs are insane. Insurance is insane. Grocery costs are insane. Higher education costs are insane.

You sound like you are single no kids and on here with a cushy tech job and be like "those poor people just don't know how to manage their money!"

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

#707

Post by nullbyte808 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

"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."

Hey this can be good for privacy in a way at least. Your traffic can be from any of your neighbors. I wonder if you can sniff packets from other households?

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

#708

Post by slibhb » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

aaarrm wrote: post #601

slibhb wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living paycheck to paycheck is usually a choice: people earn a lot of money and spend it immediately. The fact that this leaves them vulnerable to misfortune doesn't mean they're poor.

While this can be true, this absolutely is not true for the majority of paycheck-to-paycheck people. You truly need to get your head out of your ass if you honestly believe this is what is causing people to be poor.

The poverty rate in the US is ~10% and the percentage of workers who live paycheck-to-paycheck is ~35%. So it is true for the majority of people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

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

#709

Post by slibhb » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #706

slibhb wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living paycheck to paycheck is usually a choice: people earn a lot of money and spend it immediately. The fact that this leaves them vulnerable to misfortune doesn't mean they're poor.

Give me a break. Most people don't have any real benefits. Healthcare costs are insane. Daycare costs are insane. Rent is insane. Car costs are insane. Insurance is insane. Grocery costs are insane. Higher education costs are insane. You sound like you are single no kids and on here with a cushy tech job and be like "those poor people just don't know how to manage their money!"

Purchasing power is up modestly over the past 25 years. This idea that everyone is struggling/poor just isn't true (though some people certainly are).

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

#710

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #698

WalterBright wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, during the anti-trust trial of Standard Oil, Rockefeller's market share kept slipping. His competitors figured out how to compete with him. As for Rockefeller being a "robber", the rise of Standard Oil resulted in the price of kerosene dropping 70%.

Falling prices is not always indicative of a well-functioning competitive market. Rockefeller was known to deliberately lose money to undercut his competitors and put them out of business. With enough scale, a near-monopoly can provide irrational predatory pricing long enough make competitors insolvent. In between, it looks like the near monopoly is losing market share while prices drop. Without taking the larger con…

Rockefeller did not get rich by losing money.

Nor did Rockefeller eliminate his competitors. He never got more than a 90% market share. SO was not tried for being a monopoly, it was tried for trying to create one.

SO's market share sank during the trial, as Rockefeller's competitors learned how to compete with him.

See "Titan" by Chernow.

> With enough scale, a near-monopoly can provide irrational predatory pricing long enough make competitors insolvent.

The reason this doesn't work is if X has 10 times the market share of Y, if X wants to lose money to hurt Y, X loses 10 times the money that Y loses. I.e. the larger the market share of X is, the proportionately more money is lost trying to undercut Y.