Every Aussie techie reading this curses Murdoch and Abbott for screwing up the NBN, which would have given us what Switzerland has.
Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
141–150 of 464 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#142Meh. I have gigabit fiber and it's enough for me right now. I could pay for 5 gigabit, but why? The last mile is almost never the bottleneck in my connection. 99% of the time it's upstream somewhere, with the only real exception being Steam game downloads. And my home network is gigabit ethernet so to actually get any benefit I'd have to upgrade a ton of my own hardware, the router and the switches and the NICs and even all the way down to the cables.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#143I don't know that this is an easy comparison to make. Switzerland is 16k square miles in size (and about 9.1 million people). Taking a random, low-density American state as a comparison - say, the innocuous and sparsely-populated western state of Idaho - I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated…
Now do Sweden.
Well I get your point, but Sweden has a GDP of just under a trillion. The example US state of Idaho has a GDP of about 100 billion. It really is just a quiet, no-frills, rural kind of state.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#144> The Free Market Lie Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
Free market doesn't sort itself out. It has to be streamed through proper regulation.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#145"This article is ... spellchecked with AI" ??? Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???
I mean it feels like it was just straight written with AI: "Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways."
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#146The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
This article isn't about coverage, it's about what goes in the duct if there is a connection. If Comcast can run a cable to your house, then they can put four strands and allow other ISPs access to them.
That said, how many of these homes have mains electricity? Landline phone service? If they can do that, then they can do fiber. Sure your cabin in Montana might not have it (though the equivalent in Sweden probably would), but the small town probably does.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 2…
The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there . The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.
It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#148I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.
That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#149* Up to 25Gbps...
All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors.
Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared.
"dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link.
Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#150Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating. Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider. Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you…
If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you? In my experience, it's one of the best ISPs I've ever had. Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting…
> If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you?
Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.
Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.